The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  In the first weeks of 1801, Paul exiled twenty-six officers. ‘A crescendo was approaching that would be bloody,’ claimed Pahlen later. ‘There wasn’t one of us who was sure of a day of his existence! Raised to such a delicate and important position, I was one of the most in danger!’ Czartoryski put it best: Paul ‘was too fantastic and capricious. No one could ever rely on him.’

  Pahlen worked to undermine Rostopchin. Simultaneously the Professor of Cunning played an even deeper game: having gradually drawn the heir into his conspiracy, he then effectively betrayed him to Paul, implying that Alexander, Constantine and their mother were plotting against him. Paul brooded on how to punish his family. Pahlen next reported to Alexander on Paul’s plans to destroy him.* Two hundred officers flocked to join the plot.

  On 1 February, Paul moved into his forbidding new Mikhailovsky Palace, complete with moat, drawbridges and many of the paintings from the Hermitage. Figaro and Gagarina lived downstairs while the emperor’s young children were above his bedroom. Yet a fortress is only as safe as the men who guard it. Pahlen, responsible for security, knew the daily codes, and most of the emperor’s adjutants were conspirators. The Professor of Cunning found that the best place to meet was the salon of the secret police chief Obolyaninov, who was ‘unsuspicious of any evil design’, while Paul ‘never suspected intimates of Obolyaninov’.*

  Meanwhile Paul was enthusiastically launching his quixotic war against Britain in alliance with Napoleon. In January 1801, he ordered the ataman of the Don Cossacks, Vasily Orlov (no relation to Prince Orlov), to lead 20,000 men against India.†

  In mid-February, Pahlen managed to get Rostopchin exiled to his estates, and he himself replaced him as president of the Foreign Collegium and postmaster with the power to open letters. But, as the conspiracy spread, Sablukov noticed that ‘The whole appearance of society showed something extraordinary was going on.’ Pahlen himself was in danger of exposure. Once he was carrying a secret note when Paul, seeing his pockets bulging with letters, asked to see them, teasing him: ‘Are those love letters?’ Paul reached for them and Pahlen’s blood froze. Just in time he said, ‘Sire, leave it – you hate tobacco and my handkerchief is full of it.’

  ‘Ugh, what piggery!’ cried Paul, desisting. On another occasion, when Pahlen was hiding a list of the conspirators and Paul’s order of the day, Paul demanded that he hand over the latter. Facing a 50–50 chance of destruction, Pahlen reached into his pocket and luckily brought out the right piece of paper.

  Riding in the gardens, Paul suddenly gripped his own throat: ‘I felt suffocated. I felt as if I was going to die. Won’t they strangle me?’ His courtiers reassured him. He had talked of dying of ‘a sore throat’ – his euphemism for strangulation.

  At 7 a.m. on 7 March, Pahlen, making his report, found the tsar ‘preoccupied and serious. He looked at me for two minutes without saying a word.’ Someone had given Paul a list of conspirators.

  ‘You were here in 1762?’ he asked Pahlen.

  ‘Yes, Sire.’

  ‘You were in the revolution which deprived my father of his throne and his life?’

  ‘I was a young cornet in the Guards, but why does Your Majesty ask?’

  ‘They’re planning to replay 1762.’

  Pahlen trembled but collecting himself replied: ‘Yes, Sire, they want to. I know it and I am in the plot.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘You have nothing to fear. I hold all the threads of the conspiracy and you’ll soon know all.’ He reassured Paul that he had been crowned, unlike his father, who ‘was a foreigner and you a Russian’, while Empress Maria ‘had neither the genius nor the energy of your mother’, Catherine the Great.

  The emperor threatened arrests and hangings – at which Pahlen solemnly replied that he would be shocked when he learned who the conspirators were. He presented a list confirming Paul’s nightmare: Maria, Alexander and Constantine were its leaders. Paul and Pahlen planned a counter-coup to arrest them all. Paul confided to Kutaisov that after his counter-strike, ‘We’ll live without constraint like brothers,’ and he told Princess Gagarina, ‘I see it’s time to carry out my coup.’ She innocently repeated his words to Pahlen: ‘I don’t know what he means by the great coup he plans.’

  Pahlen frightened Alexander by revealing Paul’s plans. He set the date as the Ides of March, the 15th, but Caesar was becoming too suspicious. Alexander proposed the 11th when his own Semyonovsky Guards were on duty.

  Yet someone had clearly denounced the conspiracy to Paul. Around 9 March, without telling Pahlen, he secretly summoned Arakcheev and Rostopchin to return at once to Petersburg – clearly to take command of the counter-coup. But Pahlen, in charge of the posts, opened the letters and showed them to Paul, asking if they were forgeries. Paul asserted that they were genuine. When Arakcheev received Paul’s note – ‘I need you. Come at once’ – he galloped for Petersburg.

  On 10 March, Paul was tetchy. After the afternoon concert, he brooded in his apartments, then before dinner he confronted Maria and his elder sons with the charge of treason. It is said that he found Voltaire’s Brutus on Alexander’s desk and sent Kutaisov to him with a copy of Voltaire’s Peter the Great, the account of the torture of Tsarevich Alexei underlined. At dinner, the pug-snouted emperor sat, arms crossed, staring at his wife and sons. He placed the boys under house arrest and ordered Obolyaninov to readminister the oath of allegiance. As he stalked out of the dinner, Maria burst into tears.10

  *

  The next day, the 11th, Paul was more relaxed. The family were joined at dinner by the one-eyed General Mikhail Kutuzov, who would achieve immortality as the hero of 1812. ‘There were twenty of us at dinner,’ recalled Kutuzov, and Paul ‘was very gay, cheerful and affectionate to his wife and sons’. But the general may have misunderstood when Paul asked Alexander why he looked so anxious, advising him to take good care of his health.

  Afterwards Paul played with his children upstairs. ‘When Father visited us,’ recalled Nicholas, who was then aged four, ‘he was extremely fun,’ and in the huge hallways ‘we all played on sleighs indoors. Even Mother joined in.’ But that night, after Paul had gone, little Michael was asked what game he was playing. ‘Burying Father!’ he replied. Had the child somehow overheard something? The nannies silenced him.

  Late at night Pahlen made a second report of the day to the emperor and noticed that, while Alexander’s Semyonovskys were on duty around the palace, Sablukov’s Horse Guards patrolled the royal apartments. Pahlen informed Paul that the loyal Horse Guards were Jacobins and recommended dismissing them; and, as a sensible precaution given his wife’s disloyalty, he advised him to lock the door to his wife’s rooms.

  Some time during the day, Figaro received a letter warning of the plot. ‘Business Tomorrow’ was Kutaisov’s ‘favourite saying’. The letter was found in his pocket the next day, unopened.

  At 8 p.m. Colonel Sablukov, reporting to his colonel-in-chief Constantine, found both the boys ‘very much excited’. ‘You all seem to be mad here,’ muttered Sablukov. Alexander ‘crept about like a frightened hare’ and, when Paul appeared, he flitted away ‘like a lamplighter’. Only when the emperor had gone did Alexander open his door and peep into the room. ‘He sneaked again towards us like a crouching pointer.’ Having been warned of the fate of Tsarevich Alexei, Alexander was jumpy.

  ‘You know nothing,’ explained Alexander. ‘We are both under house arrest. We’ve both been brought by Obolyaninov to the chapel to take the oath of allegiance.’ But as soon as he got home Sablukov was summoned by the emperor again. Accompanied by his little dog Spitz and his aide-de-camp Uvarov, one of the conspirators, Paul declared: ‘You’re Jacobins.’ As Uvarov was ‘making silly faces and smiling behind the emperor’, the tsar dismissed the Horse Guards, leaving two unarmed valets on guard. After visiting his mistress downstairs, Paul, wearing as usual his ‘drawers, a white linen waistcoast’ and a nightcap, went to bed with his sword, cane and sash hanging over his milita
ry cot.

  Across town, the conspirators were attending several dinner parties held by different officers – but all of them, more than sixty, including three Zubov brothers, converged on the apartment of Colonel Talyzin at the Winter Palace. Wearing their Catherinian uniforms and medals, they excitedly quaffed goblets of Pahlen’s champagne. Bennigsen recalled ‘terrible joy’ and ‘extreme drunkenness’ among princes and senators, Georgians, Germans and a French valet. Most were young; some were romantic constitutionalists, some were drunken thugs itching for a fight – and three were the officers who had been personally thrashed by Paul. All discussed the new reign and a constitution, and Nikolai Bibikov, colonel of the Izmailovskys, suggested massacring the entire dynasty.

  Just before midnight, Pahlen arrived from court – while Count Arakcheev galloped up to the gates of Petersburg to save the emperor. On Pahlen’s orders he was denied entry and sent back to his estate.

  Pahlen and Bennigsen, both Germans, both ruthless and calm, both aged fifty-six, were the only two who had not been drinking. Pahlen toasted the new tsar before dividing the conspirators into two squads. The first under Prince Zubov, still only thirty-four, and Bennigsen was to enter the palace through a prearranged postern-gate and penetrate straight to the bedchamber of the emperor, while he himself with the other squad was to surround the palace, cutting off any escape routes. What if Paul resisted? ‘As everybody knows,’ replied Pahlen, ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’

  Just after midnight, Pahlen led his posse towards the front of the Mikhailovsky, while Bennigsen and Zubov hurried round the back of the palace, guided by Paul’s adjutant Argamakov across a bridge over the moat and into the royal apartments. On the way half of them got lost in the dark, so it was twelve, including Platon and Nikolai Zubov, who followed Bennigsen into the fortress.

  They drew their swords as the adjutant led them right up to the antechamber, but the valet would not open the door.

  ‘I’ve come to submit the report,’ said Argamakov.

  ‘Are you crazy? It’s after midnight.’

  ‘It’s actually 6 a.m. and if you don’t open it, you’ll get me into trouble with the emperor.’ The door opened and they burst in. One of the valets shouted a warning until ‘I slashed him dangerously on the head with my sabre,’ recalled Bennigsen. Platon Zubov lost his nerve and wanted to flee. Bennigsen gripped his arm: ‘What? Now you want to withdraw? We’re too advanced to follow your advice which would ruin us all. The wine is poured and must be drunk.’ The twelve crowded through the unlocked door into the staircase just as another twenty or more drunken, bloodthirsty bravos poured up the stairs, but the glacially cool Bennigsen and the excitable Zubov strode towards the imperial chamber. The valet’s cry* had awoken Paul. He rushed to escape, but his other exit, leading to Maria’s chamber, had been locked on his own orders. There was a trapdoor leading to a tunnel out of the palace under his desk, but before he could open it, Bennigsen and Zubov, bearing swords and candles, burst into the chamber. They hurried to the bed. It was empty. ‘He’s got away!’ cried Zubov, but Bennigsen felt the bedclothes: ‘The nest is still warm.’ Holding up candles they peered around the room. Nothing. Moonlight broke through the clouds. Bennigsen saw bare feet beneath a screen: ‘Voilà,’ he said.

  They dragged Paul out in his nightcap and bare feet to face Bennigsen, whose ‘long, thin, pale, angular form with his hat on his head and sword drawn must have seemed a terrible spectre’.

  ‘Sire, you have ceased to reign. Alexander is emperor. We’ve arrested you on his orders. You must abdicate,’ said Bennigsen in French. ‘Your life is not in danger, but if you resist, I can’t protect you!’ Prince Zubov accused him of intolerable despotism. As Bennigsen checked the other doors, Nikolai ‘Colossus’ Zubov and more conspirators barged their way into the bedchamber.

  ‘Arrested?’ asked Paul in his nightshirt. ‘What does this mean? Arrested?’ Zubov repeated Bennigsen’s speech in Russian at which Paul, regaining some imperious pride, started to argue with the drunken Colossus who growled at Paul: ‘Why do you shout so?’ He slapped the emperor. Paul pushed him away. ‘What have I done to you?’ he cried.

  ‘You’ve tortured us for four years,’ shouted a lairy ruffian. The conspirators and the emperor stared at each other breathlessly, then there was a tumult as another posse of shouting officers, led by Prince Iashvili, a Georgian bravo once caned by the emperor himself, forced their way into the bedchamber. Prince Zubov, fearing that Paul was being rescued by loyal troops, panicked and fled downstairs. Then Iashvili and his cohorts rushed at the tsar, knocking over screen, lamp and emperor.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Sire, don’t attempt to escape or you’ll be murdered,’ cried Bennigsen, who claimed he rushed out to find a lamp. It was no coincidence that Prince Zubov and Bennigsen should have left the room at the moment the hit squad arrived (if they left at all). It is more likely they were stepping aside as they handed over to the assigned killers who threw themselves on to the tsar. Paul struggled in the mêlée until Nikolai ‘Colossus’ Zubov, the man who had brought Paul news of his accession, seized a massive golden snuffbox and smashed it into his face, crushing his cheek and knocking in his eye. Paul went down, probably hitting the corner of his desk. Lieutenant Ivan Tatarinov and Captain Yakov Skariatin, assisted by Iashvili, threw themselves on to the fighting emperor. It took several big men to break him. Sablukov says these were the three officers whom Paul had beaten – ‘He paid dearly for this at the hour of his death.’ They frenziedly beat and choked him. Colonel Bibikov held his thinning hair and banged his head on the floor; Skariatin seized Paul’s sash from over the bed and, aided probably by Iashvili and Tatarinov, got it round the tsar’s neck. Zubov’s French valet sat on his feet. Paul got his fingers between the sash and his throat, begging to be spared, to be allowed to pray. Then, staring up wild-eyed into the faces of his killers, he thought he recognized his son Constantine and in a tragic moment resembling Caesar’s ‘Et tu, Brute?’ he spluttered: ‘What? Your Highness is here?’ He resumed his pleas. ‘Mercy, Your Highness, mercy! Some air, for God’s sake.’

  The stranglers tightened the sash until Paul was still – at which more of the conspirators ‘avenged themselves of personal insults by kicking and trampling on the body, mangling the unfortunate corpse’. They ‘tightened the knot and dragged along the dead body, striking it’. Bennigsen reappeared with a lamp, halted the stomping and took command. Examining the ‘mangled body’ for life, he placed thirty Guards on the doors and dumped the corpse on the bed.11

  Alexander I was obliviously waiting downstairs. ‘Without undressing, he threw himself on his bed full of anxiety and doubt,’ until there was ‘a knock on his door’ and he saw his father’s murderer ‘Count Nikolai Zubov, his dress in disorder, face flushed with wine and the excitement of the murder who cried hoarsely: “All is over!”’

  ‘What is over?’ asked Alexander, but Colossus did not answer clearly until the grand duke noticed that he addressed him as ‘Your Majesty while Alexander thought he was merely Regent’. He was ‘prostrate with grief and despair’. Pahlen now arrived, conveniently late: if the plot had failed, he could have arrested the plotters.

  ‘People will say I’m murderer of my father,’ sobbed Alexander. ‘I was promised his life would be spared. I’m the most unfortunate creature!’

  ‘That’s enough childishness.’ Pahlen shook him briskly by the arms. ‘Go and start your reign. Show yourself to the Guards.’

  ‘And my mother?’

  ‘I’ll go to her.’

  Pahlen woke up Charlotte Lieven, mistress of the robes, ‘a lady of great strength and power of mind’, and ordered her to rouse Maria. At first the empress thought her eldest daughter Alexandrine had died but then she understood. ‘Oh it’s the emperor!’ she cried, jumping out of the bed in her nightgown.

  ‘He’s had a stroke,’ said Lieven.

  ‘No, he’s been murdered!’ insisted Maria, but the Guards refused to let
the empress through the anteroom to Paul’s bedchamber. ‘How dare you! Let me pass!’ she shrieked. The Grenadiers crossed their muskets. Tended by Madame Lieven and her two daughters Maria and Catherine, the empress ‘lost her head’ and overcome with ‘ambition and sadness’ suddenly ‘declared that in consequence of her coronation, she was the ruling empress and allegiance should be sworn to her. She must reign now.’ Catherines I and II had both succeeded their husbands as sovereign. Was she deluded or bidding for power? She turned to the Grenadiers on guard: ‘As your emperor has died a victim to treason, I am your empress. I alone am your legitimate sovereign. Follow me and protect me!’

  Alexander woke up his wife Elizabeth, who was shocked by ‘the horrible crime’. He was ‘annihilated – his sensitive soul will forever be damaged’, she told her mother. Outside she could hear hurrahs acclaiming the new emperor. She and Alexander wept together. ‘I don’t know what I am!’ he told her.

  Constantine, who knew nothing, was ‘sleeping like a twenty-year-old’ when he was loudly awoken by a drunken Prince Zubov who ‘brutally pulled off my blankets and roughly told me, “Get up, go to Emperor Alexander, he awaits you!”’

  Constantine was ‘astonished – I stared at Zubov still half asleep. I thought I was dreaming.’ So Zubov pulled him out of bed. He ran to his brother’s salon, where ‘I found him stretched on a sofa in floods of tears with Empress Elizabeth. That’s when I learned of the assassination of my father. I believed it was a plot to kill all of us!’ But just at that moment an officer warned Alexander that their mother was claiming the throne for herself.

  ‘My God! Yet more embarrassment!’ wailed Alexander, sending Pahlen off to reason with her. Outside, troops were massing but some worried that Paul was still alive – despite the shrill acclamations of Zubov. ‘But that’s impossible,’ replied Bennigsen. ‘He’s damaged, smashed. He’s got to be painted and arranged.’ The soldiers refused to swear allegiance to Alexander without seeing the body, so Bennigsen let them in and they reported that the emperor was ‘very dead’. They took the oath.