Tsar Nicholas I of Russia §

Emperor of Russia from 1825 to 1855, Nicholas I inherited the final phase of Russian expansion into the eastern South Caucasus. His reign saw the 1826–28 Russo-Persian War, the capture of Erivan by Paskevich, and the Treaty of Turkmenchay, which transferred the Erivan and Nakhichevan khanates from Qajar to Russian rule. The treaty created the legal channel through which Armenians from Persia were encouraged to resettle in the newly annexed territories, changing the demographic balance of what became the Armenian Oblast. Nicholas also presided over a centralising imperial style that treated the Caucasus as frontier, military district and colonisation zone rather than as a field of national self-rule. In the atlas his importance is structural: he is not a local nationalist actor, but the imperial sovereign under whom the modern territorial frame of Eastern Armenia became Russian.