Shelikhova’s fortunes had improved along with her social standing. The grateful matriarch bought Rezanov and Anna a small country property twenty-six miles to the south of the capital where the Moika River (a different Moika River to the one in central St Petersburg) joins the Neva. There was a pleasant house on the estate, as well as a small hamlet of twenty-three adult male serfs – known as dushi, or souls – and their families. Modern Russians would describe such a suburban retreat as a dacha, albeit a rather grand one. Rezanov initially named his new property Rezanovskoe, but tactfully changed it to Annenskoye in honour of his young wife. Perhaps his fierce mother-in-law had a say in the matter.
Natalia Shelikhova also bought the young couple a more substantial estate in the Pskov governate comprising 241 souls and six villages. Like all her business dealings, the transaction was finely calculated. She purchased the estate from the Okunevs – Rezanov’s mother’s family – who were evidently in financial difficulties at the time, thereby deftly combining social climbing with family diplomacy. Neither the Rezanovs nor the Okunevs showed any sign of being embarrassed by accepting the Shelikhovs’ money. And though Natalia Shelikhova herself took an unladylike interest in the details of the property’s inventory, she seems to have been resigned to her new role as cash cow to a clan of feckless aristocrats.
Flush with Shelikhova’s money, Rezanov also bought a handsome new neoclassical building near the Blue Bridge on the Moika canal, just off Senate Square, for the new Company headquarters. It still stands today, number 72, renovated but empty, its historical status marked by a plaque to the revolutionary Kondraty Ryleev, who like many of the young liberals who fomented the Decembrist uprising in 1825 was an officer of the Russian American Company.
As Rezanov set up his grand new headquarters, the Tsar was quietly succumbing to paranoia. ‘I came to the throne late and will not be able to bring order everywhere,’ Paul feared. To help him impose the order for which he yearned, Paul recruited Pyotr Obolyaninov as head of his secret police and later as procurator-general of the Senate.9 As well as supervising the legislative affairs of the Senate the post also involved running Russia’s judiciary – the equivalent of a prosecutor-general. By happy coincidence, Obolyaninov also happened to be an old judicial colleague of Rezanov from Pskov days.
Paul had chosen well. Obolyaninov turned out to be one of the many geniuses of repression that punctuate Russian history. The Tsar had a yellow box installed at the side of the Winter Palace for petitions and denunciations. These were supposed to be anonymous, though in fact Obolyaninov’s spies watched the comings and goings of the night-time petitioners. Paul would personally open the box with his own key at seven o’clock every morning, and the Tsar’s replies were published in St Petersburg’s newspapers. At first the most common complaints were about watered vodka in the capital’s taverns, but as word spread of the Tsar’s personal interest in the box on Palace Embankment jokers began posting obscene verse, pasquinades and caricatures. Paul had the box closed.
Like his mother, Paul was an obsessive micromanager of his subjects’ lives, but he lacked Catherine’s flair for administration and wasted his energies on regulating what he could see every day – the streets of St Petersburg. All the monarchs of Europe had been profoundly shocked by the execution of Louis XVI in 1792, but none went quite as far as Paul in stamping out every hint, real or imagined, of Jacobinism. Spotting the son of an English merchant on a St Petersburg boulevard wearing a peaked velvet hunting cap – the late-eighteenth-century equivalent of a baseball cap – Paul decided that this and indeed all round hats were a symbol of Jacobinism. There being no word in Russian for a hunting cap, Paul’s ukaz forbade ‘any person to appear in public with the thing on his head worn by the English merchant’s son’.10 Coloured tops to boots were also banned for the same reason, as was use of the word ‘revolution’ by scientists to describe the movement of planets. French was still widely spoken at court, but Paul worried about dangerous Gallic influences on the general public and ordered merchants to desist from French borrowings such as magazin to denote shop – the closest native Russian word was lavka meaning ‘counter’.*
Less harmlessly, in 1800 Paul’s terror of assassination fuelled a purge of politically unreliable courtiers. Paul’s son Nicholas I was to become the true founder of Russia’s modern police state, with its apparatus of secret political police, in-camera court hearings and prison camps, but Obolyaninov certainly laid the foundations of terror. ‘In going to bed it was quite incertain whether during the night some policeman would come with a kibitka [a police gig] to take you off at once to Siberia,’ wrote Prince Adam Czartoryski. Princess Dashkova, the former best friend of Catherine the Great, was dubbed by Paul ‘a suspicious poltroon’ and banished to a hut in Karelia. Obolyaninov’s police also monitored the less exalted. ‘If any family received visitors in the evening; if four people were seen walking together; if anyone examined a public building for too long he was in imminent danger,’ Edward Clarke, an English traveller to St Petersburg, wrote in 1800. ‘If foreigners ventured to notice any of these enormities in their letters, which were all opened and read by the police, expressed themselves with energy in praise of their country, or used a single sentiment or expression offensive or incomprehensible to the police officers or their spies they were liable to be torn in an instant from family and friends, thrown in a sledge and hurried to the border or to Siberia. Many persons were said to have been privately murdered or banished.’11
Paul was not the first ruler of Russia to suffer from paranoia, nor would he be the last. But unlike his more ruthless predecessors and successors he failed to destroy the powerful enemies he made, and they therefore destroyed him. One of the least wise acts of Paul’s brief and self-destructive reign was to launch an assault on the military elite who had brought Russian arms to unheard-of heights during his mother’s reign. Paul hated the Guards regiments as havens of idleness and luxury as well as for providing Catherine with lovers. He therefore humiliated the Guards’ commanders and cut down their privileges, at a stroke alienating thousands of Russia’s most socially connected, best-trained and heavily armed young soldiers. Paul also recalled all Russian troops from overseas, including an expeditionary force of 60,000 which Catherine had imaginatively dispatched to push the boundaries of her empire southwards through modern Azerbaijan and into Persia.
Grigory Potemkin and his brilliant eccentric protégé Alexander Suvorov had re-invented the Russian army to the highest modern standards, including the introduction of radical new uniforms which were comfortable and quickly put on. ‘Get up, and you’re ready to go!’ was Suvorov’s maxim. Paul considered the new loose-fitting uniform sloppy and ordered the entire army back into antiquated Prussian-style wigs and tall hats. He also introduced the Prussian goose-step, which Russian soldiers still use today.
Most eccentric of all was Paul’s obsession with creating a universal Church uniting secular and temporal power, headed by himself. The origin of this idea came when he and his wife visited Rome on a grand tour of Europe in 1782. The young Tsarevich met Pope Pius VI, and they discussed uniting the Catholic and Orthodox wings of Christianity, split since 1054.* On coming to the throne Paul had himself declared head of the Russian Orthodox Church, the only Russian monarch ever to do so. He had the chapel of his new Mikhailovsky Palace built in the classical Italian baroque style with no iconostasis, the screen which traditionally separates the congregation from the altar in Orthodox churches. The Mikhailovsky chapel is almost indistinguishable from a Catholic church. Here Paul himself served as priest, gave communion and heard the confessions of his household.
When the thrusting young General Napoleon Bonaparte took Rome in 1798, Paul suggested the Pope move his headquarters from the Vatican to Moscow. Pius politely declined, but Paul had more luck with an invitation to the Knights of St John of Malta, whom Napoleon had recently evicted from its historic stronghold in Valetta as he seized Malta en route to Egypt. The Order’s Russian years we
re one of the odder interludes in the knights’ 800-year history. In exchange for his patronage and protection, Paul had himself appointed seventy-second Grand Master of the Order and moved its seat to St Petersburg. This was in fact the Order’s fourth move, after Saracen and Turkish advances had forced them to abandon Jerusalem and Rhodes and now Napoleon had forced them out of Malta. Paul became passionate about the order’s ancient chivalric ethos and incorporated the red and white Maltese Cross into the Russian state coat of arms.
Malta itself, though actually under French occupation, was made a province of the Russian Empire and assigned a garrison of 3,000, as well as an administration. All those notables in the rank-obsessed Tsar’s favour were assigned one of thirty gradations in the Order’s tremendously complicated hierarchy of knighthood. The white enamel Cross of Malta, worn on a ribbon at the throat, became the principal symbol of royal favour in Pauline Russia. Derzhavin, as an Actual Privy Councillor and second in the table of ranks, was granted the cross of a Knight Commander first class, which came with diamonds. Rezanov, a mere Actual State Councillor and number five on the table, received the plainer Commander’s cross in silver.
Paul had begun his reign by eschewing his mother’s foreign military adventures in Persia, but he was so incensed by Napoleon’s outrages against the Pope and the Knights that he ordered Russian troops to retake Rome and Malta for the Russian crown. Paul summoned the sixty-eight-year-old General Suvorov from his retirement in a monastery with a letter that said, simply, ‘Come and save the Tsars.’ Paul joined the first (of six) anti-French coalitions masterminded by England. Russia’s new allies were Austria and, oddly, given Catherine’s relentless wars against the Sublime Porte, Turkey. In the summer of 1798 an Anglo-Russian fleet under Admiral Fyodor Ushakov established an outpost on the Ionian Islands off Greece. The following year Suvorov’s force invaded through the heel of Italy and took Naples and then Rome. The old general was preparing to invade France itself, through Piedmont and Savoy, but Russia’s Austrian allies demanded that Suvorov’s force join them in southern Germany instead and fight alongside another Russian army which was making its way through Poland to join the fray.
Suvorov therefore turned his 15,000-strong army north and fought his way through Switzerland. Traces of the extraordinary road that his engineers carved for the army over the St Gotthard Pass are still visible today, including the holes for pitons with which they secured ropes to the vertiginous Alpine cliffs. Suvorov stormed the French defences at the Devil’s Bridge over the gorge of the River Reuss and pushed on. Unfortunately he arrived too late – the main Russian force, which had marched overland from Moscow, had been routed by the French at Zurich, and his Austrian allies sued for a separate peace with Napoleon.
Never before had a Russian army roamed so freely across the heart of the continent – though Russian troops had occupied Berlin in 1760 – and Suvorov was styled Prince of Italy, Prince of Sardinia, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Field Marshal of the Austrian and Sardinian armies as well as Generalissimo of Russia’s ground and naval forces. In an age filled with military prodigies, Suvorov’s heroic crossing of the Devil’s Bridge became a European legend. The French army nicknamed him the Russian Hannibal.
Perhaps predictably, Suvorov’s successes threw Paul into frenzies of jealousy and suspicion. On his return to St Petersburg the Tsar stripped the old general of his titles and fourteen decorations. Suvorov died, disgraced, the following year. Derzhavin was the most senior official to risk the emperor’s wrath by attending his funeral. Part of Paul’s anger at Suvorov was based on a growing fascination with Napoleon, whom he began to imagine was a man of destiny almost of his own calibre.
Paul’s hatred of Jacobin France had once been so manic that he decreed that Frenchmen would only be allowed into Russia if an official of the Ancien Régime had signed their credentials. But by the autumn of 1800 Paul’s enmity towards the French Republic was clearly wavering. A Russo-British attempt to invade the Netherlands failed, and in October the British instead took Paul’s beloved island of Malta – that is to say, the Russian province of Malta – from the French. In his rage at his ally’s treachery, Paul dissolved Russia’s alliance with Austria instead, a short step from wrecking the English-led coalition entirely.
Charles-Maurice Talleyrand, Napoleon’s foreign minister, had made it his business to be kept informed of Paul’s quixotic obsessions, and in 1800 he began to lay the groundwork for an alliance with the man who had until recently styled himself Revolutionary France’s most implacable enemy. Talleyrand played his cards brilliantly. Six thousand Russian prisoners of war taken by the French army in the campaigns of 1799–1800 were returned to Russia not just excellently fed but in new uniforms run up by Lyons tailors. Talleyrand also sent Paul a ceremonial sword presented by Pope Leo X to Paul’s predecessor as Grand Master of the Order of Malta. In addition he had his agents in St Petersburg emphasize that Napoleon had put the Jacobin excesses of the Revolution behind him.
‘It is terrible to see the so unexpected collapse of great hopes,’ wrote Charles, Lord Whitworth, Britain’s ambassador to St Petersburg, to the foreign secretary in London as the First Coalition disintegrated. ‘The Emperor [Paul] is obviously mad. And his illness is constantly progressing . . . With a man like him no one can feel in security under such circumstances.’12 This letter, though written in invisible ink, was intercepted and read by Foreign Minister Count Fyodor Rostopchin’s spies, further damaging Anglo-Russian relations.
By this time Paul was exchanging courteous letters with Napoleon. ‘The duty of those to whom God has entrusted the power to govern nations is to devote themselves to the wellbeing of their subjects,’ began Paul’s first letter to the French First Consul in November 1800. ‘Let us try to restore that peace and quiet to the world which are so much needed and which seem to conform so closely to the immutable laws of the Almighty. I am ready to listen to you and hear what you have to say.’13
Bonaparte answered enthusiastically. ‘Under this, our union, Britain, Germany and other powers will drop their weapons,’ he wrote. A Russo-French alliance was quickly sealed.
As recently as the previous year Paul had gone as far as to hire the German playwright August Kotzebue* to draft a letter to the ‘Corsican usurper’ challenging Napoleon to a personal duel.14 Paul had also taken a strong interest in a scheme to restore the Bourbon monarchy and had hosted the exiled Louis XVIII, brother of the executed Louis XVI. Now Paul threw Louis out of the Jelgava Palace in Courland (modern Latvia) and reneged on the 200,000-ruble pension he had bestowed on the man who would be King of France. Instead a portrait of Napoleon, Paul’s new best friend, was duly hung in the Tsar’s bedroom.
Paul and Napoleon’s correspondence quickly turned to the subject that interested both men most of all: world domination. After the collapse of the First Coalition Napoleon longed to decisively crush his arch-enemy England. He had taken Egypt in 1798 – why not India next? The idea had been floated in the days of Louis XVI, who had actually authorized a naval attack on Bombay in 1782, but with Russian support, it was finally – in Napoleon’s mind at least – feasible to rob England of her most valuable overseas possession. Talleyrand presented Napoleon with a detailed plan ‘for striking a mortal blow at the English power in India’, combining a blockade of Britain with a naval assault on Bombay and Calcutta and a land attack across Afghanistan. ‘Your sovereign agrees with me that if we take India away from England we will weaken her might,’ Napoleon enthused to the Russian diplomat Count Georg Magnus Sprengtporten. ‘India, this fairy land, this Oriental diamond, has given much more wisdom to the world than this drunken and vicious England with its shopkeepers.’15
America too caught the hungry eyes of the would-be rulers of the world. Napoleon had recently forced Spain into an unhappy alliance and had demanded large swathes of what is now the southern United States to add to the French-owned Louisiana Territory centred on the Mississippi valley.* There was no reason, thought Talleyrand, why th
e Spanish territories on the Pacific coast should not be ceded to Russia, thereby securing a handsome new swathe of territory for France’s new allies.
Paul took to the Indian scheme with an enthusiasm that unnerved even Napoleon. Ignoring French pleas to first devote his energies to the closer-to-home parts of the great project such as blockading England, the Tsar planned the coming conquest of Asia in minute detail. Paul, whose recreations still included playing with a huge army of toy soldiers, delightedly busied himself with the logistics of the great expedition. The cloth to be sold to the natives, he stipulated, was to be ‘of the colourings most liked by the Asians’, and the Cossack expeditionary force was to carry a large stock of festive fireworks to impress the locals.
In January 1801 Paul issued orders to Vasily Orlov (no relation of Catherine the Great’s late favourite), ataman of the Don Cossacks, to assemble a 25,000-strong force with which ‘you will invade India . . . drive out the English powers and ruin their commercial establishments’. The plan was for the Cossacks to join 35,000 soldiers of the French Rhine army under Suvorov’s nemesis General André Masséna, who would sail down the Danube, up the Don, down the Volga, across the Caspian Sea and disembark at Astrabad in modern Turkmenistan, from where they would march on India. According to French calculations, the zig-zag route from France to Astrabad would take just eighty-three days, and the march to India via Herat and Kandahar fifty more. The combined Franco-Russian land and sea assault on Bombay was pencilled in for September 1801.
Alas for Paul, his attempt at changing the destiny of the world was not to be.* Even as Ataman Orlov tramped with his Cossacks across the Kazakh steppes towards Khiva and Bukhara, a coterie of aristocrats around Paul was hatching the murder plot that he so feared but had done so much to provoke. Paul was so hated among the nobility that Count Peter Pahlen, governor of St Peterburg, found no shortage of willing conspirators. Count Nikita Petrovich Panin, nephew and namesake of the Emperor Paul’s old tutor, was delegated to speak to Tsarevich Alexander about the possibility of deposing his father. Panin was so nervous of Obolyaninov’s police spies that they met in a bathhouse. Alexander was persuaded to ‘relieve the injustices and tyrannies’ of the father he feared and detested, and agreed to the coup, but, he protested later, did not acquiesce in his father’s murder. ‘To make an omelette you must break eggs,’ Pahlen told the prince.*
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 14
