A soldier reported to Paul that Zubov had arrived. Remembering his father, Paul grabbed Maria’s hand: ‘My dear, we’re lost.’ How many Zubovs were there? he asked. ‘Well, we can cope with one!’ Zubov fell to his knees and Paul understood.
On the road to Petersburg, Paul encountered Rostopchin. ‘What a moment for you, Monseigneur,’ Rostopchin said.
‘Wait, my dear, wait,’ replied Paul. ‘God has sustained me for forty-two years’ – and they travelled on together. At 8.30 they arrived at the Winter Palace. Catherine’s panting form lay on a mattress attended by tearful retainers, past and present: the octogenarian Scarface, Bezborodko and Prince Zubov. When the latter asked for a glass of water, no one bothered to fetch it. ‘The empress’, observed Czartoryski, ‘was lifeless, like a machine whose movement has ceased.’
Paul swept through the death chamber with scarcely a glance at his mother to set up headquarters in the inner chamber. There he summoned Zubov, ordering him to surrender all Catherine’s papers. He soon found Scarface’s letter confessing to the murder of his father Peter III and his son Alexander’s refusal of Catherine’s plan to change the succession. Paul summoned Alexander and Constantine.
A gangly, scowling officer in Gatchina uniform passed the dying empress to report to Paul: Alexei Arakcheev, aged twenty-eight, born of poor gentry, known as ‘the Corporal of Gatchina’, was devoted to Paul and a brutal stickler for discipline. When Paul saw that his shirt was stained from the journey, he gave Arakcheev one of his own shirts. He turned to Alexander and, joining his hand to that of Arakcheev, he said, ‘Be friends for ever.’ Then Paul and Maria had an improvised dinner in the corridor outside the death chamber.
Elizabeth spent the night sobbing, until Alexander returned to change into his Prussian uniform. ‘His mother still breathed and the emperor had nothing better to do than make his sons put on uniforms. The pettiness!’ she wrote. ‘When I saw him wearing it I burst into tears.’ Outside, Paul’s courtiers – the coarse Gatchina officers in their outdated Prussian uniforms – were arriving. ‘The grand duke’, wrote Rostopchin, ‘is surrounded by such people that the most honest would deserve to be hanged.’ The courtiers ‘asked in amazement who were these Ostrogoths?’ The ‘Ostrogoths’ were the future.
In the afternoon, Alexander brought his wife to the deathbed. ‘At 5 a.m. the breaths of the empress grew weaker. Several times the doctors thought the last moment had come . . . The rattle was so loud one could hear it in the corridor . . . Blood went to her face, alternately red, then violet in colour.’ Zubov sat alone in a corner: the courtiers, noticed Rostopchin, ‘avoided him like the plague’. Bezborodko is said to have shown Paul the unsigned letter from his wife Maria – and Catherine’s decree removing him from the succession. Bezborodko tore these into shreds and was rewarded for this loyalty.
At 9 p.m., Dr Rogerson announced the last moments: Paul and Maria, Alexander, Constantine and their wives stood on the right, the doctors, Charlotte Lieven, governess of the imperial children, the intimate courtiers and Zubov, Bezborodko and Paul’s man Rostopchin, on the left. Catherine’s breathing ceased at 9.45 p.m., in her sixty-eighth year and the thirty-fifth of her reign. Everyone sobbed. The procurator-general threw open the door and proclaimed the new emperor. Alexander and Elizabeth and the courtiers dropped to their knees. Zubov, ‘his hair wild, his eyes rolling hideously’, according to Elizabeth, ‘wept with horrible grimaces. The poor Zodiac has fallen on hard times.’ Zubov retreated to the house of his sister, expecting the worst, while Empress Maria returned to the death chamber to supervise the body.1
The death of Peter III preyed on Paul’s mind. After the church service, he noticed that old Scarface, exhausted by the long vigil, had gone home. Summoning Rostopchin and another Gatchina henchman, General Nikita Akharov, he said, ‘I know you’re tired but go to Count Orlov’s house and make him take the oath; I don’t want him to forget 29 June.’ He was referring to the overthrow of Peter III in 1762. Awoken at 3 a.m., the startled octogenarian swore allegiance in his nightshirt.*
Next day, 7 November, Paul sported the new Prussian uniform of the Guards. He was accompanied by Alexander and Constantine, who ‘appeared in their new costumes looking like old portraits of German officers walking out of their frames’.
Paul changed everything that was connected to his mother.† Catherine lay in the Great Hall guarded by the Chevalier-Gardes, tears running down their cheeks. When Countess Golovina cried, Arakcheev, ‘the instrument of the emperor’s rigorous severities, gave me a violent push and told me to be quiet’. Elizabeth then ‘came up gently to me and gently squeezed my hand from behind’. But Catherine did not lie alone for long.
On 9 November, Paul announced that his father Peter III and his mother Catherine II would be buried together. ‘My mother having been called to the throne by the voice of the people was too busy to arrange for my father’s last rites,’ he explained sarcastically. ‘I’m just remedying that oversight.’
Eleven days later, Paul attended the exhumation of his father at the Nevsky Monastery. He kissed the shroud. Next he summoned the regicides Orlov-Chesmensky and Bariatinsky to play their roles. Orlov claimed he was too old, but Paul pointed at the crown and shouted: ‘Carry it and march!’ When Bariatinsky’s daughter appealed for a pardon, Paul replied: ‘I too had a father.’
On 1 December Paul followed the cortège on foot down Nevsky Prospect. Bariatinsky led the coffin while Orlov-Chesmensky carried the crown behind it. Peter III lay in state next to Catherine. Orlov-Chesmensky and Bariatinsky were fortunate just to be banished. Catherine and Peter were buried together.2
On 8 November, the Gatchina regiments marched towards the Winter Palace like an invasion of Ostrogoths in the old-fashioned Prussian uniforms. ‘In spite of our grief for the empress, we split our sides laughing’ at the new uniforms, wrote Guards officer Colonel Sablukov. But the Guards were still in their Potemkin uniforms. The emperor ‘bowed, puffed and blew as the guard marched past, shrugged his shoulders to show his displeasure’. Then suddenly ‘the army of Gatchina was approaching’.
Paul ‘galloped off to meet them and returned in raptures with these troops’, wrote Sablukov. ‘What officers! What strange-looking faces! What manners!’ Paul’s Gatchina Guards joined the old Guards. He ordered his adjutant-general Rostopchin to reform and Prussianize the army – starting with the uniforms. He regarded the waxed Prussian plaits as the expression of the ancien régime against the tousled locks of French freedom. ‘Never was there any change of scene at a theatre so sudden and so complete as the change of affairs at the accession of Paul,’ recalled Czartoryski. ‘In less than a day, costumes, manners, occupations, all were altered.’ Anything French, new and fashionable was banned: breeches, stockings, buckled shoes, powdered hair in a queue were all allowed, but trousers, frockcoats, round hats, top boots, laced shoes were banned, on pain of arrest. Scissors were used to cut the tails off the ‘revolutionary’ frockcoats. ‘Nothing was so odious for the upper classes’ as the banning of the frockcoat, recalled the courtier Fyodor Golovkin, putting the nobilities back in their place.
Paul’s gleeful pedantry was directed by the new governor of Petersburg, Akharov, known as ‘the minister of terror’. At the sight of the tsar or his family or just passing a palace, ‘all those seated inside carriages had to step out and make their bow’, recalled Sablukov. If Akharov spotted anyone wearing the ‘liberal’ round hat, they were chased through the streets by adjutants, and if caught, bastinadoed. Spotting a nanny pushing a pram, Paul himself absurdly scolded her for lèse-majesté for not doffing the baby’s bonnet which he then removed: the baby was the future poet Alexander Pushkin. Petersburg, ‘under Catherine the most fashionable metropolis in Europe’ in Sablukov’s view, ‘ceased to look like a modern town, becoming more like a German one two centuries back’.
The ‘chief occupation of each day’ was now the daily military parade, the Wachtparade. The emperor, immaculate in high boots and Prussian uniform, his
bald head bare to the elements and wielding a whip or cane, would be surrounded by the dazzling staff of His Imperial Majesty’s Mobile Military Chancellery and his Suite, with its ninety-three adjutants and aides-de-camp. Here he concentrated power. He promoted his veteran courtiers, Prince Alexei Kurakin, to procurator-general, and his brother Prince Alexander, to vice-chancellor to run foreign policy with Bezborodko. ‘I’m just a soldier, I don’t get involved in administration,’ he boasted, ‘that’s what I pay Kurakin and Bezborodko to do.’ Actually, Paul revelled in power, bursting with pride that a male Romanov was again imperator. Decrees poured out of him – 48,000 just in his first year.
His decisions were then published in the official gazette, where they inspired both fear and ridicule. ‘Paul’s petulance and extravagant strictness and severity made service very unpleasant,’ wrote Colonel Sablukov. When the emperor took a fancy to one of Elizabeth’s maids-of-honour, he inserted this in the Orders of the Day: ‘Thanks to Grand Duke Alexander for having such a pretty maid-of-honour.’ At the parades he asserted his power in remarks worthy of Caligula: ‘Do you know that the only grand seigneur in Russia is the man I am talking to at that instant – and only while I am talking to him?’ He was reversing the compact between the seigneurs and the monarch which had been the foundation of Russian greatness since Tsar Alexei and which had been consolidated by his mother. By such slights, he reminded his entourage that his entire reign was a living imperial coup against the pretensions of these ruling magnates and families. Walking with Prince Repnin he said, ‘Marshal, you see this guard of 400 men? At one word, I could promote every one of them to marshal.’ Paul frequently thumped his chest and declared: ‘Here is the law!’ The tsar revoked the law banning the physical punishment of nobles, a direct challenge to their privileges and pride as a ruling class, based on their right to own and whip their serfs. Soon nobles were being chastised. A staff captain was sentenced to 1,000 strokes; a priest was knouted for owning radical books; an officer had his tongue cut out. Instant sentences of exile were so common that ‘When we mounted guard, we used to put a few hundred roubles in banknotes into our coat pockets so as not to be left penniless if suddenly sent away.’ At one parade, Paul lost his cool completely and ‘struck three officers with his cane’. As we will see, they would not forget the humiliation. Paul actually quoted Caligula’s dictum – ‘Let them hate so long as they fear me.’ They feared him, but they laughed too. And nothing saps authority like laughter.
Behind the military punctilio, this enemy of female power was dominated by women. It was Maria and Paul’s mistress Nelidova who had promoted their allies, the Kurakins. ‘As for the empress,’ wrote Elizabeth, ‘she’s good, incapable of doing wrong, but I can’t bear her abasement before Nelidova, the abominable little passion of the emperor.’ Every wife knows that the best way to save a marriage is to befriend the husband’s mistress. Nelidova, Elizabeth explained to her mother, ‘is the only person who can influence the emperor so the empress makes obeisance to her and thus wins the favour of the emperor’. The emperor persuaded Nelidova to return to court, where she dominated* – along with an even more unlikely potentate: his barber.
The ‘chief arbiter of everything’ was the ‘once Turkish now Christian first valet’ Kutaisov. During the first Ottoman war, Catherine gave Paul a Turkish slaveboy, captured at Kutais in Georgia. Paul stood as godfather when he was converted to Orthodoxy as Ivan Kutaisov and sent him to be trained at Versailles. On his return he served as Paul’s valet de chambre. Kutaisov now became Paul’s confidant, fixer and pimp – ‘he looked like a sort of Figaro’.
Yet ‘Paul was sincerely pious, really benevolent, generous, a lover of truth and hater of falsehood, ever anxious to promote justice,’ wrote Sablukov. He ‘was of a very romantic disposition and delighted in everything chevalresque’; and he sometimes had a sense of humour, even about himself. When he heard that Sablukov drew caricatures, he asked: ‘Have you made mine?’ and ‘laughed heartily’ at the likeness. ‘But these praiseworthy qualities were rendered useless by a total want of moderation, extreme irritability and irrational, impatient expectation of obedience.’
Only one man stood up to him. ‘Sire, there is powder and powder; curls are not cannon, a pigtail is not a bayonet and I’m not a Prussian but a pure-blooded Russian,’ Suvorov told the emperor, who dismissed him with one of his idiosyncratic parade-ground orders: ‘Marshal Suvorov, having declared to His Imperial Highness that since there is no war he had nothing to do, is to remain without service for making such a remark.’ Arakcheev, the Corporal of Gatchina, harassed and exiled Russia’s invincible hero.
‘Never was there a sovereign more terrible in his severity or more liberal when he was in generous mood,’ noted Czartoryski. ‘Amid all that was eccentric and ridiculous, there was an element of seriousness and justice. The Emperor wished to be just.’3
On 18 March 1797, Paul and the family arrived at Catherine’s neo-Gothic Petrovsky Palace outside Moscow, where he insisted on the first of many baise-mains à genoux (hand-kissing on bended knee) for the entire court. At noon on the 28th, the day before Palm Sunday, Paul accompanied by his sons on horseback rode into the Kremlin, with the empress and Elizabeth and Anna following in carriages. Paul so enjoyed this that he rode as slowly as possible: the procession took five hours. ‘Everything was repeated,’ complained his master of ceremonies Count Fyodor Golovkin wearily. ‘The emperor was as excited as a child.’
At 5 a.m. on 5 April, the courtiers gathered for the coronation of the emperor and empress. Ladies were ready at seven and the procession set off at eight. Unusually Paul wore a dalmatique, a vestment like a bishop’s cope, to symbolize the tsar as high priest of Orthodoxy, plus boots, uniform and sword, which Metropolitan Gabriel, archbishop of Novgorod, who was officiating, asked him to remove. Paul obeyed before entering the Dormition Cathedral where the ex-king of Poland, in another blow aimed at Catherine, watched from the balcony. Maria was the first tsarist wife to be crowned with her husband, who placed the crown on her head.
Afterwards, Paul read out the decree, signed by Maria and himself in 1788, that regulated the succession by male primogeniture, starting with his heir Alexander – a sensible plan to avoid the instability that had bedevilled Russia throughout the eighteenth century. Then he promulgated his Family Law, turning the dynasty into a political institution, laying out titles (the heirs to be known as caesareviches), precedence, property, income (run by a Ministry of the Imperial Apanages) and rules for living – no grand duke could marry a commoner.
Afterwards at the Kremlin Palace Paul and Maria received more baise-mains-à-genoux before bestowing promotions and gifts – a total of 82,000 souls.* ‘The ceremony was long but it was followed by a hundred others invented by emperor and master of ceremonies to please him . . . Paul’s passion for ceremonies equalled his passion for the military,’ recalled Golovkin. Paul and Maria, both Germanic sticklers for punctilio, insisted that ‘It was essential that the emperor hear the knee hit the floor and feel the kiss on the hand.’ All ceremonies had to take place in silence in order to check that the kneelings made the sound of a rifle butt; and if anyone chattered, as they used to during Catherine’s reign, Paul shouted: ‘Silence!’ When Elizabeth entwined her tiara with flowers, Empress Maria ripped them off shouting, ‘That’s improper!’ And when the tsar saw that his two sisters-in-law were wearing cloaks, he shrieked, ‘Take off those cloaks and never put them on again!’ Yet ‘when people were not trembling, they rushed into a mad delirious gaiety – never was there so much laughter’, noted Countess Golovina, ‘a sarcastic laugh often changing into a grimace of terror’. The women ‘were dying of fatigue’.
Paul ‘was so angry when the ceremonies came to an end’ that he added an extra four days of them – and even at parades he could not resist wearing his dalmatique, ‘one of the most curious sights imaginable’, mused Golovkin, resembling as it did a bejewelled tea-cosy, combined with high Prussian boots, a tunic and a three-cornered h
at. Amid this compulsive flummery, a sexual intrigue was hatched by the Turkish barber. Knowing that there was no sex with Nelidova, Kutaisov planned to ‘give the monarch a mistress in the full extent of the word’. Selecting a teenaged nubile, Figaro ‘placed her ceaselessly under the nose of His Majesty and it was obvious enough to worry the empress’. Paul soon noticed ‘the lively black eyes’ of Anna Lopukhina.4
In any marriage, one should not underestimate the power of nagging, but in an absolute monarchy that power can be absolute and Paul was harassed by a nagging coalition of wife and mistress.
‘I’d feel happy and relaxed if I was allowed to plead for unfortunates without arousing your rage against me or them,’ Nelidova wrote to Paul, adding in another letter: ‘But you know how you love the nagger?’ Once Paul ‘entered the guardroom in a great hurry as simultaneously a lady’s shoe flew over His Majesty’s head and just missed it’, recalled Colonel Sablukov, who was on duty at the time. Then ‘Mademoiselle Nelidova came out of the corridor, picked up the shoe, put it on’ and left. The next day, Paul confided in Sablukov, ‘My dear, we had a bit of a ruckus yesterday,’ and ordered him to ask Nelidova to dance to the orchestra. ‘Charming, superb, delicious!’ cried the emperor as he watched his Little Monster dance a minuet. Wife and mistress nagged Paul into dismissing the terror of Petersburg, Akharov, but their importuning infuriated him, and he blamed Maria. She appealed to Nelidova to bring Paul back to her. ‘The empress says without you Pavlovsk isn’t beautiful,’ Nelidova told Paul. ‘Her heart is sad at parting from you.’ Paul and Maria often needed Nelidova, as in this joint letter from Gatchina in August 1797: ‘You are our good, our true friend and always will be . . .’ (Maria); ‘Only you are lacking for my happiness . . .’ (Paul).
The Romanovs Page 34