The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Pahlen ‘forced the tsar to hurry away fast’ to the Winter Palace. As he left with Constantine, with Pahlen and Zubov riding triumphantly on the running boards, Alexander asked Elizabeth to go to his mother and persuade her to join them at the Winter Palace.

  Back in the Mikhailovsky Palace, that night was ‘like a vague dream’ to Paul’s young son Nicholas: ‘I was awakened and saw in front of me Countess Lieven. I noticed the Semyonovsky Guards on duty and I was taken to Mother.’ Soon afterwards, an adjutant arrived from the Winter Palace asking Maria to come ‘in the name of the emperor and empress’.

  ‘Tell my son’, Maria replied, ‘that until I see my husband dead, I shall not acknowledge him as my sovereign.’

  Elizabeth found that her mother-in-law ‘had gone totally crazy. The officers wouldn’t let her see the body but she wouldn’t go until she’d seen him.’

  ‘But Emperor Alexander is at the Winter Palace,’ explained Elizabeth.

  ‘I know no Emperor Alexander,’ cried Maria with ‘appalling shrieks’. ‘I want to see my emperor.’ Elizabeth herself collapsed, later telling Countess Golovina that it was ‘the most terrible night of her life’. She spent the horrendous early hours with the hysterical dowager empress. Once the Scottish doctor James Wylie had cleaned up the body with varnish and paint, Bennigsen let her in. That calmed her.

  Elizabeth went to join Alexander at the Winter Palace. The tsar told her, ‘I’m not sure I can fulfil my duties. I resign my power to whoever will take it. Let those who committed this crime be responsible.’ Then Maria arrived with all her children. Nicholas only remembered that ‘Alexander threw himself before Mother and I can still hear him sobbing. I was glad when I was allowed to play with my wooden horses again.’ The new emperor endured a ‘heart-rending interview’ with his mother, who shouted at him: ‘Alexander, are you guilty?’ He denied it and they embraced. Outside the city celebrated. ‘After Paul’s excess of despotism,’ Elizabeth noticed, ‘a mad joy reigns’, and she admitted to her mother: ‘At last I can breathe.’

  Next morning, at the ten o’clock parade, Emperor Alexander I reviewed the Guards who had cut off their hair plaits, burned their Prussian hats and redonned their Russian uniforms. ‘The conspirators were very arrogant’, particularly Prince Zubov, who was ‘looking very unsoldierly with all his smiles and foppery’. Alexander was a broken man, noticed Sablukov. ‘He walked slowly, as if his knees were giving way, hair distrait, eyes tearful, his regard fixed ahead of him as if to say “They abused my youth, they tricked me!”’ Alexander issued a manifesto promising to rule ‘according to the heart of Our Very August Grandmother, Empress Catherine the Second’.

  Alexander and his mother returned to the Mikhailovsky. When he saw Paul’s smashed face, ‘he was horrified and stood transfixed’. Constantine was shocked too. ‘Well, my friend,’ he said when Sablukov reported to him, ‘my brother may reign if he pleases, but if the throne were ever to come to me, I should certainly not accept it.’

  The assassins surrounded Alexander. ‘I have seen the young prince,’ reported a French diplomat, ‘walking . . . preceded by the assassins of his ancestor, surrounded by those of his father and by all appearances followed by his own.’ Pahlen dominated everything, spending most of his time with Alexander, who ‘found affairs absolutely neglected and disordered’, he later told his brother Nicholas. ‘Our parent changed everything but didn’t replace it by anything.’

  The tsar reversed his father’s works.* He amnestied Paul’s exiles, dissolved the secret police, prohibited torture, restored the rights of the nobility (particularly the ban on corporal punishment) and, recalling the Cossacks galloping towards British India, gradually restored warm relations with Britain.

  Yet Pahlen ‘treated him like a child’. Alexander despised ‘that treacherous immoral man and his crimes’. He summoned his liberal friends led by Czartoryski (Empress Elizabeth’s lover), to whom he confessed the moral nightmare of patricide: ‘If you had been here, things wouldn’t have turned out as they did.’ Alexander complained about Pahlen’s ‘dictatorial ways’ until a courtier replied, ‘When flies annoy me, I drive them away.’

  After Paul’s death, peasants, moved by the martyrdom of a sacred tsar, sent icons to the dowager empress with the inscription from the Second Book of Kings – ‘Had Zimri peace, who slew his master?’ Pahlen demanded their removal; Alexander refused. At 10 a.m. on 17 June, at the parade, Pahlen arrived as usual in his carriage, but one of Alexander’s adjutants told him to remount and go into exile on his Baltic estates. Soon afterwards, Prince Zubov, Bennigsen and the stranglers Iashvili, Skariatin and Tatarinov were ordered out of Petersburg.*

  None of the assassins was prosecuted. Yet, as Czartoryski understood, ‘Alexander punished himself with more severity than the others.’ His father’s murder hovered over him ‘like a vulture’, and he often ‘saw in imagination Paul’s mutilated bloodstained body on the steps of the throne’. He remained ‘alone for hours sitting in silence’.12

  * Orlov-Chesmensky’s fellow regicide Prince Fyodor Bariatinsky was sacked as marshal of the court, while Peter III’s favourite Gudovich, and Captain Peter Izmailov, the Guardsman who had denounced Catherine’s conspiracy in June 1762, were returned from exile and promoted.

  † Paul confirmed Zubov in his offices and even visited and toasted him at the house of his sister. But then he sent Constantine to dismiss him. Zubov retired to his baroque Rundale Palace in Courland, formerly belonging to Biron. But he would return to Paul’s life with a vengeance. Potemkin was anathema to Paul: his Taurida Palace was turned into a cavalry barracks. Later Paul ordered Potemkin’s tomb in Kherson to be smashed and his bones scattered. Some 12,000 Polish prisoners were released; King Stanisław-Augustus was rehabilitated and invited to the coronation; the radical Radishchev was returned from exile; Bobrinsky, Paul’s illegitimate half-brother, son of Prince Orlov, was summoned and raised to count; Catherine’s colossal Pella Palace, built for Alexander, was totally demolished. Valerian Zubov’s Persian expedition was immediately recalled.

  * Nelidova was probably genuinely alarmed by Paul and was certainly pious, but she also knew that the more virtuous she seemed to Paul, the greater her power over him. She begged him to reduce his gift of 2,000 serfs to her mother: ‘For God’s sake, Sire, as a favour please reduce this gift . . . by half to 500 souls.’

  * Bezborodko was made a prince (the first made by a tsar since Menshikov), received 16,000 souls and was then promoted to chancellor. Arakcheev became a baron. The rising Turkish valet Kutaisov was only promoted to gentleman of the bedchamber 4th class and grumbled to Paul himself who was so enraged that he hit him and drove him out of the room, threatening exile. Nelidova saved him, a kindness she would soon regret. He was then promoted to a new role, master of the robes. Finally Paul announced new protections for the serfs, a gesture that sparked a flurry of peasant revolts in the countryside which had to be repressed. It was typical of Paul’s inconsistency to pose as protector of the serfs while handing thousands out as chattels to his henchmen.

  * These changes of uniform caused uproar at the Collegium of Manufactures, where Sablukov’s father was in charge. When Paul found out that the latest change had been delayed, he immediately wrote a note ordering: ‘Banish Privy Councillor Sablukov and dismiss from service.’ Poor old Sablukov was banished, only to be recalled by the emperor who ‘with tears in his eyes apologized for his petulance’.

  * This was Count Giulio Litta. The Knights were meant to be celibate warriors, but Litta fell in love with the rich ‘kitten’ Katinka Scavronskaya, Potemkin’s niece-mistress. Paul, an avid matchmaker, sponsored the happy marriage and Litta served as a marshal of the Russian court for the next thirty years.

  * Suvorov was greeted with promotion to the rank of generalissimus (held before by Menshikov and Anton of Brunswick and afterwards only by Stalin) and the romantic title prince of Italy. But Paul became jealous. Citing his contravention of ‘all my instructions, [and] being surp
rised by this, I order you to tell me what possessed you to do it’. Suvorov-Italiisky died soon afterwards. Paul made Constantine, who had served courageously, caesarevich, the title of the heir – in this case Alexander. For a while Russia had two caesareviches.

  † The postmaster was also a spymaster since he ran the cabinets noirs that perlustrated the mail, secretly opening private and diplomatic letters, copying them, breaking codes and resealing them.

  * Apart from Czartoryski the others were Count Paul Stroganov, scion of the merchant-princes of Siberia who had spent time in revolutionary France, Victor Kochubey (Cossack nobleman, nephew of Bezborodko, and Paul’s vice-chancellor for a short time) and Nikolai Novosiltsev.

  * On 26 February 1797, Pahlen received this note from the emperor: ‘To my surprise I found out about the disreputable services provided by you to Prince Zubov in Riga, from which I draw my own conclusions about your character and about which my behaviour to you will be proportionate.’

  * This account of the conspiracy is based on a variety of unpublished and published sources that allow us to tell the story from several points of view: the unpublished notes (now in the Sorbonne) of a French émigré, the comte de Langeron, who interviewed Pahlen, Bennigsen and Grand Duke Constantine; Grand Duchess Elizabeth’s letters to her mother and her memoirs as told to Countess Golovina; Bennigsen’s anonymous memoirs; Czartoryski’s memoirs probably contain Alexander’s own version of events; Sablukov’s memoirs are priceless because he was present on the night but not in the conspiracy.

  * Yet Paul was certainly watching the original conspirator, Panin, telling his Moscow governor, ‘I opened his letter in which he writes about an imaginary aunt (who doesn’t exist) who is the only one in the world with soul and heart and other nonsense. I see from all this that he is the same so please send him away but tell him to stop lying either by tongue or pen.’

  † This was not Paul’s only expansionist policy: Georgia’s kingdoms, Kartli-Kakhetia and Imeretia, still ruled by kings of the Bagration dynasty, Giorgi XII and Solomon II, had never recovered from the recent depredatrors of the eunuch-shah of Persia. In December 1800, the Russians claimed that the dying Giorgi XII of Kartli-Kakhetia had left his realm to Russia: Paul’s troops took control. Around the same time, Paul officially sponsored the Russian-American Company to colonize Alaska, the start of Russia’s American empire that lasted until 1867.

  * Princess Gagarina heard nothing, but the cry had roused Kutaisov, ‘the dexterous Figaro’, who without even shoes or stockings, in a dressing-gown and nightcap, slipped away down the stairs and ran through the town to hide in a friend’s house, not to the mansion of his mistress Madame Chevalier where troops were sent to arrest him. Figaro was not arrested but retired, founding a noble family: one of his grandsons was killed at Borodino and a Kutaisov count was in the suite of Nicholas II. As for Princess Gagarina, still only twenty-three, she and her mean-spirited husband were sent to Italy. ‘One can’t criticize her conduct in her wasted life,’ wrote Empress Elizabeth when she died young in 1805. ‘A good woman.’ She finally found love with a young Pole, Prince Boris Czetvertinsky (brother of Alexander’s future mistress) – but died in childbirth at twenty-seven. It turned out that Gagarina was not Paul’s only lover: three months after his death, a mistress gave birth to a daughter who was surnamed Musin-Yuriev (Yuriev being one of the early Romanov surnames) and endowed with the estate of Ropsha (where Peter III had been murdered). Paul’s widow Maria took over the upbringing of the girl, who died at eighteen months.

  * Closing down the Mikhailovsky Palace, which became the military engineers’ school, he resided officially at the Winter Palace but liked to live at Kamenny Ostrov, an ochre palace, built by Catherine the Great, on a small island in the Neva. Paul had lent it to Poniatowski, the last king of Poland. Here Alexander created a ‘court of exaggerated simplicity totally devoid of etiquette and he met his courtiers only on intimate familiar terms’. Now a nod was the only bow required, no longer Paul’s prostrations. The emperor himself relished walking around Petersburg on his own or with a single companion – his regular route becoming known as le tour imperial.

  * The dowager empress’s suffering was not over: a few days later, her eldest daughter Alexandrine, who had failed to marry the king of Sweden and then had married the Habsburg Archduke Joseph, also died. Maria moved Paul’s blood-spattered blouse and bed to Pavlovsk where she kept them in a bedchamber shrine. Of the chief conspirators, Panin succeeded Pahlen as president of the Foreign Collegium for a short time, then was exiled. Zubov returned to his Courland estate where he married a young Polish girl. But Alexander did forgive some conspirators: the one-legged Lothario Valerian Zubov remained in Petersburg and sat on the Council because Alexander was fond of him and he had played no direct role in the killing, while Prince Peter Volkonsky, who was a conspirator, became his constant companion. Bennigsen commanded against Napoleon, but Alexander treated him with distaste. ‘The ingrate!’ murmured Bennigsen. But Maria made sure he would never receive his marshal’s baton. Iashvili wrote an insolent and insensitive letter to Alexander, who almost arrested him. He and the other stranglers did not return to Petersburg for twenty-five years. In 1834, the poet Pushkin was fascinated to see Skariatin at balls in Petersburg, pointed out as the man who had strangled an emperor. The 11th of March remained ‘that day of horror’ (as Alexander II called it), and the tsars always attended mass for Paul that day until 1917.

  SCENE 6

  The Duel

  CAST

  Maria Fyodorovna, dowager empress, widow of Paul I

  ALEXANDER I, emperor 1801–25, son of Paul and Maria

  Elizabeth, empress, his wife

  CONSTANTINE I, emperor 1825, Alexander’s brother, caesarevich, later commander of the Polish army

  Anna Fyodorovna (née Princess Juliane of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld), his first wife

  Joanna Grudzinska, Princess Lowicza, his second wife

  Catherine, his sister, married Prince Georg of Oldenburg, then King Wilhelm of Württemberg, ‘Catiche’

  Anna, his sister, later queen of Holland, ‘Annette’

  NICHOLAS I, emperor 1825–55, his brother

  Alexandra Fyodorovna (née Princess Charlotte of Prussia), Nicholas’s wife, ‘Mouffy’

  Michael, Alexander’s youngest brother

  Elena Pavlovna (née Princess Charlotte of Württemberg), his wife

  COURTIERS: ministers etc.

  Prince Adam Czartoryski, Polish patriot, lover of Empress Elizabeth, foreign minister

  Victor Kochubey, count, later prince, vice-chancellor, interior minister, president of State Council

  Count Pavel Stroganov, deputy interior minister

  Nikolai Novosiltsev, deputy justice minister, after 1815 Alexander’s representative in Poland, later count

  Alexei Arakcheev, inspector-general of artillery, war minister, count, ‘Ape in Uniform’, ‘Vampire’

  Count Nikolai Rumiantsev, foreign minister, chancellor, later prince

  Prince Alexander Golitsyn, mystic, ober-procurator of Holy Synod, postmaster, education minister

  Karl von Nesselrode, count, envoy to Paris, foreign minister, later chancellor

  Ioannis Capo d’Istria, born in Corfu, count, foreign minister, first head of state of Greece

  Mikhail Speransky, state secretary, later count, governor-general of Siberia

  Fyodor Rostopchin, count, governor-general of Moscow

  Maria Naryshkina, mistress and mother of Alexander’s children, ‘Aspasia of the North’

  Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya, Alexander’s mistress

  Wilhelmina, duchesse de Sagan, Biron’s granddaughter, mistress of Metternich and probably of Alexander

  Princess Ekaterina ‘Katya’ Bagration, daughter of Countess Katinka Scavronskaya, wife of General Peter Bagration, mistress of Metternich and probably of Alexander, ‘Naked Angel’, ‘White Pussycat’

  NAPOLEONIC WARS

  Count Levin Bennigsen, murderer
of Paul I, commander 1806–7, chief of staff 1812

  Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, prince, marshal, war minister, commander 1812 and 1813–15

  Mikhail Kutuzov, prince, marshal, commander against Turks and at Austerlitz 1805, commander-in-chief 1812

  Prince Peter Bagration, commander of army 1812 and hero of Borodino

  Prince Peter Volkonsky, chief of staff, Nicholas I’s court minister

  Alexander Chernyshev, envoy to Paris, cavalry commander 1812, Nicholas I’s war minister and prince, ‘Northern Lovelace’

  Russia enjoyed a carnival of hope as Alexander unleashed his liberal tendencies – yet the new tsar remained a study of inscrutability. His dazzling looks were inherited from his tall, fair German mother, his charm from Catherine the Great, but his invincible geniality was a screen that concealed his real thoughts. If he was an adept actor, a master of dissembling, the man who had lived through Catherine’s decline and Paul’s terror and assassination, could be forgiven a taste for clandestinity and a talent for serpentine manoeuvre. But there turned out to be more steeliness there than even his friends had expected.

  In 1802, Alexander created a new Council and replaced Peter the Great’s collegia with eight Western-style ministries, reforms that completed Peter’s vision of a simplified central government. But his ministers were still the same grandees who had run Russia since Tsar Michael, and he wanted to find his own way so he appointed Adam Czartoryski and his friends as their deputies.* And then secretly he created an Intimate Committee made up of his friends. ‘We had the privilege of coming to dine with the emperor without a prior appointment,’ recalled Czartoryski. ‘Our confabs took place two or three times a week,’ then after official dinner and coffee, Alexander would disappear and the four liberals would be led through corridors to reappear in the emperor’s salon to discuss a constitution, a semi-elected senate and the abolition of serfdom.