Nikolay is a Slavic form of Nicholas, from Greek meaning 'victory of the people.'
Nikolay is the East Slavic form — used primarily in Russia, Bulgaria, and Ukraine — of the Greek name Nikolaos, itself built from nike (victory) and laos (people): "victory of the people." The name entered Slavic culture through the Eastern Orthodox Church and its veneration of Saint Nicholas of Myra, the fourth-century bishop from what is now Turkey whose legendary generosity to the poor — including, in one famous account, secretly providing dowries for three daughters whose father could not afford them — made him the most beloved saint in Eastern Christianity and the eventual model for the figure of Father Christmas in Western tradition. In Russian cultural history, the name Nikolay runs through the nineteenth century like a golden thread.
Nikolai Gogol wrote Dead Souls and The Government Inspector, founding Russian prose comedy. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov composed Scheherazade and shaped a generation of Russian composers. Nikolai Leskov gave Russian literature the Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Two czars bore the name: Nikolai I, autocratic and military; Nikolai II, the last Romanov, whose execution in 1918 marked the end of three centuries of dynastic rule. The name carries within it the entire arc of imperial Russia — its grandeur, its literature, and its tragedy. In the contemporary Russian-speaking world and its diaspora, Nikolay (with the familiar diminutive Kolya) remains a perennially vital choice, neither dated nor trendily revived — simply present, generation after generation, as solid and familiar as the birch forests of the Russian north.