After Alexander I died, his brother, Nicholas, took over. He married Frederica Louisa Charlotta Wilhelmina (Alexandra Feodorovna), daughter of King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, hence strengthening St. Petersburg’s ties with the Germans. However, it was in his rule that cultural and ethnic interchange with the outside world began to decline. Nicholas’s reign saw the flourishing of absolute monarchy in military and civil areas. He strengthened and centralized bureaucratic structures to an unprecedented degree and was harsh and despotic, brutally suppressing liberalism. This made Russia a less friendly environment, and foreigners began to think twice about going there to live. The popularity the capital had been enjoying with Western Europe was shattered when Nicholas attempted to partition the Ottoman Empire and when he started the Crimean War of 1853-56, in which Russia suffered a bitter defeat at the hands of a coalition of Western European states, aligned with Turkey. Nicholas was not completely disastrous to Russia’s ethnic growth though, for war with Iran a year into his reign led to the acquisition of part of Armenia and the areas of Erevan and Nakhchevan. There was little else he achieved beyond this, however.
However, diversity in the Arts peaked at this time. As a result of the acceptance of Western art techniques and styles during the preceding era. Russian art was still connected to Western standards and ideals. By the time of Nicholas’s reign, the Russians mastered the Western artistic idiom and technical advancements as shown by The Last Day of Pompeii (1830-1833) by Karl Briullov, a great St. Petersburg artist. Pushkin wrote some of his best poetry around this time, and Feodor Dostoevky began his career in St. Petersburg. The great Russian composer, Mikhail Glinka wrote some of his best operas then.
By the end of this period, the rapid ethnic growth St. Petersburg had been experiencing had levelled off. The ambivalence of the two halves of Alexander I’s reign and the harshness of Nicholas I’s reign had caused this. St. Petersburg was not much more diverse than it had been half a decade earlier. Art, on the contrary, had been well consolidated in this era mainly as a result of the development of the Hermitage which is the art museum originally begun as Catherine II’s art collection. The Hermitage brought in a huge influx of foreign art works and hence, the artist behind these works directly. Of important note is that because of Russia’s many military conquests, her welcoming position, and the resultant influx of foreigners, the religious spectrum of the city diversified, and created a need for a system of administering foreign faiths. And this led to the creation of the Department of Religious affairs of Foreign Faiths in 1810.
