The capital changed colour as Paul ordered the painting of bridges, watch-houses and imperial gates in red, black and white ‘harlequin jackets’. These appeared across the city overnight. Another caprice was the placing of the monogram ‘Paul Г, surmounted with a crown, in every corner and above every window of the palace. When someone attempted to count them all, he ‘left off perfectly weary, after he had numbered eight thousand’.24 As for dress, each day there was some alteration to what was permissible.25 Associating the whims of fashion with selfindulgence and a flagrant disregard for authority, Paul stipulated old-fashioned breeches, stockings and powdered wigs. Frock coats and round-style French hats were forbidden, and watchmen were despatched with long poles to flick offending hats off the heads of those who persisted in wearing them. French fashion called to mind revolution and republicanism, but when relations with England soured and Paul absurdly despatched a troop of more than 22,000 Cossacks to attack British India, he likewise became hostile towards English dress. Animosity extended to a complete ban on the import of British goods in 1800, further stunting life in what had been a vibrant and cosmopolitan capital. Books were also the target of embargo. In 1800, the emperor forbade the import of foreign titles and sheet music,26 although it seems readers were able to obtain a good deal of forbidden material – a skill that would serve a repressed and subversive population throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Idiocies proliferated. Paul banned some 12,000 nobles, arrested seven field marshals, 333 generals and 2,261 officers.27 One early-twentieth-century Russian source claims that he commanded prostitutes to wear yellow dresses in order to signal their trade.28 Commands were often swiftly followed by countermands, and Paul’s reputation as a compulsive and crazy lawmaker was spreading far and wide. A cartoon attributed to the Scot Isaac Cruickshank was published in March 1800, ‘The Three Orders of St Petersburg’. Paul holds an ‘Order’ in his right hand, and in his left is a paper marked ‘Counter Order’. Consequently, ‘Disorder’ is inscribed on the emperor’s crown. Another English caricature shows Paul with one foot on St Petersburg, the other in bedlam. Even palace dinners – more restrained than under previous sovereigns – were touched by Paul’s folly. When the simple meal was over, the emperor grabbed the plates containing leftover cakes and flung them into the corner of the room, ‘apparently finding amusement in watching the pages pushing and shoving each other in their efforts to gather up as many as they could’.29
Isaac Cruikshank’s The Three Orders of St Petersburg.
A French visitor recorded that, one day, Paul visited the docks and watched a sailor caulk the hull of a boat. ‘There is a skilful man,’ cried the monarch, approaching the spot and examining the work with care. ‘This is admirable,’ he told the sailor. ‘Your skill merits recompense.’ The excited man, expecting a couple of roubles, bowed before his sovereign, who said, ‘Rise, I name you lieutenant-general.’30 This incident smacks of one of the most absurd episodes of Paul’s reign: the factual life of the fictitious Lieutenant Kijé, made famous in the West after Sergei Prokoviev wrote suitably pompous, comic and catchy music for a 1934 film of the story, shot in Leningrad’s Belgoskino studios. The Kijé biography in its earliest guise appeared in Stories of the Time of Paul l, published in 1870 by the Russian lexicographer Vladimir Dahl, who got it orally from his father. In the story, a scribe deforms a phrase in a list of promotions and thereby creates a non-existent ensign named Kijé. When the document is shown to Paul, the emperor suggests that this ensign be promoted to the rank of lieutenant, in line with the others on the list. From nothing, Kijé rises rapidly through the ranks. When he becomes a colonel, Paul decides it is time to meet the officer, but no Kijé can be found. Officials trace the origin of the mistake, dare not reveal the bureaucratic blunder and decide to tell the emperor that Kijé is dead, whereupon Paul declares that it is a great pity, as he was such a good officer.
Almost equally odd was the experience of the German dramatist Auguste von Kotzbuë. After his arrival in Petersburg in the spring of 1800, Paul exiled him to Siberia but, after several months, recalled him, gave him an estate and made him the director of St Petersburg’s German Theatre. One day, the emperor summoned von Kotzbuë and asked him to translate into French an absurd almost Arthurian – summons to all European sovereigns to settle their political differences with a single tournament. Although von Kotzbuë left Russia the following year, his association with the country appears to have continued. He was assassinated by a student in Mannheim in 1819, suspected of being a Russian spy.31
As Catherine had left Russia in a sorry financial state, Paul attempted to cut costs. Even within the palace, he reduced expenses by refusing to use traiteurs and ordering food directly from the market. He put the colleges under the control of a minister answerable to the tsar. He attempted to rationalise the provinces and made nobles liable for the costs of local government. On the delicate subject of serfs, he instructed landlords not to force them to work on Sundays, and suggested that serfs only labour for their masters for three days a week – although this was never written into law.32
In the capital there was little new building. A design competition was announced for the projected cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan on Nevsky Prospekt, although Paul – who had been much impressed by the curving colonnades of St Peter’s in Rome – determined the overall effect. The Tauride, one of the city’s most splendid palaces, fell victim to Paul’s military passion and was converted into a barracks, while the tsar’s notorious impatience resulted in the old St Isaac’s Church being rapidly finished with brick. Paul was understandably exasperated that such a significant structure, right in the centre of St Petersburg, remained unfinished after twenty-six years. Meanwhile, the emperor’s acute insecurity resulted in the building of the fortified Mikhailovsky Palace, in which he intended to live. Moated and protected by drawbridges, the castle was designed to afford protection against dangerous plots.
On the site of Rastrelli’s old Summer Palace, Vincenzo Brenna constructed a forbidding mass, which suddenly turned red. The colour of a pair of gloves worn by a lady of the court so struck the emperor that – as a contemporary visitor noted – ‘the next day it became his favourite tint and he gave instant orders that his new residence should be painted accordingly. Hence it is called the Red Palace and a most frightful, glaring appearance it makes.’33 Paul laid the foundation stone in February 1797, and the Mikhailovsky Palace was swiftly completed by thousands of builders and decorators working around the clock. The main approach was made between stable buildings along a short avenue that terminated in a square, where Peter sited an impressive snub to the memory of his mother: a copy of Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s unrealised equestrian statue of Peter the Great. In order to disparage Catherine’s text on the base of Falconet’s Bronze Horseman, which linked her with Peter the Great, Paul added a caption below his statue: ‘To Great-Grandfather – from his Great-Grandson’.34 Legitimacy and lineage were proclaimed and the imperial family moved into the Mikhailovsky Palace, against their wishes, on 1 February 1801. The plaster was still damp, the interior clammy.35
Entrance to the moated, martial Mikhailovsky Palace.
By then, as Prince Viktor Kochubey wrote, a ‘black melancholia’ had ‘taken possession of everyone’.36 Presiding over this gloom was the emperor, who was living in perpetual terror and was vividly aware – as he confessed to the Swedish Ambassador – that he was ‘insupportable’. By mid-1800 plans for a coup had been conceived by Count Nikita Panin, the nephew of Paul’s tutor. The fine-tuning and organisation were undertaken by the military governor of the St Petersburg district, Count Peter von der Pahlen, who persuaded the reluctant grand duke, Alexander, to agree to the ousting of his father. There was no talk of regicide, but the composition of the band chosen to penetrate the Mikhailovsky Palace, and the manner in which they prepared for the attack, suggested that matters would get out of hand. On 11 March 1801, a group of disgruntled soldiers – led by officers of t
he Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards, along with senators eager for change – met for supper. Their enthusiasm in toasting the man who was soon to rule over them resulted in inevitable inebriation. Alexander, meanwhile, was dining with his father and a small group of relations and courtiers, in the supposed safety of the Mikhailovsky Palace.37
Pahlen covered the main entrance and surrounded the stronghold with soldiers. The last of Catherine’s three great favourites, Platon Zubov, along with his mighty younger brother, Nicholas, and General von Bennigsen snuck in through a back entrance and attempted to negotiate the labyrinth of passages designed to bewilder intruders. They overcame sentries manning interior guard posts, and found and forced their way into Paul’s apartment. The emperor attempted to hide behind a screen, but – as in almost any farce – his ankles gave him away. Von Bennigsen and Zubov were placing Paul under arrest when a group of about eight rowdy soldiers burst into the room and – thinking the tsar was putting up a fight – set upon him. Paul’s jaw was smashed against a marble table and a pair of large hands closed around his throat.
The tsar was dead, and few Russians shed a tear. When it was announced that Paul had died of an ‘apoplectic stroke’, spontaneous celebrations erupted throughout the capital. As suddenly as St Petersburg had been converted into an armed camp, it reverted with jubilation into an easy, elegant and urbane capital. Absurd dress codes were dropped, the police presence diminished and a great number of people who had been arrested were released. Furnishings and paintings were rescued from that ‘monstrous mass of red rock’, the Mikhailovsky Palace, so that they would not decay in its deadly atmosphere.38 The new emperor moved back to the airiness of the Winter Palace. But in that very moment in which the city regained its brilliance – with candles of thanksgiving burning brightly in every window – patricide compounded with regicide in Alexander’s perception of the recent coup, and his concern about his unnatural complicity in the plot would cast a shadow over his reign.39
Four years later, in 1805, a student of Benjamin West arrived in St Petersburg as historical painter to the Russian court. Robert Ker Porter found a capital in which almost every joy was beset with difficulty and annoyance. Kronstadt, where he disembarked, was in its habitual state of neglect. Attempting to climb the ‘straggling staircases’ leading to the customs and immigration offices, he found them ‘obstructed by heaps of rubbish, bricks and mortar’. A more splendid welcome was offered by the orange-sashed, blue-tunicked boatmen who oared him into the city, low-toned Russian folk songs sounding from beneath their ‘well-curled mustachios’.40
Upon arrival, Porter beheld what another contemporary visitor famously called ‘a city of columns’, with buildings placed in clear geometrical patterns. That visitor – Theodor von Faber – provided a compliment and update to the thorough study made by Heinrich von Storch towards the end of St Petersburg’s first century. In 1794, Storch estimated that a family of five people with five servants and a carriage-and-pair, living in a comfortable part of the capital, could exist on 3,500 roubles per annum. By 1805, that had risen to 6,000 roubles, and by the end of the decade ‘a very mediocre household’ would spend 10,000 roubles a year.41 Storch caustically suggested that the work of three Russian servants was easily performed by one maid in Germany, although, in St Petersburg, serfs were legion.42 Casanova claimed that there was no ‘better servant in the world than a Russian’, who ‘works without ceasing, sleeps in front of the door of his master’s bedroom to be always ready to fulfil his orders, never answering his reproaches, incapable of theft’.43 And yet, ‘after drinking a little too much he becomes a perfect monster’. The servant hired by Theodor von Faber during his stay certainly indulged. One night, von Faber returned to his lodgings where his soused servant, Fedor, failed to recognise him. Falling against his master repeatedly as he tried to help him undress, Fedor was locked up in his room and threatened with dismissal. The following morning, von Faber was awoken by his apologetic serf, who presented breakfast faultlessly laid out on the table. Thinking Fedor had forced the lock in order to escape from his room, von Faber was furious. After further explanations – it had been Fedor’s birthday, he’d drunk with a friend, and he hadn’t forced the lock but escaped through the window to perform his duties – von Faber remained adamant. Yet, after musing on the various qualities of Russian servants and on the need for a little pleasure and alcohol in the cold north, von Faber told Fedor that he could stay.44 A few decades later, Lord Redesdale’s coachman would ask his lordship’s leave to get drunk. Redesdale would check his engagement book. If he was free that night, he’d let his coachman go.45
Among the wealthy and fashionable women of St Petersburg there was a growing tendency towards simplification,46 which was visible in the high-wasted dress designs. Beside the sobriety of this French Empire style, native Russian dress appeared both exotic and excessive. The over-made-up wives of well-to-do merchants sported brocade and gold lace47 – to which, in winter, they added velvet capes lined with sable. Among the aristocracy, the display of great swathes of jewels had been replaced by extravagance at the milliners’ – but the wives of merchants still decked themselves with pearls. Petersburg fashion was also coloured by decoratively dressed Cossacks, Bashkirs and Armenians, while the smocks of local peasants resembled those worn in England at the time of Richard II.48 The serfs grew ‘great unmerciful patriarchal beards’, which made the Irish visitor Catherine Wilmot wonder if they had not been born before the Flood. She was fascinated by peasants crossing themselves incessantly. Even when they were floating ‘on timber planks in the river’, she witnessed ‘men bowing with all their might and main . . . their long beards forking in the wind’. As for the servants of the nobility, Catherine was struck by their ‘oddest’ appearance – ‘as if a Turk had been their Father and a Quaker their mother!’49
With Alexander’s accession in 1801, the festivities of each season were celebrated once again. Winter arrived with slivers of ice swirling down the Neva, as the beards that Catherine Wilmot saw blowing in the wind began to glitter white with frost.50 The freeze hardened and thickened. Fir branches marked out carriage tracks across the Neva, along which people drove, oblivious of the great current swirling underneath. Robert Ker Porter found the incessant and rapid movement of so many colourful carriages and sledges skidding about, against the blinding dazzle of the ice, painful to his artist’s eye. Yet he was thrilled when the early arrival of winter animated the city and transformed its trees into clumps of white coral dusted with diamonds. The freeze thawed the hearts of the Russians who sung, laughed and wrestled – ‘tumbling about like great bears’ on the snow. The ever-popular ice-hills on the Neva rose to a height of twelve to fifteen metres, which did not prevent the reckless from skating down their vertiginous slopes.51
Approaching Christmas, Porter was invited to a Venetian masquerade at the Winter Palace, where he was able to see and smell 1,500 assorted guests – from members of the court down to the rich merchants and their wives, who appeared like ‘magicians and overgrown fairies clad in glittering robes of shining green’. He spent an hour or so among the ‘steaming’ throng, after which the imperial family made its slow progress through the palace and along with the grateful historical painter to the court – retired from the ‘offensive vapour’. Quarenghi’s theatre in the Hermitage had been converted into a banquet hall to enable them to dine to the harmonies of a hidden orchestra. Such balls were frequent during Christmas and carnival, when hordes of masked revellers crowded the streets and as many as 800 carriages could be seen drawn up outside the Winter Palace.52 Lent was strictly observed and the people prepared ‘for abstinence with extravagance’.53 Porter noted that the extreme cold and ‘mad festivity’ of carnival led to drunkenness and death.54
When the thaw arrived, fragile ice was deliberately broken along the river banks to dissuade pedestrians from trying their luck.55 Roadways marked out across the frozen river held fast the longest, but were eventually swept away by the vast blocks of
ice speeding downriver towards the Gulf, leaving the Neva navigable only by boat once more. John Quincy Adams – who, in 1809, became the first American Minister Plenipotentiary to be recognised by the Russian court – noted that, while his family was breakfasting at about 10 a.m. on 24 April, there was a five-gun salute from the Peter and Paul Fortress, signalling that the river was free. As had been the custom since the city’s earliest days, the governor carried a glass of water to the tsar to mark the occasion.56
With the onset of spring, melting snow flooded the streets and unlucky pedestrians were doomed – as they were in autumn, with its rains and piercing winds – to be splattered and soaked. When Easter arrived, the festivities resumed. Peasants gave one another hard-boiled eggs dyed with logwood, while sugar, glass, gilded wood, porcelain or marble eggs and boxes full of sugar plums were exchanged among the well-to-do. Fairs were set up in St Isaac’s Square with swings and ‘whirligig chairs’57 – a four-seat wooden forerunner of the Big Wheel, propelled by a peasant pushing the back of each chair as it circled down to begin its ascent. Booths were set up for short performances of raucous comedies performed by clowns and local amateurs, and larger temporary wooden theatres holding up to 1,500 spectators were constructed. There were tightrope-walkers and dancers. Sometimes a dromedary clumped around between the dancing bears and monkeys.’58 If the gardens on the small Neva islands were compared with London’s eighteenth-century pleasure gardens at Vauxhall, then these boisterous scenes more closely resembled London’s Bartholomew Fair.
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