Paul I of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Paul I of Russia ruled the largest empire on earth from 1796 until his assassination in 1801, yet for most of his life he was known simply as the man his mother refused to trust. Catherine the Great kept her son at arm's length for decades, giving her lovers fifty thousand rubles on her birthday while Paul received a cheap watch. She planned to bypass him entirely and leave the throne to his own son, Alexander. She drilled in Prussian-style soldiers at his private estates and argued about military reform in secret documents. Then, on the 17th of November 1796, Catherine suffered a stroke and died without regaining consciousness. In a matter of hours, Paul raced to destroy her will before anyone else could read it. What followed was a five-year reign defined by chivalric obsession, dramatic foreign policy reversals, and a gathering storm of officers who finally decided to act. How does a man shaped by neglect and rivalry become the tsar of Russia? And why did the very officers sworn to serve him drag him from behind his bedroom drapes and strangle him to death?

• 2. Childhood and Paternity

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  Paul was born to Emperor Peter III and his wife, the woman history would remember as Catherine the Great. Catherine was born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, a daughter of a minor German prince who married into the Romanov dynasty. She later engineered a coup to remove her own husband from power, and Peter III died in prison shortly after. Catherine hinted in the first edition of her memoirs, published by Alexander Herzen in 1859, that her lover Sergei Saltykov was Paul's biological father. She later recanted, asserting in the final edition that Peter III was Paul's true father. The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote that while Paul's true paternity was "impossible to know," he did look and behave like Peter.

  The infant Paul was taken almost immediately after birth by Empress Elizabeth, who proved an obsessive but incapable caretaker, never having raised children of her own. Roderick McGrew recorded one specific instance of this neglect: on one occasion the infant heir fell out of his crib and slept the night away unnoticed on the floor. Paul grew up intelligent and good-looking, according to those around him, but sickly. An attack of typhus in 1771 left him with the pug-nosed features that would mark his face in later life. His governor, Nikita Ivanovich Panin, and a succession of tutors oversaw his education. One of those tutors, Poroshin, complained that Paul was always in a hurry, acting and speaking without reflection. Panin's own nephew would eventually become one of Paul's assassins.

• 3. Waiting for the Throne

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  At eighteen, Paul believed, along with his adviser Panin, that he was the rightful tsar of Russia as the only son of Peter III. Panin had taught him that rule by women endangered good leadership. Catherine, fully aware of her son's ambitions and the superiority of his claim to the throne, maneuvered carefully to distract him. She chose a bride for him among the minor princesses of the Holy Roman Empire: Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt, who took the Russian name Natalia Alexeievna. The bride's older sister, Frederika Louisa, was already married to the Crown Prince of Prussia. Wilhelmina and their child both died in childbirth on the 15th of April 1776, three years after the wedding.

  Catherine moved fast. On the 7th of October 1776, less than six months after the death of Paul's first wife and child, Paul married again. The new bride was Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, who received the Russian name Maria Feodorovna. Their first child, Alexander, was born in 1777, and on this occasion the Empress gave Paul the estate of Pavlovsk as a gift. In 1781-1782, Paul and his wife traveled through western Europe. By 1783, Catherine had granted Paul the estate of Gatchina Palace, where he maintained a brigade of soldiers he drilled on the Prussian model. That arrangement was deeply unpopular in Russia, where Prussian military style had few admirers. Paul published a document called Reflections, a thinly veiled dissertation that openly criticized expansionist warfare and called for a more defensive military policy. Catherine received it without enthusiasm. She met secretly with Alexander's tutor, Frédéric-César de La Harpe, to discuss her grandson's future as her successor rather than her son's. By 1787, Catherine appeared to have decided to exclude Paul from succession altogether.

• 4. A Tsar in a Hurry

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  Paul's first act as emperor was not a decree or a proclamation. It was a search. He wanted to find Catherine's will and, if possible, destroy it before it could exclude him from power. These fears may have driven his swift promulgation of what became known as the Pauline Laws, which established strict male-line primogeniture within the House of Romanov. Those rules lasted until the end of the Romanov dynasty and of the Russian Empire itself.

  His treatment of his father's memory was one of the most striking gestures of his early reign. Peter III had been buried without honors in the Annunciation Church at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg upon his death in 1762. Paul ordered the remains transferred to the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, the traditional burial site of the Romanovs. Count Alexei Orlov, then sixty years old, had played a role in deposing Peter III and possibly also in his death. Paul ordered him to walk in the funeral cortege holding the Imperial Crown of Russia as he walked in front of Peter's coffin. Since Peter III had never been crowned, Paul personally performed the coronation ritual on his father's remains. On a monument near St. Michael's Castle, Paul had inscribed in Russian the words: "To the Great-Grandfather from the Great-Grandson," a deliberate echo of Catherine's famous Latin dedication on the Bronze Horseman statue of Peter the Great.

  Paul also reversed many of his mother's policies within his first year of rule. He allowed Alexander Radishchev, Catherine's best-known critic, to return from Siberian exile. He freed Nikolay Novikov from Schlüsselburg fortress and released Tadeusz Kościuszko, though both men were then confined to their own estates under police supervision. He ordered the bones of Grigori Potemkin, his mother's celebrated military commander and lover, dug out of his grave and scattered.

• 5. Chivalry as Policy

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  Paul's view of the Russian nobility was contemptuous. He saw the aristocracy as decadent and corrupt, and he wanted to transform it into a disciplined caste resembling a medieval chivalric order. To those few who matched his ideal of a modern-day knight, including his favourites Mikhail Kutuzov, Aleksey Arakcheyev, and Feodor Rostopchin, he granted more serfs during his five years of rule than Catherine had given to her lovers during her thirty-four years. Seven field marshals and three hundred and thirty-three generals did not meet his standard and lost their positions.

  This chivalric obsession also drew Paul toward the Knights Hospitaller. As a child he had read the histories of the Order and admired what they represented. In 1796, the Order approached him about the Priory of Poland, which had been neglected and paid no revenue for a hundred years, and sat on Russian land. Paul relocated the Priories of Poland to St. Petersburg in January 1797. The knights made him a protector of the Order in August of that same year. When the French occupied Malta in June 1798, Paul was deeply offended. In September, the Priory of St. Petersburg declared that Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim had betrayed the Order by effectively surrendering Malta to Napoleon. A month later, on the 24th of November 1798, the Priory elected Paul Grand Master. The election of an Orthodox sovereign as the head of a Catholic order was controversial. The Holy See and several other priories delayed their approval, creating political friction. But the election gave Paul a personal stake in opposing France that went beyond statecraft.

• 6. War, Alliance, and Reversal

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  Paul entered the Second Coalition against Revolutionary France in 1799, promising sixty thousand men to support Austria in Italy and forty-five thousand men to help Britain in northern Germany and Holland. The Austrian offer to place Alexander Suvorov in overall command of the allied armies in Italy was a significant concession, and under Suvorov's leadership the allies drove the French out of Italy, though at heavy cost. The alliance then fractured. Austria sought territorial gains in Italy rather than the restoration of the Italian monarchies that Paul and Suvorov wanted. The Austrians maneuvered Suvorov's army out of Italy and into Switzerland just as the campaign there was stalling, and the French were able to destroy the army of Alexander Korsakov before Suvorov could reach him. Suvorov fought his way out of Switzerland with heavy losses and blamed the Austrians publicly. Paul formally ended the alliance with Austria in October 1799.

  The British relationship broke apart more slowly. The Anglo-Russian invasion of Holland began well, with a British victory at the Battle of Callantsoog on the 27th of August 1799, but the Russian forces arriving in September faced bad weather, poor coordination, and fierce resistance. The allies signed an armistice in October. Russian troops had suffered three-quarters of total allied losses, and surviving Russian soldiers were sent to the Isle of Wight rather than to Britain, since foreign troops were legally barred from entering Britain. Over the winter of 1799-1800, several events accelerated the break: France released seven thousand Russian prisoners of war that Britain had refused to ransom; Paul grew closer to Denmark-Norway and Sweden over neutral shipping rights; and Paul recalled Britain's ambassador Charles Whitworth in 1800 without explanation.

  In July 1800, the Royal Navy seized a Danish frigate, and Paul closed all British factories in St. Petersburg and impounded British merchantmen and cargo in Russian ports. When Britain captured Malta from France in September 1800 and refused to hand it over to the Knights Hospitaller, Paul seized all British vessels in Russian ports, sent their crews to concentration camps, and took British traders hostage. He then used the Second League of Armed Neutrality, formed with Sweden, Denmark, and Prussia, to block British trade across northern Europe. Britain responded in March 1801 by sending a fleet under Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson to Denmark. Nelson's fleet defeated a Danish fleet off Copenhagen and then sailed toward St. Petersburg, reaching Reval on the 14th of May 1801. By then, Paul was already dead.

• 7. The Assassination

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  Paul had premonitions of assassination. His drive to impose chivalric discipline on the nobility had alienated many of his most trusted advisors. He had also uncovered corruption in the Russian treasury. The conspiracy against him was organized by Peter Ludwig von der Pahlen, Nikita Petrovich Panin, and José de Ribas. It was allegedly financed by Olga Zherebtsova, the sister of the Zubov brothers, using funds from her lover, Charles Whitworth, the British ambassador who had been recalled from Russia the year before.

  De Ribas died in December 1800, which delayed the plan. On the night of the assassination, a band of dismissed officers made their way to the newly completed Saint Michael's Castle, where Paul was staying. The group included General Levin August, Count von Bennigsen, a Hanoverian serving in the Russian army, and General Vladimir Mikhailovich Yashvil, a Georgian. They had been drinking together before they came. They found Paul hiding behind drapes in the corner of his bedroom. The conspirators dragged him to a table and tried to force him to sign his abdication. Paul resisted. Nikolay Zubov struck him with a sword, and then the assassins strangled and trampled him to death. Paul's son Alexander, twenty-three years old, was in the palace at the time of the killing. He had given his consent to the overthrow of his father but had not expected it to end in murder. Zubov announced the accession to Alexander with the words: "Time to grow up! Go and rule!" Alexander I did not punish the assassins. The court physician, James Wylie, declared apoplexy the official cause of death. The Manifesto on the Three-Day Corvee, limiting the labor demands placed on serfs, was one of Paul's reforms that outlasted him, and his laws of succession shaped the Russian throne for more than a century.