Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  The delay in leaving Taganrog was, in part, a consequence of the extraordinary confusion over the Succession. Volkonsky could not order the removal of the body until he had received instructions from the new Tsar. But who was the new Tsar? Alexander may have made it clear to his mother, his brothers, Golitsyn and the Metropolitans that he regarded Nicholas rather than Constantine as his successor; but nobody at Taganrog was in the secret, not even Elizabeth.43 As soon as Alexander died, couriers were sent directly to St Petersburg and to Warsaw. The news reached the Russian capital about midday on 9 December;44 and Nicholas, despite the disapproval of Golitsyn, at once insisted on renouncing any rights bestowed on him in secret by Alexander. He had the palace guards take an oath of allegiance to Tsar Constantine, formally swore the oath himself, and gave instructions for all government departments and military units to pledge their allegiance to Constantine without delay. But the courier to Warsaw had arrived two days earlier, on 7 December: Constantine, keeping to the arrangement with Alexander, duly swore an oath of allegiance to Nicholas and sent the Grand Duke Michael, who was with him in Poland, back to St Petersburg to assure their brother of his loyalty. At the same time he proclaimed Nicholas Tsar and King of Poland in a document which he ordered to be read publicly in Warsaw.45

  At Taganrog Elizabeth received a letter of sympathy from Constantine, written to her ‘as a brother and not a sovereign’, while an official decree from St Petersburg gave orders to the public authorities and troops in the town to swear allegiance to the new Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, Constantine I. There was accordingly a solemn ceremony of oath-taking on the morning of 22 December.46 But no message came from the new Tsar about arrangements for his brother’s burial: a letter from Marie Feodorovna to Volkonsky at last left him with sole responsibility for the translation of ‘the mortal remains of the best of sons’.47

  Meanwhile, some twelve hundred miles away, the confusion in the capital grew worse with every day. Nicholas and the Senate awaited the arrival of Constantine from Warsaw and they were surprised when Michael came instead of his elder brother. Marie Feodorovna, learning of Constantine’s proclamation of his brother in Warsaw, urged Nicholas at once to accept the throne everyone was thrusting on him. This was sensible advice: no autocracy could function under such conditions. But Nicholas still hesitated, sending messages back to Warsaw in the hope Constantine would change his mind. It was impossible to keep this glorious Imperial muddle secret and there was a certain amusement among foreign visitors to the capital. The absurd situation was aptly summarized by a correspondent for the London Times, who reported, ‘The Empire is in the strange position of having two self-denying Emperors and no active ruler’.48

  But this absence of leadership had serious repercussions. Earlier in the year Alexander had been informed of plots among the garrisons of the Ukraine; and agents were sent to discover more about the conspiracy. Alarming reports reached the Tsar, either while he was in the Crimea or soon after his return to Taganrog: it was clear there would be a risk of mutiny or revolt in the spring, but Alexander’s illness prevented him from taking decisive action. Similar information also reached Arakcheev, but he too remained inactive, largely because of his grief at the murder of his mistress by young serfs she had ill-treated at Gruzino.49 On 16 December, however, General Diebitsch came across the reports of the agents while he was sorting through papers which had accumulated during Alexander’s illness. He saw to it that measures were taken against the dissident officers in the Ukraine and, at the same time, sent an express courier to St Petersburg to alert the Grand Duke Nicholas, who had already received police reports of unrest among the officers of two regiments in the capital. It was this fear of revolt which finally reconciled Nicholas to his own proclamation.50

  Hence on the morning of 26 December, after two and a half weeks of tergiversation, Nicholas consented to have the troops of the Petersburg garrison paraded in order to swear allegiance to him. A battalion of the Moscow Regiment and some companies of the Izmailovsky refused to take the oath. They assembled defiantly on the Senate Square, calling for ‘Constantine and a Constitution’;‡ they were joined by marine Guards and a regiment of Guards Grenadiers, and supported by labourers building the new cathedral of St Isaac. When General Miloradovich urged the troops to lay down their arms, he was shot and mortally wounded. An appeal by the Metropolitan Seraphim, rich in full canonicals, was accorded more respect but he was urged to retire to the cathedral and pray for their souls. At last, reluctantly, Nicholas ordered three cannons to be loaded with grape-shot: ‘I sent Major General Sukhozanet’, he wrote, ‘to announce to them that, unless they put down their arms at once, I would give the order to fire. They replied with shouts of “Hurrah” and the same exclamations as before, and after that with a volley. At that point, seeing no other alternative, I ordered: “Fire”!’51 The insurgents scattered in disorder, pools of blood in the snow around Falconet’s statue to the founder of the city. It was a terrible prologue to Nicholas’s reign.

  Or was it, rather, an epilogue to the reign of Alexander, a consequence of the frustration and disappointments of his later years? For the leaders of this ‘Decembrist Rising’ were, for the most part, members of the aristocratic intelligentsia, distinguished and brave veterans of the campaigns, the very groups who had come together in the secret societies rather than accept as final the system of Arakcheev. Politically the conspiracy was a mistake, confused in immediate objectives and premature in execution. It was all too easy for the authorities to restore order in the capital and round up dissidents in Kiev and Odessa. Only a far larger conspiracy, involving every great city and the principal regiments throughout the army, could have succeeded in changing the structure of Russian government towards the liberal constitution system which the Decembrists desired. Their failure led to the consolidation of reactionary rule in Russia for another thirty years. Yet it must be admitted that if such a rising had taken place while Alexander was still on the throne, it would almost certainly have had similar consequences. No son of Paul was likely to give way to the dictation of mutineers.

  Legends

  The Decembrist unrest, and the confusion over the Succession, made it important that Alexander’s burial should follow protocol and tradition so far as was possible. Already, among a people accustomed to look for mystery in the sudden death of sovereigns, there were disturbing rumours. Why had there been so much uncertainty in St Petersburg? Was Alexander, isolated in a remote town on the fringe of Asia, the first victim of a conspiracy? Had he been poisoned, or done to death like Peter III? As the long funeral procession wound its way slowly northwards through the snow to Kharkov, Kursk, Orel and Tula silent crowds watched the great funeral coach go by, sad and apprehensive. On 15 February the procession reached Moscow; eight greys, draped in black with the Imperial insignia on their covering, hauled the cumbersome carriage along the route Alexander had followed for his Coronation. For two days the coffin rested within the Kremlin, at the Cathedral of the Assumption where the earliest Romanovs are buried. The people of the city wished the body to be exposed so that they could honour the sovereign who had refused to make peace with Napoleon in the epic days of 1812. The authorities would not open the coffin, and there was nearly a riot. It was, by now, two and a half months since the unskilled morticians of Taganrog had sought to embalm the corpse; and there was good sense in the decision not to permit the corpse to be exposed. But the episode intensified the general air of mystification: another thread of doubt was added to the loom of legend.52

  As the procession neared Tsarskoe Selo, Marie Feodorovna came to meet the escorting troops and the coffin was received in the palace chapel with fitting ceremony. She insisted on seeing for herself the body of her son: ‘Yes, that is my dear Alexander’, she was heard to say. ‘Oh, how he has wasted away’ (Ah, comme il a maigri!).53 As a form of identification, it did not entirely carry conviction. There followed then another puzzling episode: the coffin was left for a week in the military hospit
al at Chesme, while arrangements were completed for the final interment. Only after this last delay were the funeral rites observed in what the Duke of Wellington (who was present as representative of George IV) described as ‘a terrible ceremony’.54 The coffin was placed beside the tomb of Paul on the north side of the small cathedral in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul. To encourage belief that this was indeed the body of Alexander, the wedding ring which he had worn for thirty-two years was fixed to the ikon facing the sarcophagus.

  His widow never saw the tomb. Originally Elizabeth had intended to accompany the funeral procession northwards. The shock of Alexander’s death weakened her own condition and it was clear by the beginning of January she could not journey across the Russian steppes in the depth of winter. She therefore paid her last homage to Alexander on the day the cortège set out from Taganrog. With a doctor in attendance and Roxane Stourdza (Countess Edling) assisting her ladies-in-waiting, she remained in Taganrog until the snows melted and the warmth of spring came to southern Russia. Then, at last, she prepared to go back to the heart of the Empire, planning to settle near Kaluga, and perhaps later go to Germany if she recovered her strength.55 She had no wish to return to St Petersburg.

  At nine in the morning of 4 May she prayed alone in the Greek church which held so many memories for her, and set out slowly towards Kharkov, travelling no more than fifty miles a day. On the evening of 15 May she reached the small town of Belev, eighty miles north of Orel. She went to bed, anticipating a visit next day from Marie Feodorovna, the first meeting with a member of the Imperial family since Alexander’s death. Possibly the anticipated strain of the encounter was too much for her. At five o’clock in the morning of 16 May Elizabeth’s heart stopped beating: and her soul was free to follow ‘the angel’ she had lost twenty-four weeks before.56

  Elizabeth’s death did not surprise those who knew her personally. To others, however, this sudden disappearance of Alexander’s consort intensified the mystery of his own fate. Gradually doubts over what had happened at Taganrog changed their form. People became less interested in whether Alexander had, or had not, been poisoned. The stern repressive policies of Nicholas I created a nostalgia for the magnificent era of 1812–14, when Russia was ruled by a sovereign for whom the world was bright with promise. Now, as official policy caused monuments to proliferate to the dead Tsar, so among simple people of all classes one of the most primitive instincts of folk fable began to assert itself: Alexander, it was said, had not died but was living out a life of prayer in some distant monastery. Neither for the first time nor the last, the credulous and superstitious refused to accept the fact of mortality in the Russian Imperial dynasty.

  There were, of course, good reasons why Alexander of all Russia’s rulers should have his last days embellished in this way. He had, for much of his reign, seemed to many of his subjects a romantic hero; his own psychology constantly favoured the devious rather than the direct; and there was, anyhow, sufficient confusion over events at Taganrog and along the whole funeral trail to raise unanswerable questions in the mind. But some of the hypotheses put forward by the champions of Alexander’s survival stretch credulity to the utmost extent. It has been maintained, for example, that a substitute corpse was brought into the sick room at Taganrog while the real Alexander was smuggled out and put aboard an English yacht, which then conveyed him through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles to the Holy Land.57 The gravest objection to this particular sleight of hand is that it would have necessitated from the Empress Elizabeth a degree of religious dissimulation totally against her character and her conscience. She could not have acted out the role while showing the spiritual feeling and sincerity of grief revealed in her letters. Nor is there any reason why a husband who was so interested in purchasing an estate at Oreanda where he could find rest with a wife for whom he felt the deepest concern should, a fortnight later, have lent himself to a conjuring trick of this nature. No life of repentance could be based upon deceit, least of all upon an act which required the Church to fulfil sacred rites knowing them to rest upon a falsehood.

  The belief that Alexander had, in some way, survived was however strengthened by tales of a Siberian starets, or holy man, who began to excite attention in the early 1840s. This starets – tall, with a stoop, middle-aged, and possessing an impressive presence – was not a dabbler in miracles, like Photius or the later Rasputin; he was an austere practitioner of a life of prayer and meditation, and he was known as Fyodor Kusmich. Nobody was certain of his true age or his background; but he was someone with connections at Court, he enjoyed recalling the reign of Catherine II, and it was believed by those who met him that he occasionally received visits from eminent figures in the Empire. By the late 1850s, when Kusmich settled in a village near Tomsk, there were many people convinced he was in reality Tsar Alexander, expiating his sins by prayer, as a voluntary exile in the wastes of Siberia.58

  There is no doubt Kusmich was a remarkable personality, possibly an unfortunate offspring of the Imperial family. But he cannot have been Alexander. Fyodor Kusmich did not die until February 1864; and it is impossible to believe a man of Alexander’s constitution could have lived until the age of eighty-six. Moreover the records of Fyodor Kusmich’s table talk about public affairs show him to have had a totally different attitude from the Tsar to the great campaign of 1812–14: in particular, Kusmich delighted in praising Kutuzov; and he made the odd slip of describing once how the Tsar of Russia had ridden in triumph into Paris in 1814, with Metternich at his side.59 His identity, like that of other holy men in Russia, remains unknown: he died, as he had lived, a man of mystery in a house of sanctity. It is later writers who made him famous.

  Yet while it seems certain that the legends of Alexander’s survival are false and that he died at Taganrog on 1 December 1825, as the records maintain, there is still one peculiar circumstance for which there is no ready explanation. On at least two occasions, and possibly more, the tomb in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul has been opened and found empty.60 Either no corpse was ever buried in it or the body that was laid in the sarcophagus was subsequently removed; and there is indeed a story which claims that a body was taken from the tomb in 1866, under the orders of Alexander II, and secretly buried in the principal cemetery of the city, the graveyard of the Nevsky Monastery.61 If the Alexander tomb is, as seems likely, a cenotaph then this macabre tale would appear to support the champions of Kusmich.

  There may, however, be a less sensational explanation of the empty tomb, though one based purely on conjecture. Alexander I disliked the traditional burial place of the Tsars, associated as it was in his mind with the interment of his father. He had, on the other hand, a strong personal attachment to the memory of the only previous ruler in Russia to bear his name, St Alexander Nevsky, a warrior prince as he had once thought himself to be. What therefore would be more natural than that he should wish to be buried in the confines of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, where he had prayed as he set out on so many journeys, including the final expedition to Taganrog? Did he, one wonders, leave with the Metropolitan Seraphim a written request that, should he die, his remains were to be buried at the monastery rather than at the fortress? A secret testament of this kind was in character, a similar commitment to his secret decree on the Succession.

  Yet such an arrangement would have been highly inconvenient for Nicholas and politically inexpedient. The only sovereign ever buried in the cathedral of Alexander Nevsky was the murdered Peter III (whose body Paul insisted on translating to the fortress cathedral at the time of his mother’s State funeral). To bury Alexander in the Nevsky cloisters in 1826, after all the uncertainties of December, would incite startling rumours over what had happened at Taganrog. If Nicholas fulfilled any such wish of his brother, then he can only have done so by a secret burial preceding the long and involved funeral ceremonies and the lowering of an empty coffin in the cathedral of St Peter and St Paul. Alternatively it is possible – though highly speculative – that the remains a
llegedly moved from the fortress under the direction of Alexander II were in fact those of Alexander I, the young Tsar thereby at last fulfilling the secret wishes of his uncle and namesake. In either case, the true burial place of Alexander I would therefore be within the monastery at the end of the Nevsky Prospect rather than in the grim fortress across the river.

  All this, of course, is a more appropriate subject for detective fiction than historical narrative. The most impressive memorial to Alexander I is not in any fortress or any monastic cloister but in the centre of modern Leningrad, outside the Winter Palace. In 1832 the Frenchman Monferrand, whom Alexander himself had encouraged to settle in Russia so as to re-build St Isaac’s Cathedral, was instructed to erect a column in the dead Tsar’s honour that would dominate the massive Palace Square. The monument, completed two years later, is 158 feet high, slightly lower than Nelson’s Column m London. It consists of a monolith resting on a granite plinth which is ornamented with bas-reliefs and inscribed, quite simply, ‘To Alexander I, Grateful Russia’. In a sense the column complements Falconet’s equestrian statue half a mile away in Senate Square, which Alexander as a child had watched his grandmother unveil. Yet one feature of Montferrand’s tribute to Alexander distinguishes it from other commemorative columns; for, though honouring the Tsar whose armies marched across Europe, it is crowned at the summit not by the figure of a human conqueror, but by a winged angel looking out towards Peter the Great on his prancing horse. In the left hand the angel holds a cross while the right is raised in perpetual blessing of a city once dedicated to St Peter and now to Lenin. It is an appropriate symbol, a parable in stone commemorating the Tsar whose sense of Divine Mission elevated him, until he lost touch with the people his fortitude had saved.