In pre-revolutionary liberal and then Soviet stereotypes, Emperor Nicholas I was presented exclusively as the strangler of freedom, the rude martinet “Nikolai Palkin”, the “gendarme of Europe”, the persecutor of the Decembrists, Polish patriots, freethinkers and Pushkin, the enemy of technological progress. Many contemporaries considered him almost an ideal sovereign, a fearless officer, a subtle and skillful politician, a codifier, a reformer, who built a stable vertical of power, a well-functioning bureaucratic apparatus, headed by Nicholas himself, who worked 24/7. It was he, the only one of the Russian tsars, who could rightfully say about himself: “The state is me.” Using extensive documentary material and testimony from contemporaries, the author understands the features of this controversial figure in Russian history and his era.