His father, Karl, was among the Russian Empire's first railroad builders after Russia's defeat in the Crimean War motivated the tsar to modernize.

Alongside her intense but platonic relationship with Pyotr Tchaikovsky, she also brought Nikolai into contact with such people as Claude Debussy, who stayed with the family as a young man.

Deciding to give up a career in law and devote himself exclusively to the railway business, he asked his mother permission to leave school without receiving his degree.

Nikolai von Meck at the beginning of Russian-Japanese War led charity cargoes sent to the Far East Department of the Committee of Grand Duchess to raise funds in aid of the army under the shadow of the Russian Red Cross Society.

The project involved the improvement of electricity and telephone networks, water supply, tram lines, hospitals, buildings of public meetings.

Despite this, due to his "bourgeois" origins, he was repeatedly arrested on various charges from 1919 onward, accused of, among other things, "counter-revolutionary speeches against the Soviet system" and being part of a "technological counter-revolution."

He was arrested for the final time in 1928, and in May 1929 the OGPU (forerunner of the KGB) sentenced him to death for wrecking; that is, attempts to sabotage Soviet authority through substandard work.

The best introduction of Nikolai von Meck could be the words of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, who described him as "an honest servant of the King and Fatherland".