In pre-revolutionary liberal, and then in Soviet stereotypes, Emperor Nicholas I presented himself exclusively as a strangler of freedom, a rude soldier "Nikolai Palkin," "gendarme of Europe," a persecutor of the Decembrists, Polish patriots, freethinkers and Pushkin, an enemy of technological progress. Many contemporaries considered him almost an ideal sovereign, a fearless officer, a subtle and skillful politician, codifier, reformer, who built a stable vertical of power, a clearly working bureaucratic apparatus, headed by Nikolai himself, who worked around the clock seven days a week. It was he, the only one of the Russian tsars, who could rightly say about himself: "The state is me." On a large documentary material and testimonies of contemporaries, the author understands the features of this contradictory figure of Russian history and its era.