Secret Lives of the Tsars (20 page)

The heir to the throne appeared to be the only one at court oblivious to his wife’s infidelity. But any thought Catherine may have had in squelching the affair evaporated when Natalia became pregnant. She was carrying the future sovereign, even if the child may not have been Paul’s. In the end, it didn’t matter, as Natalia died while delivering a stillborn son. Her cuckolded husband went mad with grief, smashing the furniture in his apartments and threatening to hurl himself out a window. He even refused to have Natalia buried because he believed she might still be alive.

The empress finally put an end to this nonsense when she told her son the cold truth about his dead spouse and presented as proof the love letters from Razumovsky that she found in Natalia’s desk. Thus, having crushed Paul’s sentiments toward his beloved wife, or at least confused them, the empress presented him with the plans she had for a replacement.

“I have wasted no time,” she wrote to Grimm. “At once, I put the irons in the fire to make good the loss, and by so doing I have succeeded in dissipating the deep sorrow that overwhelmed us.”

The German princess Catherine had in mind to sacrifice to her son was sixteen-year-old Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, with Frederick the Great once again serving as matchmaker. Paul was sent off to Berlin to inspect his potential
mate, and, fortunately for his mother, who hoped to strengthen ties with Prussia, he instantly fell for the girl. “I found my intended to be such as I could have dreamed of,” Paul wrote to his mother. “She is tall, shapely, intelligent, quick-witted, and not at all shy.”
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And the fact that Sophia Dorothea came recommended by Frederick only added to her luster, for Paul, like Peter III, idolized the Prussian monarch. King Frederick, on the other hand, was less than impressed by the Russian heir.

“He seemed proud, haughty, and violent, which made those who knew Russia apprehend that he would have no little trouble maintaining himself on the throne,” the king wrote of Paul. “He would have to fear a fate like his unfortunate father.”

On September 26, 1776—less than a year after his first wife’s burial—Paul married Sophia Dorothea, who, after her required conversion to Orthodoxy, was given the name Maria Feodorovna. Catherine the Great adored her new daughter-in-law. “I confess to you that I am infatuated with this charming Princess, but literally infatuated,” the empress wrote to a friend. “She is precisely what one could have wished: the figure of a nymph, a lily-and-rose complexion, the loveliest skin in the world, tall and well built; she is graceful; sweetness, kindness and innocence are reflected in her face.”

And, for once, the empress and her estranged son were in
complete accord—at least when it came to Maria. “She has the art not only of driving out all my melancholy thoughts,” Paul wrote of his new bride, “but even of giving me back the good humor that I had completely lost over these last three unhappy years.” Unfortunately, Maria was not able to drive out the demon that tormented her new husband most: his mother.

Catherine consumed Paul’s thoughts as an evil entity bent on destroying him, just as she had the man he believed to be his father. Yet it was this same enmity that only served to alienate the empress further. More and more she came to see her son as unfit to succeed her, and instead placed all her hopes and ambitions for the future on the next generation. Thus, when Grand Duchess Maria gave birth to a boy, the future Alexander I, in 1777, Catherine immediately swooped in to make the child her own—just as Empress Elizabeth had done to her decades earlier when she delivered Paul.

“I am making a delicious child of him,” Catherine wrote to Grimm with great satisfaction. “It is astonishing that, although he cannot talk yet, at twenty months he knows things that are beyond the grasp of any child at the age of three. Grandma does what she likes with him.”

And Grandma did the same with the next child,
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Constantine, who she dreamed would one day rule over the yet-to-beconquered Byzantine Empire. These little boys were to be the very personification of Russian greatness. Their father, on the other hand, was to be superfluous—merely a sire for the glorious offspring. Alexander “is going to become an
excellentissimo
personage,” the empress declared, “if only the
secondaterie
[Paul] doesn’t hold me back in his progress.”

Rendered impotent as a parent—and in every other official capacity, for that matter—Paul wrote to a friend in frustration, “I am already thirty years old, and I have nothing to do.” The heir’s only real diversion was to pursue his obsession with Prussian-style militarism at his estate of Gatchina, where he maintained an army of two thousand men, and, as one visiting foreign royal noted, “distinguished [himself] by incomprehensible strangeness and foolishness.” Given his disposition, there were many who feared the time when this vile-tempered, paranoid drillmaster’s domain would extend beyond the borders of his fortified estate and consume all of Russia. “Woe to his friends, his enemies, his allies and his subjects!” wrote Prince Charles de Ligne. “He detests his nation.”

Paul’s wife, Maria, though she managed to love him, was nevertheless aware of what was being said about her husband. “There is no one who does not daily remark on the disorder of his faculties,” she confided. And she was right. There was in fact a litany of dire assessments regarding the heir’s character, sanity, and fitness to rule:

—The English ambassador: “[He has an] acrimony of disposition which already renders the Great Duke an Object dreadful to those who look forward to a future reign.”

—The Austrian ambassador: “With a Prince of his character, one cannot count on the stability of his sentiments.”

—The French ambassador: “They are going so far as to say that his mind is deranged.”

—The Swedish ambassador: “Grand Duke Paul continues to behave very badly and to lose ground not only in the minds of the great but in the minds of the people as well.”

Perhaps the most detailed, and frightening, account of Paul’s behavior during this period was provided by Count Feodor Rostopchin, who became the grand duke’s confident—a role to which he was apparently most unwillingly consigned. “Next to dishonor, nothing could be more odious to me than Paul’s good will,” he wrote. “The Grand Duke’s head is filled with phantoms, and he is surrounded by such people that the most honest man among them would deserve to be hanged without trial.” Rostopchin continued:

“It is impossible to observe what the grand prince does without shuddering and pity. [It is] as if he seeks out every means of making himself hated. He is obsessed with the idea that people do not respect him and that they scorn him. Proceeding from that [assumption], he fusses over everything and gives orders indiscriminately.… On Wednesdays, he holds maneuvers, and every day he is present for the changing of the guard and also for punishments, when they take place. The slightest tardiness, the slightest contradiction put him beside himself, and he is inflamed with rage. It is remarkable that he is never aware of his own mistakes and continues to be angry with those he has offended.… He is destroying himself and contriving the means of making himself hated.”

Of course no one was more concerned about Paul’s fitness to wear the Russian crown than the empress herself. “I see into what hands the empire will fall when I am gone,” she once remarked gloomily. Catherine II had long cherished the idea of disinheriting her unworthy son in favor of her hand-raised grandson, Alexander, and it was widely believed that she was prepared to issue a manifesto to that effect at the beginning of 1797. Fate intervened, however, when the empress was felled by a stroke and died in November 1796. Paul immediately ordered his mother’s office sealed, thus ensuring
that if a document barring him from the succession did exist, he had plenty of opportunity to destroy it—just as he would attempt to do with the rest of his despised mother’s legacy. And so began the mad reign of Emperor Paul.

After orchestrating the ghoulish exhumation and reburial of Peter III next to his mother, Paul turned his unsteady gaze toward the Russian empire he now ruled. In a frenzy of legislomania, the emperor began to assert his control over the minutest aspects of his subjects’ lives. A new dress code was instituted, for example, and those who failed to follow it often found themselves under assault by government troops who were known to shred banned clothing while it was still being worn and to confiscate unsanctioned shoes. Women were now legally obliged to prostrate themselves, even in the mud, whenever Paul happened to pass by in his carriage, and houses could only be painted in state-approved colors. Printing presses were shut down, imported books and music banned, and, in deference to the emperor’s abhorrence of the French Revolution, such incendiary words as
citizen
were stricken from the language.

Count Golovkin lamented the woeful state of St. Petersburg under the new regime: “This beautiful capital, in which people used to move about as free as air, which had neither gates nor guards nor customs officers, is transformed into a vast prison surrounded by guard posts; the palace has become the seat of terror, before which one may not pass, even in the absence of the sovereign, without taking off one’s hat; these fine, broad streets have become deserted, the old nobility being unable to go to perform their functions at court without showing police passes seven times over.”

The new emperor’s domestic tyranny coincided with a bizarre foreign policy, which was perhaps best illustrated by one of his more inspired diplomatic overtures. Seeking to resolve all conflicts in Europe once and for all, Paul publicly challenged his fellow monarchs to face one another in a series of duels.

But the emperor was undoubtedly the most capricious when it came to the Russian military, which, fulfilling the dream of Peter III, he reinvented in the style of his idol Frederick the Great—reducing the proud force into what one bitterly called “Prussian monkeys,” and punishing them mercilessly. Any missed goosestep or unpolished button would result in ferocious imperial wrath, and officers were known to carry extra money with them should they suddenly find themselves hauled off to Siberia.

“In general,” one diplomat reported, “the slightest mistake committed by an officer on parade, a small irregularity in saluting … is punished either by transferring the regiment to the provinces … by cashiering it at once from service, or sometimes by reducing it to the rank of simple foot soldiers.… Petersburg has become the domicile of Terror.”

Even the emperor’s family feared him and grew increasingly disturbed by his erratic policies. His son Alexander, whom Catherine the Great dreamed of making her successor, had shown proper deference to his father when the empress died, eschewing any thought of challenging him for the throne. He even appeared at Catherine’s deathbed in the Prussian-style uniform so favored by Paul—a move designed to please. But soon enough the loyal son grew disgruntled.

“Everything has been turned upside down all at once,” Alexander wrote to his former tutor in 1797, “and that has only increased the confusion of affairs, which was already too great.
The military waste almost all their time on parades. In other areas, there is no coherent plan. An order given today will be countermanded a month hence. No remonstrance is ever tolerated until the damage has already been done. In short, to speak plainly, the happiness of the State counts for nothing in the governing of affairs. There is only one absolute power, which does everything without rhyme or reason. It would be impossible to enumerate to you all the mad things that have been done.… My poor country is in an indescribable state: the farmer harassed, commerce obstructed, liberty and personal welfare reduced to nothing. That is the picture of Russia.”

Alexander’s wife, Grand Duchess Elizabeth, had an equally low opinion of her father-in-law, which she expressed in a letter to her mother. “It is always something to have the honor of not seeing the Emperor,” she wrote. “In truth, Mama, I find that man
widerwartig
[disgusting], just to hear him mentioned, and I find his society even more so.… In any case, he doesn’t care if he is loved so long as he is feared, he has said so himself. And his wish is generally fulfilled, he is feared and hated.”

After four years of maniacal rule, Emperor Paul had thoroughly alienated his subjects, many of whom believed him to be actually insane. “The fact is, and I speak it with regret, that the Emperor’s literally not in senses,” the English ambassador reported in 1800. “This truth has been for many years known to those nearest to Him, and I myself had frequent opportunity of observing it. But since He has come to the Throne, his disorder has gradually increased, and now manifests itself in such a manner as to fill everyone with the most obvious alarm.”

To save Russia from its rabid monarch, a band of conspirators
colluded to force his removal. Count Peter Pahlen, governor of St. Petersburg and Paul’s close confidant, headed the group, which also included Catherine the Great’s last lover, Platon Zubov—primed to avenge the humiliation he had endured under Paul—and his brothers. Before they could proceed, however, the plotters needed the support of the emperor’s son and heir, who would take his father’s place on the throne. Though Alexander had previously shuddered at the very idea of participating in an act of such magnitude, now Paul was looming as an increasing threat to him.

On one occasion, while Alexander was reading Voltaire’s tragedy
Brutus
, his father burst into the room, seized the book, and shook with rage as he read the last line, “Rome is free; that is enough.… Let us give thanks to the gods.” Without a word, the emperor left his son’s apartments, returned to his own, and pulled from his library a life of Peter the Great. He then opened the book to the passages detailing the death by torture of the tsar’s disobedient son and had it sent to Alexander with instructions to read the illustrative part. The message was clear, and so with Pahlen’s assurance that his father would not be harmed in the planned coup, merely sent away into honorable retirement, Alexander gave his tacit approval to the scheme. He refused, however, to actually participate in it.