Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon
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Russian expansionism in Europe also took place at the expense of Poland: it was a matter of profiting from the weakening of a state undergoing decomposition in order to expropriate lands that had formerly been part of Kievan Russia. In 1772 the first division (of three) made by Austria, Prussia, and Russia resulted in amputating from Poland a third of both its territory and its population. Russia acquired the regions of Polotsk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev, as well as part of Lithuania—representing a total of 1.3 million persons and 85,000 square kilometers, which substantially enlarged imperial territory.
While these territorial aggrandizements demonstrated the growing influence of Russia, they did not suffice to make it a great power—hence the efforts at political and economic modernization that the empress undertook from the beginning of her reign.
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This undertaking would not be easy on any count. Confronted with successive traumas like the Mongol yoke, the terror of Ivan IV’s reign, and the religious schism3 of the 1660s, Russia had remained outside the great currents of thought—the Renaissance, humanism, and the Reformation—that had enriched Europe. Thus it remained a “pariah” figure on the European cultural scene. Moreover, the structure of Russian society was gripped by profound anachronisms. With its docile service nobility, little inclined to take any initiative, and its often uneducated clergy, incapable of playing the role of cultural transmission that the clergy performed in Western Europe, and finally, its subjugated and illiterate peasant mass, Russian society in the middle of the eighteenth century appeared quite refractory to any progress.
Aware of the breadth of the difficulties, Catherine tried to promote the modernization to which she aspired by resorting to measures that were less coercive than incentivizing. Of course, as under the reign of Peter the Great, it was still up to the autocratic state, incarnated by an empress attached to her prerogatives, to lead the reforms that would enable political, social, economic, and cultural modernization. In 1764, to launch a vast reform of current legislation, Catherine wrote and published Instruction for the Legislative Commission (Nakaz) that tried to frame the future work of a legal commission. In this long text, inspired by Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and Beccaria’s Treatises of Penalties and Punishments, which she shamelessly plagiarized, she pronounced on very concrete issues, for example calling for the suppression of torture. But despite these initial ambitions, the outcome of the commission was disappointing: charged to reflect on reforms to current legislation, it would meet only from 1767 to 1768 and yield no concrete results. On the other hand, the reform of provincial administration was more successful; launched between 1764 and 1775, it managed to establish a more uniform and effective organization that was more concerned with the well-being of the empire’s subjects. Similarly, the Charter of the Gentry that she decreed in April 1785 aimed to strengthen the nobility’s rights, while seeking to make it the privileged actor in a limited form of political modernization. Exempt from taxes and any corporal punishment, nobles were free to enter or not into state service, and they were authorized to elect provincial assemblies that had the right to present their requests to the governors. In parallel, Catherine took inspiration from the writings of liberal English economists in order to foster private initiative and free trade. In October 1762, a ukase (that is, an imperial decree) lifted monopolies on industrial and commercial activities, now authorizing any individual, with the exception of the inhabitants of Moscow and St. Petersburg, to become “entrepreneurs” and to allow millions of state peasants4 to produce textiles, leather, and pottery. Wanting to obtain quick success in this enterprise, the empress again called on the expertise of competent Europeans, whom she attracted to Russia by paying them generously. For example British Admiral Knowles was invited to participate in modernizing the Russian fleet. But interestingly, this call upon European expertise was not limited to elites, since the imperial state also facilitated a massive migration of free peasants from central Europe. Drawn by fiscal, financial, and legal opportunities that were particularly advantageous, several thousand Germans came to colonize the Volga basin and to turn the fertile lands of southern Russia into the future wheat granary of the empire.
Finally, in order to give Russia the cultural influence that ought to belong to her, the tsarina tried to open up her empire to Europe: culturally, artistically, and intellectually. To promote the influence of the Enlightenment in Russia, she facilitated the dissemination of ideas from the western part of the continent. In 1768 she created a special fund to translate into Russian the literary and scientific works of western Europe; she fostered the establishment in Russia of European artists like Quarenghi, Falconet, and the Scottish architect Charles Cameron, who was asked to familiarize Russia with art of neoclassical inspiration and to oversee the architectural renovation of St. Petersburg.
This cultural and intellectual openness to Europe was also manifested in the empress’s behavior: she liked to write (apart from her memoirs, we have several historical essays and plays) and maintained a correspondence with Diderot, Voltaire, and (as we have seen) Baron Grimm. However, we should not mistake the significance of these literary exchanges: they testify both to her sincere openness to Enlightenment Europe, but also to her desire to make a striking demonstration of the European-ness of Russia and to give the image of a modern and cultivated monarch who had broken with the “barbarous” heritage of the preceding centuries. It was her concern for her own image that explains her spectacular and generous gesture to Diderot, purchasing his library, while leaving him the right to enjoy it until his death.
In 1777 Catherine had been continuing the enterprise of Peter the Great for 15 years, striving to foster the emergence of a more modern Russia, better administered and more tolerant, influenced by the spirit of the Enlightenment. But we should not exaggerate the scope of the changes she brought about, since any assessment would reveal her attachment to an autocratic regime and her refusal to concede the least share of her power, particularly to her son Paul.
Autocratic Power Undivided
In the decade from 1760 to 1770, the Russian state had been open to the ideas of the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert, but by 1777 its political influence remained still very limited—the autocratic foundation of the state remained unchallenged. In fact the legislative reforms initially encouraged by Catherine quickly got bogged down, as with the Legislative Commission. Moreover, the few explosions of popular discontent that did flare up, or any attack that sought to shake off autocratic rule, were repressed in a systematic and brutal manner.
In 1770 the country was struck by plague: in the spring of 1771, it reached Moscow and killed almost 400 people per day at the start of the summer. The inability of power to contain the epidemic (which would kill almost 130,000 in Moscow alone) aroused the population’s anger and soon its insurrection. Far from trying to temporize, Catherine charged Gregory Orlov with restoring order through force. This would be achieved in September, while the epidemic began to recede the following month.
Similarly, Catherine proved harsh during the revolt fomented and directed after 1772 by Emilian Pugachev, a Cossack from the Don. Then aged 20, Pugachev claimed to be Tsar Peter III (whom Catherine had had deposed and killed) and posed as the representative of legitimate power while she was a “usurper”; for more than two years, he defied the empress by raising an army of Cossacks, fleeing serfs, and workers from the Urals. Calling for the restoration of a more just monarchy and the abolition of serfdom, he seriously threatened the foundations of the empire. But, betrayed by those close to him in September 1774, Pugachev was finally handed over, and his atrocious execution (he was decapitated in a Moscow square in January 1775), as well as the severe repression in the Urals, testify to the pitiless nature of a regime that was not respectful of the humanist values and practices advocated by the Enlightenment.
Any openness of mind to enlightened Europe had not shaken the social order, either. Catherine had tried at the start to promote reconsideration of
serfdom, but the ferocious hostility of the nobility to any change in the condition of serfs and the conviction that Russia was not yet ripe for a reform of such scope had quickly dissuaded her. Between 1762 and 1777, the conditions of the subject peasants continued to deteriorate. This situation aroused speculation on the part of Grand Duke Paul, who was held at a distance by his mother and had difficult relations with her.
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Paul had been born in October 1754, under the reign of his great aunt Elizabeth I,5 when the Grand Duke Peter, nephew of Elizabeth and heir to the throne, and Grand Duchess Catherine had been married for nine years. Rumors affirmed that the child was not Peter’s6 but likely that of Sergey Saltykov, the Grand Duke’s chamberlain; Elizabeth, who wanted to ensure the dynasty’s survival, closed her eyes to the affair and celebrated the birth of the future emperor with magnificent parties and masked balls at court. From the infant’s first hours, she took him from his parents to supervise his education herself. Peter and Catherine were authorized to see their son only 40 days after his birth, and they would only see him four times during the first six months of his life.
The infancy of Paul was overseen by numerous nurses, maids, and governesses. After 1760 Elizabeth confided the supervision of his education to Count Nikita Panin, promoted to his principal tutor. Endowed with various teachers of renown, Paul learned Holy Scripture, Russian, French, German, history, geography, arithmetic, and physics; he proved over the years an able student who did not apply himself. Elizabeth wanted to familiarize him with the exercise of power, obliging him to attend audiences of foreign ambassadors; Paul was rarely permitted to play with children his own age. He had no friends apart from Alexander Kurakin, Count Panin’s nephew, and Andrey Razumovsky,7 and met his parents only once a week.
Little Paul was “handsome—so handsome that when one saw in the gallery of Count Stroganov Paul’s portrait at age seven in the grand costume of the order, alongside that of Emperor Alexander at the same age and in the same costume, strangers often asked why Count Stroganov had two copies of the same portrait.”8 But in 1764–1765 the child fell victim to smallpox, which left his face blistered and marked by scars. His humor tightened as a result: now phases of despondency alternated with crises of agitation and anger.
On January 5, 1762, the death of Elizabeth made Grand Duke Peter the new emperor. Peter from the start adopted popular measures, among them the abolition of the secret chancellery (the feared secret police), a reduction in the salt tax, and permission granted to Old Believers who had been exiled by his aunt to come back to Moscow and freely practice their faith. Peter secularized the goods of monasteries, turning thousands of serfs who had been harshly treated in them into peasants of the state with better prospects. But while he was ambitious on the social level, Peter III proved maladroit, even provocative, with respect to the army. A Germanophile, he undertook negotiations to put an end to the Russo-Prussian war and he announced his intention to restore conquered territories—just when the victorious Russian army was marching through eastern Prussia. Even more seriously, he envisaged, with the support of Frederick II of Prussia, a war against Denmark aiming to recover Schleswig, a former possession of his native Holstein. On June 22, 1762, the signature of a diplomatic and military alliance with Prussia brought the army’s discontent to a paroxysm.
It was in this tense climate that Catherine, concerned for her future and for Paul’s survival (Peter had never been concerned with someone he knew not to be his own son and did not mention him in the proclamation when he ascended the throne), decided to resort to a military coup. Far from being content with a regency, as Count Panin had hoped when he supported her enterprise, Catherine chose to exercise fully her new power and to have herself crowned, by which the Church gave her legitimacy. On July 9, 1762, after the coup, Paul swore fidelity to the new empress, who made him her heir that day; nevertheless, the intimated little boy of seven, who held himself straight in the Kazan Cathedral where the ceremony took place, would never know maternal tenderness, growing up far from the empress.
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Paul resided four kilometers from Tsarskoye Selo (and 27 kilometers south of St. Petersburg). Two mornings a week, he visited his mother, accompanied by Count Panin.9 Week after week, the encounters were alike: while the child wanted to please his mother and arouse her tenderness, Catherine was cold and distant, distrustful of the one who could someday be the instrument of a plot to get rid of her. In Secret Memories of Russia, Colonel Charles Philibert Masson, a future poet who lived in Russia from 1787 to 179710 and eventually became secretary to the Grand Duke Alexander, gave an extremely severe verdict on Catherine’s behavior toward her son:
From infancy he showed qualities that she stifled by her bad treatment; he had spirit, activity, a penchant for science, sentiments of order and justice: everything has perished for want of development. She has morally killed her son—after long deliberating whether she should actually get rid of him. Her hatred of him is the single proof that he is the son of Peter III, and this proof is weighty. She could not bear him, holding him far from her, surrounding him with spies. While her favorites (who were eventually younger than him) were governing Russia and swimming in wealth, he lived retired, insignificant, and lacking in what was necessary.11
Yet Paul still remained destined for the throne of Russia, and it was for this purpose that Catherine continued to perfect his education. From the age of fourteen, he was taught politics, which left him cold, and military matters, about which he was passionate, to the regret of Count Panin, who wanted to see his pupil take an interest in managing the state. For his eighteenth birthday, on October 1, 1772, Catherine offered him the post of admiral of the Russian navy and made him colonel of a cavalry regiment.12 But contrary to Panin’s expectations she did not give Paul any portion of her power and even feared the young man’s popularity. Perceived as “Russian” while Catherine was perceived as foreign, Paul began in fact to crystallize the hopes of writers critical of Catherine’s regime and closer to Panin, like Fonvizin and Sumarokov, as well as those in military circles. In 1772 a first attempt at a military conspiracy was formed around Paul, and a year later a new embryonic plot was formed; both were uncovered and these attempts fed the empress’s growing distrust of her son.13
At the same time, to ensure the solidity and durability of the dynasty, Catherine decided to marry Paul off. After long consultations and negotiations that began in 1768, her choice was finally Wilhelmina, daughter of the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. On October 10, 1773, Paul married the young princess, who had converted to Orthodoxy under the name Natalia Alexeievna.
At this date, Paul was happy in his marriage but very shocked by the scope of Pugachev’s revolt, and he began to take an interest in political questions and wanted to act for the good of the state. In 1774, with the help of Count Panin and the latter’s brother, Field Marshal Peter Panin, who even envisaged a plot to bring Paul to power,14 the young man wrote a text titled Reflections on the State in General—at the very moment when Catherine was finishing her reform of provincial administration. From the start Paul asserted in his memorandum ideas that ran counter to Catherine’s practices. He declared himself in favor of an imperial government that with the guidance of the senate (whose power would be strengthened) might evolve toward constitutionality, as well as in favor of peace and domestic development. In Paul’s eyes, the empire should end the interminable wars that were exhausting it, and in future it should conduct only defensive wars. To this end fortresses should be built along the borders; their command and organization should be confided to local troops, who would defend them all the better since they would be defending their own soil. The army should be composed of volunteers, recruited as a priority among the sons of soldiers. The rights and duties of soldiers would be governed by precise regulations, and regiments would be subject to irreproachable discipline and order. A text that soon resonated as a critique of both Catherine’s absolutism and the ruinous political expans
ionism that she was conducting, in contempt of the living conditions of her people, was scarcely reassuring to the empress. And while she continued to shower Prince Potemkin (her lover since 1774) with political prerogatives, honors, and presents, Catherine continued to keep her son outside the circles of power.
Isolated, treated with disdain by his mother, Paul soon suffered a new personal tragedy when on April 15, 1776, Natalia died in childbirth. Hoping to remarry him as soon as possible, even though he was inconsolable, Catherine resorted to the cynical (even cruel) strategy of revealing to him, with letters in support, that Natalia had been the mistress of Paul’s childhood friend, Count Andrey Razumovsky. Painfully attacked in domains of both love and friendship, Paul shortly afterward agreed in the presence of Frederick of Prussia to marry (on October 7, 1776) the young princess Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg, converted and baptized under the name of Maria Feodorovna. But Paul had difficulty recovering from a trauma that left him depressed and full of bitterness, while Catherine was proclaiming more and more openly her contempt for someone she considered both dangerous to her and intellectually limited.
In December 1777 when “Monsieur Alexander” was born of the union between Paul and Maria Feodorovna, all the ingredients for a political and familial battle were in place. It was in this tense climate that the childhood of the grand duke was going to unfold.