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Rh disturbances broke out at home and abroad. Throughout life Nicholas trembled at the spectre of revolution. In his own family he had before him the example of his sister-in-law, the unhappy wife of Alexander I; after her death (1826) he burned her diary with his own hand. The hanging of Pestel did not suffice to erase the memory of his father's death and his brother's guilt. Not many years before Nicholas ascended the throne occurred the rising in Spain in 1820 and that in Piedmont in 1821; during his reign came the July revolution, the Polish revolt, lesser risings in France, and at length the revolutions of 1848. After the Polish rebellion, not merely were the Polish constitution, diet, and national army abolished, but pitiless confiscations of property were carried out, and the university of Vilna was closed.

Tsar Nicholas had a very different education from his two elder brothers. Born in 1796, he was nearly twenty years younger than Alexander, and he was not yet five years old when the latter began to reign. There seemed no probability that he would ever be tsar. Not until it became clear that Alexander would have no legitimate offspring was Constantine induced to renounce the succession. Nicholas' tutor was General Lamsdorf, a rough man who made use of corporal punishment as one of the principal means of education. The prince's only keen interest was in the army. Strict subordination, unquestioning obedience, were Nicholas' system. In his psychology men were mere machines, or at most, animated slaves. "I regard the whole of human life a service," he said on one occasion. The anti-revolutionary mission of Russia therefore began with the reign of this "supreme lord of the narrow world," as Frederick William IV termed him. Žukovskii the poet, tutor to the next tsar, who was in Paris during the February revolution, in his letters to the heir to the throne eloquently pointed the moral that in the universal deluge Russia was the ark of salvation, not for herself alone, but for the rest of the world. Žukovskii hoped that the reigning tsar would keep his country remote from the European plague, would isolate it from the infection by building a Chinese wall. It was the unmistakable design of Providence that Russia should continue to constitute a separate and entirely independent world.

In European policy, Nicholas, like Alexander, was, therefore, protector of legitimism. He was the declared opponent of Louis Philippe, condemning as unlawful the French monarch's