In his accession manifesto, Alexander I pledged to follow Catherine’s “heart and laws.”1 The timing of Alexander’s accession with the start of the new century, writes Simon Dixon, led to his being associated with the glories of the prior century—including those of his grandmother. Many of Catherine’s histories, plays, and letters were reissued.
Like his grandmother, Alexander began his reign with attempts at reform. As a snub to Catherine, Paul had pardoned exiled writer Alexander Radischev. In 1801, Alexander restored Radischev’s ranks and appointed him to the Commission on Revision of the Laws. But by the following fall, with peasant reform thwarted, Radischev committed suicide by drinking poison (suppressed until 1905, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow became a best seller during the Soviet era).
As grand duke, Alexander had just three months to enjoy the palace his grandmother built for him before she died. He used Alexander Palace as a summer residence through his father’s brief rule before moving to the larger Catherine Palace as tsar. Alexander resurrected Charles Cameron’s career, appointing him chief architect at the Russian Admiralty (though Alexander razed most of the houses in the unfinished model town of Sophia for bricks). Ironically, Paul I had spared Alexander Dacha, expanding Catherine’s adjacent agricultural school into a state institution. But after Andrei Samborsky left to become one of Grand Duchess Alexandra’s priests, the school was abandoned. Later, during Nicholas I’s reign, private owners bought the property; in 1851 the dacha was demolished.
In May 1802, Alexander put Luigi Rusca in charge of renovating damaged Tauride Palace, and made it his town residence the following fall. For the restored interiors, the new court architect relocated many sculptures from Saint Michael’s Castle. The finest of the palace statues was the Venus acquired by Peter the Great in Rome. Rusca and Potemkin’s English gardener William Gould recreated the dramatic Winter Garden and re-landscaped the neglected gardens, which had been used as a carriage park during Paul’s reign.
Catherine left her adored grandson two of her most prized possessions—her books and engraved gem collection. “My library including all manuscripts and all papers I bequeath to my beloved grandson, Alexander Pavlovich; likewise my jewels, and I bless him with my soul and with my heart,” read her 1790 will.2 In 1805, Alexander revitalized his grandmother’s plan for the Imperial Russian Library by acquiring the manuscript collection of Russian diplomat Peter Dubrovsky. During the French Revolution, the bibliophile managed to save papers from the Bastille archives. The trove featured medieval manuscripts, letters by Erasmus, Leibniz, Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire, and Old Slavonic and Eastern writings.
The Dubrovsky acquisition led to the creation of a manuscript department at the Imperial Russian Library. It was among his grandmother’s personal effects that Alexander discovered a treasure for the new department—the Ostromir Gospel. Named for its patron, the governor of Novogorod, the richly decorated 11th-century gospel is the oldest surviving Russian manuscript. Alexander also acquired twenty-seven Latin manuscripts from the Weissenau Monastery in Swabia. In 1810, Alexander’s Regulations for the Administration of the Imperial Public Library declared Catherine’s library opened “for general use” and funded by the state.3 Enlarged by Carlo Rossi and again at the end of the 19th century, today’s Russian National Library is the world’s fifth largest, occupying an entire city block.
Catherine saw to it that Alexander’s education included an appreciation for the arts. Though the young tsar viewed the Hermitage as his grandmother’s legacy, he began making his own mark. Under his watch, the museum was reorganized and professionalized; the first engravings of its famous paintings were published. Franz Labensky, keeper of the Hermitage paintings, established a restoration studio and a school to train restorers to transfer paintings from wood to canvas. In 1808, Alexander sent Labensky to Paris. After almost a year, Labensky returned to St. Petersburg with Caravaggio’s The Lute Player and Pieter de Hooch’s Woman and a Maid.
Early on, Alexander admired Napoleon. After Russia’s defeat in the Battle of Friedland in 1807, the two rulers met at the Neman River and signed the Treaty of Tilsit, establishing peace and pledging mutual cooperation. During the accord, Napoleon’s art adviser Baron Dominique Vivant-Denon helped Alexander acquire some forty pictures for the Hermitage, including Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), Jacob’s Dream by Murillo, The Appearance of the Virgin to St. Lawrence by Guercino, and Deposition by Luca Giordano.
The rapprochement between Alexander and Napoleon came to an abrupt end five years later when France’s massive continental army, some half a million strong, invaded Russia. Several hundred thousand people were killed as Napoleon’s army advanced to Moscow. By mid-September 1812, with Napoleon poised to take the city, the population of Moscow was evacuated and the city intentionally set on fire. Though the desperate measure destroyed two thirds of the city, it left Napoleon’s army without food or supplies to survive Russia’s brutal winter; 400,000 French soldiers died as a result.
As Napoleon retreated in defeat, Alexander’s popularity soared. The tsar led his troops on a European victory march, arriving in 1814 for the Treaty of Paris. Boasting the world’s largest army and holding parts of the former French empire including Poland, Saxony, and Holstein, Russia was the global superpower Catherine envisioned.4 Ironically, the Catherinian revival from early in Alexander’s reign dwindled. “Once Alexander had made his own glory by defeating Napoleon, any lingering need to cling to his grandmother’s skirts was finally removed,” writes Simon Dixon.5 Even Catherine’s court poet Derzhavin celebrated Alexander’s entry into Paris, questioning whether “Peter and Catherine were as great as you.”6
The Napoleonic Wars rocked the art market and Alexander exploited the opportunity to enhance his grandmother’s collection. Spanish resistance to Napoleon had endeared the country to Russians. In 1814, Alexander addressed the Hermitage’s dearth of Spanish Old Masters when he paid 100,000 guilders for sixty-seven pictures belonging to London-based banker William Coesvelt. Among the works were Velazquez’s Portrait of Count-Duke Olivares and Murillo’s Annunciation.7 Like Catherine, Alexander’s most important acquisitions came from Paris. The first was a gift his grandmother would have applauded.
While visiting Napoleon’s ex-wife Joséphine in May 1814, Alexander assured her that riverfront Malmaison would go to her son and daughter from her first marriage (four years earlier, Napoleon annulled their marriage when she’d failed to produce a son). In gratitude, France’s former empress handed Alexander the Gonzaga Cameo, one of the world’s most coveted carved gems. Stolen by Napoleon, the cameo was the last great buy of Pope Pius VI, who died as a French prisoner after signing the Treaty of Tolentino (and also after handing over some one hundred masterworks, including the Apollo Belvedere, the Dying Gaul, and Raphael’s Transfiguration).8
Carved in 3rd century B.C. Egypt, the three-layer sardonyx cameo depicts Arsinoë II and Ptolemy II Philadelphus. “It is, of course, a lover’s gift, because it’s an image of a couple,” explains Paul Mosterd, deputy director of the Hermitage Amsterdam. “But it is also a very smart move on her part, a brilliant move of a lady who needs protection. . . . The symbolism is strong: She’s saying, ‘You can do this to me.’”9 The stunning gift proved timely.
In late May, around the time Napoleon was moving into a former biscuit warehouse on the island of Elba, Joséphine caught a cold and died of pneumonia. Along with a three-million-franc debt, she left a trove of four hundred paintings and drawings, sculptures, furniture, antiquities, and jewels. The next year, Alexander paid Joséphine’s daughter, Hortense de Beauharnais, the enormous sum of 940,000 francs for thirty-eight paintings (among them Gerard ter Borch’s A Glass of Lemonade, Gabriel Metsu’s Breakfast, Paulus Potter’s Farm, and three David Teniers the Younger pictures) and four Antonio Canova sculptures, including Cupid and Psyche. Thanks to Russia’s tsar, Joséphine’s children settled their mother’s debt and enjoyed a large inheritance.
Some of Joséphine’s paintings had been looted by the French army in 1806 from William IX, landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, when his electorate was annexed by the kingdom of Westphalia (ruled by Napoleon’s brother, Jérôme Bonaparte). The Dutch-rich picture gallery had been assembled by generations of collectors from the German house. Alexander refused to return the works to the landgrave, arguing that he was not involved in their seizure and had paid fairly for them.10
Napoleon’s defeat, like Catherine’s military victories over the Turks, inspired a number of commissions. Alexander ordered St. Petersburg’s architects to “build this capital to such a level of beauty and perfection that would be appropriate to greatness in every respect.”11 Leading this effort was Carlo di Giovanni Rossi, protégé of Giacomo Quarenghi and Vincenzo Brenna. In addition to remodeling the center of St. Petersburg, Rossi built the tsar an estate on Yelagin Island at the mouth of the Neva. In 1826, Rossi designed the National War Gallery at the Winter Palace housing George Dawe’s portrait series of Russian generals who helped defeat Napoleon. Alexander’s gallery may have been inspired by George IV’s Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle, lined with twenty-plus military portraits by Thomas Lawrence, and the Duke of Wellington’s Apsley House, where Dawe, Lawrence, and Jan Willem Pieneman contributed to a gallery of military heroes.12
When handsome, six-foot-tall Alexander married beautiful Elizabeth Alexeievna, Catherine described the teenagers as angels. But their fairy-tale marriage proved to be just that. The tsar and tsarina led separate lives, both taking other lovers. After the light-haired couple produced a dark-haired daughter, rumors spread that the father was Polish prince Adam Czartoryski, Alexander’s best friend. Both of Elizabeth Alexeievna’s daughters would die young. Meanwhile, Alexander had several illegitimate children with Polish Princess Maria Narishkiva, with whom he had a fifteen-year relationship. “His sexual appetites were insatiable,” writes David King, “already rivaling those of his grandmother Catherine the Great.” Napoleon too was a fan. “If he were a woman,” Napoleon once said, “I think I would make him my mistress.”13
Alexander’s role in his father’s assassination is the subject of much debate. Whatever his involvement was, the crime haunted him for the rest of his life. “He would long be tortured in his sleep, hearing his father’s awful screams over and over in his head,” writes King.14 Increasingly religious, Alexander confided to family members that he wanted to abdicate. On November 19, 1825, while traveling in South Russia with his ailing wife, the 48-year-old tsar died unexpectedly from typhus.
Alexander had converted the Round Hall at Catherine’s Chesme Palace into a church. Now, his body lay in state here before burial in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Or did it? A rumor began to circulate that Alexander staged his own death and became a monk in Siberia. The theory gained a wider following in the early 20th century when Soviet officials opened his grave and reportedly found an empty casket.15
Alexander’s unexpected demise led to a succession crisis when Grand Duke Constantine was proclaimed tsar by mistake. In 1801, Constantine’s miserable wife, Anna Feodorovna, had returned to Germany permanently. Forbidden to divorce by Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, Constantine proceeded to father two illegitimate sons with two French actresses. While commanding Russia’s forces in Poland, Constantine fell in love with a twenty-year-old beauty. When his first marriage was finally annulled in 1820, the couple became husband and wife.
Because of Constantine’s morganatic marriage, Alexander signed a secret manifesto in 1823 naming his youngest brother Nicholas heir to Russia’s throne. When Constantine announced his abdication upon Alexander’s manifesto coming to light, a group of army officers led several thousand soldiers to Senate Square in a protest known as the Decembrist Revolt. In a sign of things to come, 29-year-old Nicholas ordered his troops to open fire. After the bloodbath, the new tsar executed many of the leaders and exiled participants to Siberia. Dubbed “the gendarme of Europe,” Nicholas I would rule Russia for three repressive decades, almost as long as his grandmother. A secret police force enforced his “autocracy, Orthodoxy and nationality” policy.
Like his father, Paul, Nicholas was extremely hostile to Catherine’s memory.16 The ultra-conservative tsar found his grandmother’s love life a complete embarrassment. Deeming it “too compromising for the dynasty,” Nicholas removed the bronze plaque above Cameron’s monument to her beloved Alexander Lanskoy at Tsarksoe Selo. Similarly, he pulled Lanskoy’s portrait off the wall of the Hermitage, declaring “It has no place here!”17 Nicholas also opposed the reprinting of Catherine’s memoirs and diaries that had circulated during Alexander’s reign. His censorship committee prevented further publication of the intimate diary of Catherine’s secretary Alexander Khrapovitsky.
The new tsar abandoned Tauride Palace. Chesme became a dilapidated almshouse for invalids, Moscow’s Tsaritsyno Palace a barracks. Despite his neglect of Catherine’s palaces, Nicholas would rival his grandmother as a builder and art patron, impacting both the architecture and collection at the Winter Palace and Hermitage. Along with his older brother, he helped complete Catherine’s vision for St. Petersburg. “The extent of her [Catherine’s] ambitious projects was realized in the reigns of her grandsons Alexander I and Nicholas I,” write Dimitry Shvidkovsky and Yulia Revzina. “. . . [N]eoclassicism became the definitive style of the Russian Empire, and St. Petersburg was the ‘new Rome.’”18
Between 1819 and 1829, Carlo Rossi designed a large administrative complex for the government’s general staff and ministry of finance. Located across from the Winter Palace, Rossi’s General Staff Building featured a curving neoclassical façade with a triumphal Roman-style arch topped by a victory chariot. Catherine, who celebrated her military victories with numerous monuments, would have been thrilled with Nicholas’s next addition—a column marking Russia’s victory over Napoleon. Richard Wortman describes Auguste Ricard de Montferrand’s creation as “a votive object in the emerging cult of dynasty.”19
Carved out of Finnish rocks and transported by barge 100-plus nautical miles to St. Petersburg, the 155-foot Alexandrine Column trumped both Paris’s Vendome Column and Rome’s Trajan Column as the world’s tallest.20 From the top of the column, Boris Orlovsky’s bellicose angel with the face of Alexander looks down on the square below while crushing a snake and pointing his cross to the heavens. On Alexander’s name day, August 30, 1832, over 2,000 soldiers helped erect the 600-ton stone block, which stood on its own weight. Two years later, 120,000 troops gathered in Palace Square for the official dedication. In the distance, participants could see Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great.
Alexander Palace had been gifted to Nicholas by his older brother, and it became a favorite summer residence for successive generations of his family. In 1812, Napoleon had turned Catherine’s Petrovsky Palace into his headquarters, waiting there for Moscow to surrender. But instead of receiving the keys to the city, Napoleon watched from the palace as flames consumed the Kremlin. As a parting gesture, the humiliated French ruler burned down the palace. In the 1830s, Nicholas had Petrovsky rebuilt.
Nicholas blamed Voltaire for the French Revolution and the Decembrist Revolt against him. When he saw Houdon’s Seated Voltaire for the first time, he reportedly exclaimed, “Smash that grinning monkey!”21 Fortunately, the offending marble was transferred to a less conspicuous spot in the Hermitage Library. Nicholas would later sell his grandmother’s bronze statuette of Voltaire. Fearing the writings of Voltaire and Diderot would fuel opposition, Nicholas issued a court order prohibiting public access to their libraries. An exception was made for poet Alexander Pushkin, who he’d allowed to return to St. Petersburg after a six-year exile in South Russia.
In 1829, Nicholas acquired another thirty Malmaison paintings from Joséphine’s daughter. Two years later, Russia’s ambassador in Paris, Pozzo di Borgo, brokered a secret deal for thirty-three pictures assembled in Rome by Manuel Godoy, Spain’s exiled prime minister. Among the cache that included pictures by Honthorst and Murillo was a work thought to be a Raphael. Christ Leading the Apostles to Mount Tabor was later identified as a predella panel from an altarpiece by Venetian artist Lorenzo Lotto. In 1834, Nicholas added over one thousand painted vases belonging to the Italian physician Pizatti, among them ancient Greek masterworks by Exekias and “the Amasis painter.” In 1836, Franz Labensky traveled to London where he paid 23,400 pounds for seven Italian paintings from William Coesvelt’s second collection. The gem was Raphael’s The Alba Madonna costing 14,000 pounds.22
But the following December, these masterworks along with thousands of Catherine’s treasures were nearly lost. While attending an evening performance, Nicholas got word that the Winter Palace was on fire. Smoke from the ventilation system was filling the Field Marshals’ Hall lined with full-length portraits of Russia’s military leaders. Nicholas had hired Montferrand to restore the hall; the fire was traced to ventilation canals littered with leftover building materials. It took just minutes for the wooden hall to collapse and the fire to spread throughout the palace.
The fire raged for two days. “The last hours of the phoenix building were grandly mournful,” recalled court chamberlain Alexander Bashutsky. “. . . We watched through the broken windows as the fire strolled victorious in the empty space, illuminating the broad passageways: at one moment it cracked and tossed down the marble columns, at another it impudently blackened the precious gilding, the next it fused the crystal and bronze decorative chandeliers together in deformed heaps and then tore the sumptuous brocades and damasks from the walls.”23
To protect the artworks in Catherine’s Small Hermitage and Large Hermitage, passageways were taken apart, doors were closed, and water doused on the walls. These efforts saved the art, but not the dazzling interiors. Nicholas insisted on restoring the palace at breakneck speed, causing many construction workers to lose their lives. Fifteen months following the fire, the royal family moved back into the palace. Nicholas inaugurated the War Gallery created by Alexander. Architect Vasily Stasov restored the staterooms, Jordan Staircase, Small Throne Room, and Field Marshals’ Hall.
On Nicholas’s order, Stasov redid the walls and columns of Giacomo Quarenghi’s St. George Hall with white Cararra marble instead of the original multicolored marble; a plain ceiling with gilded embellishments replaced the painted allegorical plafond. In the 1840s, reconstruction work started in the Small Hermitage, including the hanging garden and Southern Pavilion. In the Northern Pavilion, the former greenhouse was replaced by a new Pavilion Hall, with floor mosaics copied from the Roman bath at Ocriculum.
In 1838, Nicholas visited Munich’s two new public museums, the Glyptothek and Pinakothek, built to house Ludwig I of Bavaria’s sculptures and paintings. His tour guide was the museums’ architect, Leo von Klenze. In addition to Munich, public museums had opened across Europe—in Berlin (Altes Museum), Rome (Capitoline and Museo Pio-Clementino), Florence (Uffizi), Paris (Louvre), Madrid (Prado), and London (Dulwich Picture Gallery and British Museum). Not wanting Russia to be left behind, Nicholas invited Klenze to St. Petersburg to design a public museum beside the Winter Palace.
To give the New Hermitage a façade facing the Neva, Klenze proposed demolishing Catherine’s Large Hermitage and Raphael Loggia. Nicholas doesn’t seem to have even been aware of his grandmother’s Loggia, reportedly remarking on a visit to the original in 1845: “It would have been better had they stayed here.”24 Fortunately, a commission whose members included Russia’s leading architects nixed Klenze’s plan, sparing the Large Hermitage and incorporating the Loggia into the new museum. During construction, the Loggia’s tempera paintings were removed from the walls, damaged areas were restored, and the gilding reapplied.25
Having studied painting as a boy, Nicholas considered himself an expert. He assembled a commission of artists, headed by Hermitage picture curator Fiodor Bruni, to review the entire 4,500 work paintings collection—most of which was amassed by Catherine. With Nicholas making a daily appearance, the commission identified 815 paintings to hang in the new galleries, 804 to display elsewhere, 1,369 to store, and 1,564 to sell. The deaccessioned pictures were transferred to Tauride Palace; 1,219 of them were sold at auction in 1854. The sales earned a paltry 16,500 rubles, less than 14 rubles per painting.26
Though many of the sold paintings were of lesser quality, mistakes were made. For example, Portrait of Saint Andrew by Andrea Sacchi bought by Catherine in 1770 from François Tronchin had lost its attribution and was deemed unworthy. Chardin’s Still Life with Attributes of the Arts, a work Catherine liked so much that she hung it in her private apartments at the Winter Palace, was also sold. Geoffrey Kneller’s Portrait of Joseph Carreras from Robert Walpole’s collection eventually returned to Houghton Hall.
Nicholas began buying art for the New Hermitage. During a trip to Italy in 1845, he added to Catherine’s neoclassical sculpture collection by commissioning marble works from Tenerani, Bienaimé, and Rinaldi. In 1846, the Hermitage gained 182 pictures, mainly Italian, and Italian bronze statuettes bequeathed by Count Dmitry Tatishchev, Russia’s ambassador to Spain. From Paris, Nicholas bought the lavish 15th-century Grandes Chroniques de France, considered a masterpiece of the Imperial Russian Library’s illuminated manuscripts.
In 1850, Nicholas acquired the Barbarigo collection, one of the oldest in Venice. Bought sight unseen, most of the Italian Renaissance paintings were in terrible condition and were later sold. But among the disappointments was a treasure—five Titians sold by the artist’s son to Cristoforo Barbarigo in 1581. These included Portrait of Pope Paul III, The Carrying of the Cross, and The Repentant Mary Magdalene which “moves whoever sees it extremely . . . to compassion,” wrote Vasari.27 Also that year, Nicholas bought van Eyck’s Annunciation (1425–30) from a Brussels dealer. In 1852, Fiodor Bruni negotiated for Marshal Nicholas Jean de Dieu Soult’s collection in Paris. Like Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte, Soult had amassed an enormous collection by looting art in Spain. Francisco de Zurbaran’s St. Lawrence and Murillo’s Liberation of St Peter and Infant Jesus and St. John were among the new pictures arriving in St. Petersburg.
After Catherine’s death, Paul had recalled her silver governor’s services to St. Petersburg for his own use; Nicholas now melted most of this down for coin. But there was another kind of metal he’d fancied since his teenage years. As tsar, he built a small Neo-Gothic castle to house his vast collection of antique arms and armor.28 In May 1842, he hosted a knightly procession from the Arsenal to Alexander Palace. Heralds led the procession, followed by fifteen men in armor and fifteen women in 16th-century dress. Nicholas and his son Alexander were clad in armor from Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian’s era; the younger grand dukes were dressed as pages from the same period. In front of Alexander Palace, the group performed quadrilles and other moves on horseback. To mark the occasion, Nicholas commissioned Horace Vernet to paint the Knightly Festival.
The sudden death of Nicholas’s brother-in-law, William II of the Netherlands, in 1849 led to a small but fine acquisition of Renaissance art (the tsar’s youngest sister Anna Pavlovna married William, then Prince of Orange, at a Winter Palace ceremony in 1816). William had secretly borrowed one million guilders from Nicholas, using his paintings as collateral. When he died, William’s brother Prince Frederik paid off the debt to Nicholas with proceeds from an auction of the splendid royal collection. Outbidding collectors like the Marquess of Hertford (Wallace Collection, London) and the Rothschilds, Nicholas came away with thirteen gems, including Francesco Melzi’s Flora (then attributed to Melzi’s teacher, Leonardo), Jan Gossaert’s Descent from the Cross, Sebastiano del Piombo’s Lamentation, Bronzino’s Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici, and Dierick Bouts’s Annunciation (Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon; attributed to the circle of Bouts).
In 1852, Nicholas launched the ancient sculpture collection at the New Hermitage by transferring Catherine’s choicest works from Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlosk. These included over twenty classical statues and thirty heads and busts, along with vases and bas-reliefs. To his grandmother’s antiquities Nicholas added three hundred more ancient vases and over fifty sculptures from the daughters of Count Ivan Stepanovich and Countess Alexandra Grigoryevna de la Valle, starring marble portraits of Gaius Julius Caesar and Emperor Balbinus.29
A dozen years in the making, the New Hermitage opened in February 1852. Though access to the galleries increased, the museum remained an imperial collection with ticket applicants screened and a strict dress code enforced.30 Twenty-eight full-sized sculptures of artists adorned the façade; ten colossal gray granite atlantes appeared to be holding up the portico. Inside, Spanish, Flemish, and Italian paintings filled a trio of huge sky-lit halls. In contrast to Catherine’s “tapestry” method of hanging her pictures, Nicholas organized the canvases by national school, all in uniform frames. Over two hundred Dutch paintings lined the Tent Room; Catherine’s Rembrandts were hung in three rows in a large hall nearby.31
To celebrate the grand opening, Nicholas hosted a special performance at the Hermitage Theatre followed by dinner for six hundred guests. “Thousands of candles rising in pyramids above huge lapis-lazuli vases comprised the chief adornment of this hall, and lit with their reflection the magnificent works of Murillo, Velazquez, and other painters,” observed Florian Gilles, head of the Imperial Library. “The Italian, van Dyck, and Rubens halls, with their huge vases and candelabra of malachite and jasper—the products of the Urals and Altai—were lit almost as splendidly. . . .”32
By the following fall, the celebrations were over. In 1853, while trying to establish a Russian Orthodox presence in the Ottoman Empire, Nicholas entangled Russia in the disastrous Crimean War, a territory Catherine herself had annexed in 1783. He considered the humiliating defeat by the Ottomans, France, Britain, and Austria a personal failure. On the morning of February 18, 1855, the 58-year-old tsar died of a bad cold at the Winter Palace.