Tsar Nicholas I: The Life of an Absolute Monarch

ix, 294 pp. "Constantin de Grunwald, who has an international reputation as a diplomatic historian, sees in Nicholas I a typical expression of absolutism, and in this biography he treats him as such--a man with a strong sense of rule who was a strange mixture of cruelty, obstinacy and domesticity. ...The book derives special importance from the author's sources which are mainly the private correspondence of the Imperial family and the reports of foreign correspondents in St. Petersburg. ...The descriptions of life at the Russian court with its rigid ceremony and the gay and childish amusements of the Royal family at their summer palaces form a vivid and contrasting background to the book and the parallels drawn by the author between the confessions of the Decembrist revolutionaries and the victims of Soviet purges help to illuminate the workings of the contemporary Russian mind."