The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  After one outburst of rage, Paul apologized to Nelidova: ‘Forgive a man who loves you more than he loves himself.’ Nelidova was trying to save Paul from himself: ‘Sovereigns more than others have to exercise patience and moderation,’ she wrote to him. But the women overreached themselves.

  As an alliance of European powers failed to contain revolutionary France, Paul found himself too short of cash to wage war. Manipulated by a dubious Dutch banker, Maria and Nelidova supported the Kurakins in the creation of a Bank of Assistance for the Nobility, which turned into a scandal from which the brothers made fortunes. Paul blamed the women. When Maria (whose homeland Württemberg had been seized by the French) and Nelidova canvassed Paul to join Austria and Britain against France, Paul had had enough – and Figaro Kutaisov set up his honeytrap.5

  Once Paul noticed his wife Maria whispering to Alexander Kurakin. ‘Madame,’ Paul called out, ‘I see you want to make friends and prepare the role for yourself of Catherine, but you won’t find me a Peter III.’

  In January 1798, Maria gave birth to a fourth son, Michael. But the birth was so dangerous that the doctors ordered her to abstain from sex. ‘The instigator and prime mover of this plot’ was Rostopchin, who hated Kurakin and Nelidova, while Bezborodko was keen to avoid war and keep Maria out of politics.

  While on a visit to Moscow, Paul asked Figaro why he was so loved there but not in Petersburg.

  ‘Sire, it happens that here [in Moscow] you are seen as you truly are, good, magnanimous and sensitive,’ explained the barber, ‘while in Petersburg it is said if some grace is extended that it’s the empress or Fräulein Nelidova or the Kurakins who’ve extracted it from you – but if you punish, it is you alone.’

  ‘Thus it’s said I’m governed by those women?’ asked Paul.

  ‘Even so, Sire.’

  At a ball, Kutaisov pointed out Anna Lopukhina.

  ‘Your Majesty, you’ve turned a head’.

  ‘Isn’t she a child?’ murmured Paul.

  Hardly, replied Kutaisov, she was sixteen.

  Paul was infatuated, but Lopukhina, a virgin related to Peter the Great’s first wife, could not be procured like a showgirl. Figaro negotiated with her parents.

  Returning to Pavlovsk in late June, the tsar rejected Maria and Nelidova. ‘On 25 July, the storm broke when the Emperor ordered Monseigneur [Alexander] to tell the Empress never again to interfere in politics,’ but the son took his mother’s side: ‘I see I have lost not only my wife but my son.’

  Paul screamed at Nelidova to get out for ever – then tested Alexander by offering him the crown to hold: ‘It’s amazingly heavy. Here hold it. Judge for yourself.’ Alexander turned pale.

  ‘The emperor exhibited all the symptoms’, wrote Countess Golovina, ‘of a young man of twenty,’ even confiding in his son Alexander: ‘Just fancy how much in love I must be!’ The new mistress, observed Golovina, ‘had a pretty head, pretty eyes, well-marked black eyebrows and black hair, beautiful teeth, an attractive mouth, a little retroussé nose – but a very poor figure, ill made and narrow chested! But she was kind and incapable of doing harm to anyone.’

  Lopukhina resisted the advances of ‘the ugliest man in the empire’ for a long time until, suffocating from the imperial attentions, she ‘burst into tears and begged to be unmolested, confessing her love for Prince Pavel Gagarin’, a young army officer. Paul had the two married at once and congratulated himself on his virtue. But Gagarin ill-treated his tainted wife and, in collusion with Kutaisov, ‘worked up Paul’s evil passions’ so that Lopukhina, now known as Princess Gagarina, succumbed dutifully to the emperor’s seduction.

  Paul sacked the Kurakins and appointed Gagarina’s father, Peter Lopukhin, ex-police chief of Moscow, as procurator-general. But the real winner was Figaro, now raised to count. The emperor’s domestic maestro, ‘despite his crass ignorance’, wrote Golovkin, ‘aspired to be a minister. In the meantime, the ministers consulted him daily.’ Yet Figaro never became arrogant, wrote Sablukov – ‘He was always ready to help people and was never known to injure anyone.’ But only in Russia, thought Czartoryski, could ‘the autocratic wand of Tsarism accomplish this metamorphosis’ of a slave into an aristocrat.

  Paul and Figaro now shared boyish erotic escapades. ‘Middle-sized, a little stout, but alert and quick in his movements, very dark, always smiling with Eastern eyes and a countenance displaying a sensual joviality’, Figaro took as his own mistress the French actress Madame Chevalier, for whom he bought a house next to that of Gagarina. ‘They used to drive together incognito on these expeditions.’

  Paul was ‘so excited’ by his conquest of Gagarina ‘that the poor man was quite beside himself’ and ‘thought he could never be generous enough’. Gagarina received a palace while her complaisant husband was promoted at one point to run the War Collegium. Gagarina’s favourite colour was scarlet. Paul changed the colours of Guards regiments’ uniforms for her* and when he went to visit Gagarina with Kutaisov, his carriage and footmen were all accoutred in crimson. Paul had forbidden waltzes as ‘licentious’, but Gagarina adored waltzing; so, in a classic Pauline reversal, waltzing went from being banned to obligatory. Just as Paul changed mistress and ministry in June 1798, a French general, who had made his name conquering Italy, departed to attack Egypt.6

  On his way, General Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Malta, seat of the Knights of Malta, which outraged their new grand master – Paul himself. This religious-military order had originally been known as the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, whose crusading history appealed to Paul. A suave Italian count and Knight of Malta* arrived in Petersburg to invite Paul to become the Order’s protector and then grand master. He embraced the Order’s rituals with all the excitement of a schoolboy and made Kutaisov its master of the horse. Paul saw himself as the leader not just of Orthodoxy but of all Christendom in a crusade with Austria and Britain against atheistic France, whose conquests he abhorred and whose ideals he feared.

  This new coalition agreed to attack the French in Holland, along the Rhine, in Switzerland and in Italy before invading France itself. Paul signed a treaty with London, but naively placed Russian armies at the disposal of Austria. The timing, however, was perfect: the French government, the Directory, was corrupt and divided. Its best general was in Egypt while Paul’s best general was languishing on his estates. When he renegotiated with the Austrians, they fondly remembered their joint victories against the Ottomans under Suvorov and suggested him as an acceptable commander. Paul recalled him to Petersburg.

  At a ball in February 1799, the sixty-nine-year-old Marshal Suvorov reappeared at court, bathing in Paul’s favour. ‘No contrast could have been more striking’, noted Countess Golovina, ‘than the austere soldier, in the turmoil of a ball, with his white hair and gaunt face, and the Emperor dividing his attentions between Suvorov and a simple girl [Princess Gagarina] whose pretty face would hardly have been noticeable had it not happened to win the favour of the Emperor.’

  Paul ordered two Russian corps to march towards Italy and Switzerland to join up with the Austrians, while another joined the British to attack Holland. On 17 February, Suvorov set off to take command of Austro-Russian forces in Italy, and there he drubbed the French. But the Austrian ministers undermined their Russian allies. Suvorov offered to resign, but Paul, who sent his son Constantine to serve with him, encouraged him to fight on. Paul even challenged General Bonaparte to a duel, with his plump sybaritic Figaro as his second. When Prussia hesitated to join the coalition, Paul published ‘a challenge to any sovereign who differed from him to settle the difference in single combat’, but as Czartoryski joked, ‘Paul would have been in great difficulty if the challenge had been accepted as he was very timid on horseback.’ In August, Suvorov won the Battle of Novi and took northern Italy.

  Yet the Russian and Austrian armies in Switzerland were floundering. Suvorov marched over the Alps, but the Austrians now abandoned their allies. Only Suvorov could have fought his way out. Paul, exaspe
rated by Austria’s betrayals, recalled the marshal.* Meanwhile in Holland the Anglo-Russian expedition was also a debacle, since the British were as inept as the Austrians. Faced with personal insults and military disasters, Paul reversed his entire policy, contemplated war against Britain and decided Bonaparte was his hero.7

  ‘The emperor is literally not in his senses,’ the British ambassador, Charles Whitworth, confided to London. Whitworth’s mistress was the sister of Prince Zubov, the thirty-three-year-old Olga Zherebtsova, who fostered a conspiracy to murder Paul. First she put together Whitworth with the chief champion of the pro-British policy in the Russian government, Count Nikita Panin, nephew of Catherine’s minister. Now that old Bezborodko had died, Paul appointed Rostopchin as president of the Foreign Collegium and postmaster† – but he also made Panin his vice-chancellor. Rostopchin had argued for a new pro-French policy and dismemberment of the Ottoman empire, Panin for a British alliance. Paul had then rudely rejected Panin who decided the tsar was insane and should be murdered. Two other Zubov allies were brought in: Admiral José Ribas, a Latino ruffian who had helped found Odessa, and Count Peter von der Pahlen, new governor-general of Petersburg, who arranged a farcical meeting with the heir to the throne.

  Panin secretly met Alexander and proposed that Paul should allow his son to rule as regent. Both were terrified, Panin nervously gripping a dagger. When Panin wondered aloud if they were being followed, Alexander shrieked. He did not commit to the plan, but nor did he report the conspiracy. Whitworth was recalled when Paul turned against Britain, Ribas died early, and Paul exiled Panin to Moscow. Only Pahlen remained of the conspirators – and he was sent to defend the frontiers.

  Rostopchin, promoted to count, helped Paul prepare for war against Austria and friendship with France. Bonaparte abandoned his army in Egypt and returned to France, where, in November 1799, he seized power as the semi-monarchical first consul. He dynamically restored French fortunes, retaking Italy and in June 1800 defeating the Austrians at Marengo. Paul was now captivated by Bonaparte. ‘I’m full of respect for the First Consul and his military talent,’ he wrote. ‘He acts. He is a man with whom one can do business.’ His infatuation with Napoleon resembled his father’s crush on Frederick the Great, a passion that only intensified when France presented Malta to Grand Master Paul, despite the fact that the island soon fell to the British. Paul recognized the new borders of France and put together a Northern System of Denmark, Sweden and Prussia to act in armed neutrality against Britain.

  Within months, Napoleon and Paul were planning a fantastical scheme to send the French General Masséna with 35,000 men to rendezvous in Astrakhan with a Russian army of 35,000 infantry and 50,000 Cossacks. Together they would cross the Caspian, capture Kandahar, then invade British India.8

  Paul, ‘more suspicious than ever’, now launched what Czartoryski called a ‘reign of terror: all who belonged to the court or came before the emperor were in a state of continual fear. In going to bed, it was quite uncertain whether during the night some policeman would not come with a kibitka [wagon] to drive you off at once to Siberia.’ Paul’s paranoia was justified – but it was also self-fulfilling.

  Paul’s plan for dealing with Alexander (and his brother Constantine) was to burden them with so many duties that the boys would scarcely have time to visit their wives let alone plan a coup. ‘The Grand Dukes’, explained Golovina, ‘were nothing better than corporals: their duties carried absolutely no power.’ ‘Tied as I am to the trivialities of military service,’ complained Alexander, ‘I find myself carrying out the duties of an under-officer.’ Sablukov noticed that ‘both Grand Dukes had a terror of their father. If he looked in the least angry, they would tremble like aspen leaves.’

  Alexander was watched by Baron Arakcheev, a grisly and implacable myrmidon with a ‘convulsively twitching neck, large ears, a big ill-shaped head and sallow face with hollow cheeks, bulging forehead and deep grey eyes’. Nicknamed the ‘Ape in Uniform’, Arakcheev was co-commandant of Petersburg alongside Alexander himself. The emperor gave him the estate of Gruzino – and Zubov’s apartments in the Winter Palace. ‘The terror of everyone’, an incorruptible organizer of ‘superior cleverness, severity and indefatigable vigilance’, he was the opposite of the liberal Alexander.

  Yet the Ape and the angel formed a surprising partnership: when Alexander was expected to present his report at 5 a.m., Arakcheev entered his room with the report completed and got his signature (while Elizabeth hid under the bedclothes) to present to his father. ‘Do me a favour,’ reads a typical note to Arakcheev, ‘and be here when my guard is mounted so they get nothing wrong.’ Alexander needed Arakcheev: ‘Forgive me for troubling you, my friend, but I’m young and badly need your advice.’

  Elizabeth hated Paul. ‘This man is repugnant to me; anyone who displeases His Majesty may expect a coarse rebuke,’ Elizabeth told her mother. ‘Oh mama, it’s painful and frightful to see daily injustices and brutalities. It’s all the same to him if he is loved or loathed provided he’s feared . . . He is hated and feared at least by everyone . . . His humour more changeable than a weathervane.’

  The couple’s relationship with the emperor was not improved when Paul encouraged Alexander to have an affair with the sister of his mistress Gagarina by locking them in a room together. When Alexander had a few moments off parade, he chose his own mistress, sharing Madame Chevalier with Figaro.

  ‘Everything is turned upside down at once,’ he wrote to one of his best friends. ‘Absolute power disrupts everything. It is impossible for me to enumerate all the madness’ in a country that had become ‘a plaything for the insane’. He believed that the ‘army wastes all its time on the parade ground . . . Power is unlimited and exercised perversely. You can judge how I am suffering.’

  Alexander confided in his four best friends, a coterie of liberal aristocrats,* led by Prince Adam Czartoryski, a Polish patriot in Russian service, who was a study in ambiguity. He asked Czartoryski to draft a constitution and a manifesto that denounced ‘the evils of the regime, the blessings of liberty and justice’ and his ‘resolution to abdicate’ after reforming Russia. To complicate matters, Elizabeth fell in love with Czartoryski, though she found Alexander complaisant. When she gave birth to a daughter, the child’s hair was black. Paul rightly suspected that Czartoryski was the father. The Pole narrowly avoided Siberia. Instead Paul appointed him minister to Sardinia.

  Paul sensed danger all around him and started to build a new, more secure palace in Petersburg, the Gothic-style Mikhailovsky Castle. When there was a fire alarm at Pavlovsk, Paul panicked, convinced it was a revolution, and ran for his life, while the hearts of Grand Duchess Elizabeth and her sister-in-law Anna ‘beat with hope that it was something’. The emperor rushed at a group of hussars with sword drawn crying, ‘Get back, you scum!’ He ordered two soldiers to be whipped in front of him – for starting the panic. He treated Alexander as a threat. ‘They are really bad together now,’ reported Elizabeth, and Alexander told his ex-tutor Laharpe: ‘I’ve become the unhappiest being.’9

  Yet at the start of 1800 no conspiracy existed and the throne was guarded by devoted henchmen, Rostopchin as minister and spymaster, Arakcheev, now count and quartermaster-general, as military strongman, and a new procurator-general, Peter Obolyaninov, ex-steward of Gatchina. Yet one by one Paul himself destroyed the very men devoted to his protection and promoted the ones set on his destruction.

  When Arakcheev covered up a theft perpetrated under his brother’s watch, Paul dismissed him. ‘These appointments are a real lottery,’ reflected Alexander, who wrote secretly to the Ape in Uniform: ‘My friend, I don’t need to send renewed assurances of my unshakeable friendship . . . Believe me, it will never change.’ But it took just one man of action to change everything: Pahlen had been sacked twice and reappointed twice to the key post of governor-general of Petersburg. Earlier Paul had dismissed him as governor of Livonia for entertaining Zubov.* But somehow, Pahlen had befriended Kutaisov who
kept advising Paul to reappoint him. After suffering from Paul’s whims so frequently, Pahlen decided the emperor must go. ‘The weak man talks,’ he said. ‘The brave man acts.’ Pahlen cultivated an image of easy-going bonhomie, offering his visitors a glass of champagne, which concealed a vulpine gift for conspiracy – his nickname was ‘Professor of Cunning’.

  Pahlen, as governor-general, had access to Alexander, who was commandant, and he started to probe ‘lightly, vaguely’. Alexander ‘listened but didn’t answer’. When Pahlen told him that Paul must be removed, Alexander said he was ‘resigned to go on suffering’. But in late December or January 1801 Pahlen coaxed the heir into agreeing to a vague plan to be regent or to rule if his father abdicated – but only after extracting ‘the sacred promise that Paul’s life be assured’. Alexander planned to ‘establish his father in the Mikhailovsky Palace’ where ‘he’d have the whole winter garden to walk and ride in’. He decided to add a theatre and riding school ‘so to bring together everything that could have made Emperor Paul’s life happy’.

  ‘I promised,’ recalled Pahlen, ‘but I knew it was impossible – if Paul had not ceased to live, the blood of innocents would soon flood the capital . . . My liaisons with Alexander raised the suspicions of the emperor.’ They cut back their meetings, communicating with unsigned notes immediately destroyed.

  Pahlen sought men who knew how to drown kittens. ‘I needed the Zubovs and Bennigsen,’ a tough German officer exiled by Paul. Understanding Paul’s chivalry, Pahlen appealed to his generosity: should he not recall the Zubovs? Pahlen needed Figaro’s backing and that was simply won. Olga Zherebtsova, the Zubovs’ sister, hinted to the barber that Prince Zubov wished to marry his daughter. On 1 November, Paul pardoned the Zubovs, appointing them to minor jobs but he offered nothing to General Leo Bennigsen, who hated him all the more.