Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace Page 7

  Alexander remained loyal to his father, though at times it took hard nerves to brazen out life in St Petersburg. But from the moment of Suvorov’s disgrace conspiracy was in the air, and by the spring of 1800 it had begun to assume a definite shape.26 Its leaders were Admiral Ribas and Count Nikita Panin, nephew and namesake of one of Paul’s tutors and himself a trusted adviser on foreign affairs. Panin appears to have discussed his plans with the British ambassador, Lord Whitworth, who had never been a friend of Paul or his policy. Arakcheev’s successor as military commandant of the capital, Count Peter von Pahlen, also knew of the plot and sympathized with Panin. It was on Pahlen’s suggestion that Panin met Alexander about the time of Suvorov’s funeral and did his best to persuade him that the hour had come to depose his father. Exactly what was said is not clear; but the Tsarevich gained the impression that Panin intended Paul to be placed under restraint while Alexander himself was proclaimed Regent. If this was indeed Panin’s plan then it was clearly a constitutional device owing more to Whitworth’s recollections of George III’s illness than to Russian experience. Nothing, however, came of the project. Alexander declined to commit himself. Indiscreet behaviour led Whitworth to be sent home to London in June; Panin incurred Paul’s displeasure for giving disagreeable advice on foreign policy and was banished to his estates; and a heart attack removed Admiral Ribas in December. By the end of 1800 there remained of the would-be conspirators in the capital only Pahlen – and the wavering figure of Alexander.

  By now the need to curb Paul’s impetuosity was greater than ever. Foreign policy no less than social conventions had become dependent on personal whim. Consul Bonaparte, Paul believed, was a man he could respect, a soldier who would tame the revolutionary beast in France and impose good order on Europe. In December 1800 and January 1801 the Tsar wrote three personal letters to Bonaparte, proposing a meeting at which they could discuss the prospects for a general peace and ways of putting pressure on the British, whom Paul was now convinced were the greatest menace to a lasting settlement in Europe.27 At the same time Paul imposed an embargo on British trade with Russia and ordered a force of twenty thousand Don Cossacks to set out from Orenburg and advance by way of Khiva and Bokhara to the Indus, where they would form the advance-guard for a projected Franco-Russian invasion of India. The Tsar’s commercial policy was unpopular in the Baltic ports, while the expedition to the Indus was regarded by the army commanders as the height of folly, for there was no hope of supplies in the Central Asian wastes and much of the route beyond Khiva remained unmapped.28 Grand Duke Constantine, not by nature inclined to aphorisms, was heard to remark, ‘My father has declared war on common sense, firmly resolved never to conclude a truce.’29

  In these final months of his life every facet of Paul’s character became grossly exaggerated, as in some hideous caricature. He had always suspected hidden conspiracies among officers he saw talking together. Now his paranoia extended even to his wife and his former mistress, Catherine Nelidova, two women who remained devoted to ‘our dear Emperor’ and who longed to help him.30 He seemed at times to shake at the shadows he had himself conjured up, peering anxiously at his sentries to make certain the Guards had not been changed without his knowledge. On 13 February 1801 Paul took up residence in the Mikhailovsky Palace. There, so he told his new mistress, he felt safe, and he installed her in an apartment immediately beneath his own rooms.31 He had himself supervised the security arrangements – the double doors, the water defences, the drawbridges. The Mikhailovsky would be the Kremlin of St Petersburg. He expected the imperial family and their households to share it with him. How else could he be certain what Alexander and Constantine and Marie Feodorovna were plotting?

  The two Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses moved into their apartments, unenthusiastically, on 5 March. The building was so new that when the stoves were fired the walls steamed with damp. Paul had always been impervious to home comforts but his sons and daughters-in-law, though hardly Sybarites, were certainly not Spartans and there was about the Mikhailovsky an air of austerity which it shared with the best prisons. Elizabeth, however, was not unduly downcast and two days after moving in she sent a hopeful letter back to her mother at Baden. ‘I await the Spring with more impatience than ever’, she wrote, ‘Since our rooms are bounded on one side by a canal and on the other by the Summer Garden, springtime here will be pleasant.’32 But by the time spring came at last, the Grand Ducal suites at the Mikhailovsky were grey with dust-sheets, silent and deserted.

  Murder at the Mikhailovsky (March 1801)

  At the end of February Alexander had a meeting with Count von Pahlen.33 There was no reason why they should not have come together as often as they wished, since they shared responsibility for security in the capital. Yet on this occasion they met discreetly, if not exactly in secret, for Pahlen was again anxious to sound Alexander over the possibility of deposing Paul. But Alexander was not helpful. He was genuinely troubled by the oath of fealty he had sworn in the coronation ceremony and he could not therefore approve any conspiracy which had, as its principal purpose, the abdication of the sovereign. Pahlen, however, persevered and eventually secured from Alexander verbal consent to a plan for placing Paul under restraint and establishing a Regency. The Grand Duke insisted that no harm should come to his father. He thought it would be possible to confine him in one of the Imperial palaces near St Petersburg, much as George III had been at Windsor in 1788–9. Since everything would be done in the Tsar’s name, the conspiracy did not appear to involve any breach of the coronation oath.

  It is incredible that Alexander and Pahlen should ever have thought that Paul, of all people, could be induced to surrender his rights, even temporarily. Probably at heart neither man believed it. Pahlen was too ruthless to care about such niceties while Alexander possessed a strange quality of self-deception which allowed him to foresee half an event but not its consequences. He always lacked the courage to think logically of what he most dreaded. Although Pahlen kept him informed of the progress of the conspiracy, even of its timing, he remained convinced his father’s life would be spared. This error of judgement racked Alexander’s conscience for the remainder of his days.

  Most of Pahlen’s fellow conspirators were recruited from the Guard Regiments, who had always resented Paul’s contemptuous disregard of their traditions. There were others with old scores to settle, favourites from Catherine’s reign like the Zubov brothers, aristocrats like Prince Yashvil and Prince Viazemsky whom Paul had insulted; but the brain behind the conspiracy was the Hanoverian-born General, Levin Bennigsen, a professional soldier who at fifty-five had spent nearly half his life in Russian service. His quarrel with Paul came, not from the heart, but from the intellect: he despaired of a commander-in-chief who could throw himself into such rages of pique; he feared for an empire in which the Autocrat could cut free from foreign alliances on the whim of a moment. The conspirators were men of courage but not of noble ideals. None of their leaders were personal friends of Alexander although they included officers from the Semeonovsky Regiment whom he knew well as he was their Colonel-in-Chief. Several prominent conspirators, notably the Zubovs, Alexander had long detested.

  In the second week of March Paul picked up the scent of the conspiracy. Unexpectedly he challenged Pahlen at their next meeting, even though he had continued to show a blind confidence in the city commandant ever since his appointment eighteen months previously. Pahlen admitted that officers were plotting against the Tsar and claimed that he had penetrated their movement so that, in due course, he would be able to denounce them. ‘Don’t waste time, then!’ Paul screamed at him, ‘Remember that my father was murdered in 1762.’34

  Paul went through the motions of taking Pahlen at his word, but he was alarmed. He regretted the way in which he had banished those two stalwarts from Gatchina days, Arakcheev and Rostopchin. Secretly, on Saturday 21 March, Paul ordered a messenger to ride out to Arakcheev’s estate at Gruzino (eighty miles away) with a note for the General, ‘I ne
ed you: come at once.’ But Pahlen was a good security man. He intercepted the courier, confiscated Paul’s note and confronted the Tsar with it telling him that he assumed it was a forgery intended to embroil Arakcheev in the plot, since it had been despatched without Pahlen’s knowledge. By now the Tsar was too terrified to fly into a rage. He insisted that the messenger be sent on to Gruzino and at the same time made an effort to get a similar note through to Rostopchin.35

  But the knowledge that Paul was seeking to rally support from ‘the men of Gatchina’ precipitated the crisis. On Sunday evening (22 March) Pahlen summoned the principal conspirators to a meeting in the house of Countess Zherebzova, sister of the Zubovs. There it was agreed that a battalion of the Semeonovsky Guards should take over palace duties for the following evening, that General Bennigsen would take six conspirators to the Tsar’s bedroom at midnight, that Paul would then be placed under arrest and conveyed across the river to the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul.

  Alexander does not seem to have been informed that action was imminent until Pahlen visited him at six o’clock on the Monday evening. Once more the Grand Duke was assured that no harm would come to his father and that he would be permitted to live in an Imperial residence within the Petersburg boundaries. Pahlen left Alexander’s apartments and went at once to the home of General Talytzin, commander of the Semeonovsky, where some sixty officers were plied with more wine than was good for them on a cold night. One of the older conspirators, more sober than the others, pertinently asked the question which Alexander had always ignored: what would happen if the Tsar offered resistance? ‘Gentlemen,’ Pahlen replied calmly, ‘you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.’36 It was an ominous remark, difficult to reconcile with his assurance to Alexander.

  Meanwhile, in the Mikhailovsky, Paul had seventeen guests to dinner that night.37 Both his elder sons and their wives were present and so was his fourteen-year-old daughter, Marie. The visitors were mainly senior officers from the garrison, the most distinguished of them being General Kutuzov, who was accompanied by his wife. Apart from Alexander, no one at table knew what was planned for later that night. Paul, who had been morbidly suspicious all day, was now in a genial mood and was especially pleased with a new porcelain dinner service which depicted views of the Mikhailovsky on every plate and dish. He noticed that Alexander had little appetite and suggested he should see his doctor, a Scots physician, James Wylie. But when the meal was over the officer of the Guard brought Paul the regulation nightly report and at once the Tsar’s guests saw him turn purple with anger. For the Guard duties were being carried out, not by his regular bodyguard, but by the Semeonovsky Regiment whose officers he held to be crypto-Jacobins. Pahlen, he insisted, should have known better than to replace his men by the Semeonovsky. The dinner party, not surprisingly, broke up early. Alexander, pleading indigestion, retired to his apartment facing the Summer Garden. Paul went upstairs to his own suite of five rooms, diagonally opposite to his eldest son’s across the courtyard. Every door was locked, including the one which communicated with Marie Feodorovna’s apartments. Two personal valets remained on guard in an ante-chamber, looking impressively alert in full Hussar uniform.

  There are several accounts of what happened that night, some of them in marked contradiction to others.38 It was bitterly cold, a strong wind sending scurries of sleet through streets lined with snow which had begun to melt by day but was now once more frozen. By eleven o’clock the city was deserted. An officer of the Preobrazhensky Guards admitted the conspirators to the outer courtyard. Pahlen headed at once for Alexander’s rooms, although he moved quietly and made no attempt to wake the Grand Duke. Bennigsen led his group, swollen to eighteen officers directly to the Tsar’s apartment. The two valets were overcome, the door broken down, and the bedroom entered. A single candle was burning but there was, at first, no sign of the Tsar. Bennigsen, however, holding the candle above his head, saw Paul crouching in terror behind a screen. ‘Sire,’ he declared, ‘you have ceased to reign and we are arresting you on the orders of the Emperor Alexander.’39 As if uncertain whether this was reality or nightmare, Paul remained silent. Then he began to argue; but the officers, heavily fortified with drink, were in no mood for talk. There was a confused scuffle and Paul cried out for help. Nicholas Zubov, whom Paul had wrongly thought to be the herald of disaster at Gatchina on the eve of his accession, picked up a heavy snuff box and struck Paul violently on the left temple. When he fell to the ground one of the other conspirators seized a silk scarf and began to strangle him, and yet another officer held a malachite paperweight against his windpipe until he stopped breathing. No one could be certain who actually murdered him. It was some minutes short of one o’clock in the morning of 12 March by the Russian calendar, 24 March 1801 by the Gregorian calendar of western Europe.

  Pahlen woke Alexander with the news that his father was dead. He told him that the threat of detention had thrown Paul into an apoplectic fit, from which he never recovered. Alexander was not deceived. The new Autocrat of All the Russias collapsed with grief. ‘I cannot go on with it’, he sobbed, ‘I have no strength to reign. Let someone else take over from me’, he declared, resting his head on Elizabeth’s shoulder.40 But she, though startled by the news, remained magnificently resolute. She begged her husband to steel his nerves, to show himself to the troops so as to prevent further mischief. At last, reluctantly and hardly able to move his legs for shock, he agreed to leave at once for the Winter Palace and assume his responsibilities as sovereign of the Empire.

  There were still terrible hours ahead of him that day, and often he seemed to walk in a daze, barely conscious of what was going on. He told the troops that his father had died and that he would reign according to the spirit and principles of the Empress Catherine. James Wylie came to the Mikhailovsky Palace and certified that Paul had indeed died from apoplexy, a fiction officially maintained for more than a century. Few believed it even at the time. Marie Feodorovna collapsed in hysterical sobs as soon as she was told of Paul’s death.41 At first she denounced Alexander for conniving at his father’s death and she refused to receive him in her apartments. Momentarily, in her hysteria, she even claimed the throne for herself, insisting that the night’s crime made a mockery of Paul’s coronation and therefore invalidated every pronouncement made on that occasion, including the decree regulating the succession. By noon, however, she was sufficiently recovered to talk sensibly to her eldest son, whose grief convinced her he had not known his father’s life was in danger. Outside, wrote Princess Lieven in later years, ‘a superb sun broke over this great and terrible day … There were shouts of deliverance and of joy.’42 Inside the Winter Palace a young man of twenty-three was stunned into silence, his broad shoulders still shaking with convulsive sobs.

  Alexander’s nerves were shattered. For weeks on end he could bear to dine only with Elizabeth at his table, back in the familiar surrounds of the Winter Palace. She believed it was the manner of his father’s death, the sordid scuffling by candlelight, which troubled his mind: ‘His sensitive soul will remain tortured by it for ever’, she wrote to her mother a fortnight later.43 Yet as the months passed into years, with the murderers themselves going unpunished, it became clear that Alexander was haunted, not by a crime he never witnessed, but by the conspiracy of which he had known too much and too little. Until the end of his life there would come, now and again, black days of despair when he was unsure of himself or his purpose; alone with his doubts and reflections, his conscience would begin to turn round upon itself and the Tsar of Russia became a squirrel in a cage, thrown into torment by the shadows of parricide.

  * The Knights of St. John had long possessed a priory in one of the regions of Poland incorporated in Russia by the partitions. On his accession Paul confirmed the rights of the Order within his Empire and even made a personal contribution to the running expenses of the priory. When, in June 1798, Bonaparte occupied Malta itself, the head of the priory offered the Grand Mastership of the whole Or
der of Knights to Paul, even though he was Orthodox and not Catholic in religion. The Tsar accepted the Grand Mastership and demanded that the French evacuate Malta. When they ignored his intervention he authorized a naval squadron to attack the French outposts in the Ionian Islands as a preliminary to general war in the Mediterranean. In the following year Russia joined the Second Coalition.

  The Cracking of the Ice

  A Promise of Reform

  The mood of the people of St Petersburg in that spring of 1801 was a strange compound of mixed emotions. Most of them greeted with relief the accession of a young and handsome Emperor, but their joy was tinged at first with an odd sense of doubt and uncertainty as though they could not entirely accept the fact that the grotesque tyranny of the past four years was ended. Paul met his death on the Tuesday of Passion Week and his embalmed body lay in state at the Mikhailovsky Palace from the following afternoon until the evening of Good Friday: during those nine days more than one hundred thousand men and women – half the population of the capital – filed past the catafalque.1 Few showed signs of sorrow, only of curiosity. They needed to convince themselves that the ruler whom they had learnt to fear was really dead and not spirited off to some distant fortress from which he might one day return to take vengeance on those who hailed liberty with such rash jubilation. Experience had taught them circumspection.

  Yet once certain that Paul’s reign was indeed ended, they slipped easily back into old habits and customs. The weather helped them welcome Alexander’s accession. Springtime came with astonishing rapidity that year, the ice on the Neva cracking and melting rapidly under bright sunshine, a good omen to the superstitious. Although Court etiquette imposed many weeks of mourning on the country, Alexander lifted all excessive restrictions for the traditional revels of Easter Week. People found a simple pleasure in doing what had been forbidden under the austere code of previous months. Nobody bothered any longer over the shape of a hat or the cut of a coat, and the wealthier families were able to hold parties and receptions without first having to seek police permission. Streets previously deserted long before dusk were made lively by onlookers eager to watch the carriages drive up to the Winter Palace or to catch a glimpse of their sovereign as he rode out in the dark blue uniform of the Semeonovsky. Paul had always expected dignitaries summoned to the Court to arrive on foot or, if the weather were bad, in little sledges; and he had ordered the citizens of the capital to prostrate themselves whenever their Tsar and his consort passed by. But Alexander rejected such outward manifestations of authority. He felt no need to make his subjects abase themselves in his presence: they respected him for what he was and for the promise of a new era which his accession held out for them.