Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

by Owen Matthews

  Rezanov played not only on Zubov’s greed, but on the Empress’s fear. Larger matters than the missionaries’ objections to the colonists’ morals and to their own seafood diet were at stake. Interloping foreigners were challenging Russia’s imperial destiny in America; indeed the post that had brought Iosaf’s complaints also brought a batch of disturbing reports from Baranov: Boston traders had been appearing in ever greater numbers, endangering the Russian outposts by selling the natives liquor and gunpowder.* Another plaintive petition from the Aleuts – doubtless organized by the embittered Iosaf – complaining of ill treatment by the colonizers was turned by Rezanov into another argument for his hobby horse: only a chartered company under government supervision could bring the Empress’s justice to these, her newest vassals. Clearly, a race for America’s west coast was afoot, and Russia could lose no time in staking her claims to the land.

  Queen Elizabeth I of England ‘founded the greatness of her country’ on trade, Rezanov wrote. Now the Empress had a chance to make her ‘name of greater exaltation than Elizabeth’s . . . if under Your happy reign Russians will shake off the yoke of foreign nations and reap an abundant harvest from great undertakings.’11 The old Empress finally put her imperial imprimatur on a draft charter for the infant Russian American Company at the end of September 1796. Perhaps she was intrigued by the prospect of becoming a new Elizabeth I. More probably she had been swayed by the argument that foreigners were threatening Russia in her own backyard.

  Demidov was impressed by the aplomb with which Rezanov had handled the family business and pressed his suit at court. ‘Your son-in-law seems not as foolish as you describe him,’ he wrote to Natalia Shelikhova. Rezanov should, counselled Demidov, be ‘more respected at your home, and be endowed with a voice regarding your present situation made difficult by the atmosphere of [rival merchants’] greed’.12 In securing the royal charter, Rezanov had proved to his sceptical ruble-counting mother-in-law that he was not merely a feckless aristocrat but a negotiator of the highest calibre.

  But Rezanov’s triumph was short-lived. On 6 November 1796 Catherine the Great, who had been on the throne of Russia since Rezanov’s infancy, the patroness of all his political allies and the cornerstone of all St Petersburg’s vast edifice of appointments, favours, alliances and political pacts, collapsed from a massive stroke on her commode at Tsarskoye Selo.13 Zubov rushed to her bedside and found his royal mistress unconscious. As she lay dying he busied himself with burning the Empress’s private papers and planning a hasty withdrawal from Russian politics.

  Footnotes

  * In fact Grigory Grigoriyevich Shelikhov also died at the age of four, in 1799.

  * Two years before, George Vancouver’s British expedition, dispatched in the aftermath of the Nootka Crisis, had also appeared, mapping the north-west coast of the Americas. The Spanish, too, in a small fleet led by Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés-y-Flores had been spotted nosing around the north Pacific.

  8

  Tsar Paul

  He pretends to be a Prussian king, and every Wednesday holds manoeuvres.

  Count Fyodor Rostopchin.1

  Catherine was succeeded by her dwarfish, emotionally crippled and mentally unstable son, the Grand Duke Paul, who hated his mother with a consuming passion. This dislike was not entirely irrational: Catherine had deposed Paul’s father, Peter III, who was subsequently strangled by her supporters. Catherine, for her part, reciprocated her pug-nosed little boy’s dislike. In her memoirs, widely circulated in secret in court circles after her death,* Catherine hinted strongly that her first lover Sergei Saltykov was Paul’s real father, despite a striking resemblance between Paul and Peter in both appearance and personality. She also labelled Paul ‘weak’ and ‘dull-witted’. Nor did she confine her opinions to the pages of her memoirs. ‘Monsieur and Madame are persons of the second sort,’2 she wrote to a friend of Paul and his wife. Paul’s paranoia grew into full-fledged mania during the 1790s, as the Tsarevich feared that his mother was trying to kill him and publicly accused the Empress of having glass mixed into his food.

  As soon as Paul heard the news of his mother’s stroke he rushed to Tsarskoye Selo and started rifling through her personal papers. Zubov had already wisely vacated the premises. The veteran diplomat Count Bezborodko claimed that Paul found a sealed packet in Catherine’s papers marked, ‘To be opened in Council after my death’. Russian monarchs, by order of Peter the Great, had the right to choose their successor, and Paul had long feared that his mother would pass him over in favour of his own eldest son Alexander, on whom the old Empress doted.* Catherine certainly considered this possibility and even discussed it with her advisers in 1794. But by the time of her death Alexander was only nineteen years old, still a little young to rule, and it is unlikely that Catherine would have left such a dramatic change of succession to a single piece of paper. In any case, Paul tossed the Empress’s last testament on her study fire.

  Cruel wits at court called Paul the Russian Hamlet. Like Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, Catherine had lived with the murderer of her royal husband and marginalized her troubled and introspective son. Paul was forty-two years old when he finally succeeded his domineering mother, making him the oldest tsarevich in Russian history. A dozen years earlier Paul was already lamenting, ‘I am already thirty and have nothing to do.’ When his children were born Catherine took them away to raise them herself, just as the Empress Elizabeth had taken away Catherine’s own children within days of their birth.*

  Deliberately excluded from government by the Empress, Paul made his Palace of Gatchina a microcosm of the empire he would one day inherit. Paul’s residence was itself a kind of cruel joke on Catherine’s part: it had belonged to her lover Grigory Orlov, whose brother Alexei had killed Peter III, and was given to Paul after Orlov’s death. Paul’s first petty act of revenge was on Orlov’s palace. He ordered the pretty French parterre torn up and replaced with a raked red-gravel parade ground. In place of garden pavilions he built barracks for a small army he dressed in Prussian uniforms and drilled mercilessly. He also had a 150-yard long escape tunnel built in case of attack by assassins sent by his mother. Catherine, so judicious and wise in her dealings with her advisers and correspondents, had bred a monster of a son.

  Paul’s boredom had fuelled a paranoia that was to destroy his reign after only four years, four months and four days. One of his first acts on acceding to the throne was to avenge himself on his mother’s favourites. He ordered the mausoleum which contained the remains of Potemkin smashed and the prince’s bones dug up and scattered. This was taken as a strong hint by Zubov, who fled the capital, though in the end he managed to escape the worst of Paul’s wrath and was simply made to resign his offices and exiled to his estates in Lithuania but allowed to keep his wealth and jewels.

  The Orlovs, as represented by Grigory’s last surviving brother Alexei, were almost as lucky. Paul ordered his father Peter III exhumed from the tomb in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery where he had been buried thirty-four years before after the ‘fatal attack of haemorrhoids’ that remained the official explanation for the late tsar’s death. Peter’s bones, along with the boots and gloves recovered from the coffin, were conveyed in solemn procession to the imperial crypt at the Peter and Paul Fortress. Alexei Orlov was made to walk behind the coffin carrying Peter’s crown. That night, on Paul’s orders, Orlov also stood vigil with another of Peter’s murderers, Catherine’s former court marshal, Prince Baratinsky. Peter’s killers were thus humiliated but hardly punished. Paul’s reign began, as it would continue, with a display of both vindictiveness and weakness.

  Paul’s guiding principle was to systematically reverse every policy of his mother and ruin the men she had raised. He rejected Russia’s alliance with the Austrian Emperor Franz II on the grounds that he was the nephew of his mother’s old friend, the Emperor Joseph II. Despite his passionate hatred of Jacobinism, he ordered that Catherine’s most radical critic, Rezanov’s old colleague Alexander
Radishchev, be returned from his Siberian exile. Paul revived the medieval tradition of full prostration before the Tsar, which his mother had scrapped as un-European, and banned his subjects from travelling without special passports.

  This petulant destruction of Catherine’s legacy boded ill for the fledgling Russian American Company, pet project of the fallen Zubov. After spending so much effort on getting Zubov to back the scheme, Demidov and Rezanov now had to back-pedal as hard as possible to distance themselves from the disgraced favourite. They were not alone in doing so. Derzhavin, wily old courtier that he was, quickly ingratiated himself with the new regime by writing one of his epic odes in praise of the new Tsar. Catherine had appointed Derzhavin to the Senate after firing him as her secretary of petitions in 1793; now he made himself useful by drafting a new bankruptcy law. Paul wisely decided that the irrepressible Derzhavin was too valuable and experienced an administrator to lose and appointed him head of the chancellery of the Imperial Council, with a diamond tobacco box to seal his successful transition into Paul’s favour.

  Once again Rezanov rode Derzhavin’s ascending coat-tails. On Derzhavin’s recommendation, Rezanov was appointed procurator of the First Department of the Senate. Russia’s Senate was not a constituent part of a parliament – unlike, for instance, the Senate of the fledging United States of America or Britain’s House of Lords. Rather, it functioned as the empire’s highest court and was the body that controlled Russia’s bureaucracy. Paul distrusted it as a stronghold of Catherine’s appointees but evidently decided that dismantling the Senate would be more trouble than it was worth. So while it was not as powerful as the court, the Senate was nonetheless an important centre of patronage and power. It is an impressive testament to Rezanov’s diplomatic skills that after only six months in the political wilderness he had gained such a promising position. He was now able to renew his efforts to hitch the Company’s fortunes to the empire’s.

  By 1798 Rezanov had acquired a new weapon in his arsenal of persuasion: a newly printed three-volume copy of Captain George Vancouver’s A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean.* Paul may have disdained all projects embraced by his mother on principle, but the published opinions of a foreigner, and an Englishman to boot, certainly pricked his interest. Rezanov was himself so impressed by Vancouver’s strategic vision that he quoted it often in his later letters. The west coast of America, Vancouver argued, was a prize waiting to be taken from the lazy Spaniards by a vigorous maritime nation – meaning his native England. But his arguments applied just as well to Russia. ‘The Spaniards . . . have only cleared the way for the ambitious enterprizers of those maritime powers who, in the avidity of commercial pursuits, may seek to be benefitted by the advantages which the fertile soil of New Albion [California] seems calculated to afford,’3 wrote Vancouver, author of some of the most convoluted prose of the eighteenth century. The Spanish had inexplicably neglected it, but ‘the prosecution of a well-conducted trade between this coast and China, India and Japan [could] become an object of serious and important consideration to that nation which shall be inclined to reap the advantages of such a commerce’.4

  Thanks to the patronage of Derzhavin, now heading the Ministry of Commerce, Rezanov was senior enough in the administration to make these arguments to Paul in person. America’s Pacific coast was a jewel to be taken, Rezanov told the emperor, and the English were clearly planning to do so. An English settlement planned by Vancouver at Nootka Sound in Alaska would be, as Rezanov later wrote, ‘a dagger held to the throat of the Russian East’.5 It was an image judiciously chosen to appeal to Paul’s assassin-obsessed mind. The colonization of America was, in Rezanov’s analysis, an urgent issue of Russian national security. Finally, in what was perhaps his clinching argument, Rezanov reminded Paul that his mother had always been opposed to granting commercial monopolies – indeed the version of the charter that she had signed stopped short of granting such a monopoly. Rezanov knew his man. If Catherine had been against it, Paul would be bound to consider it a capital idea.

  Rezanov’s persuasive arguments planted the seed firmly in Paul’s mind. In February 1798 Paul demonstrated his favour towards the Company by conferring noble rank on Natalia Shelikhova and her children, with the right to engage in trade. Rezanov had been just in time. Just two months after the Shelikhovs’ ennoblement, a wild-eyed monk with a pair of Aleut natives in tow arrived in St Petersburg bearing fresh tales of drunkenness and cruelty from the American colony. This was Father Makarii, one of the unfortunate group of divines Shelikhov had dispatched in 1794. Like Sergeant Brityukov a decade earlier, Makarii had found an eager audience of jealous merchants in Irkutsk to sponsor any lurid tales likely to damage the Shelikhov-Golikov Company. These merchants’ allies in St Petersburg ensured that the Tsar personally received Makarii and the Aleuts and heard their tale of woe. But Paul, by now firmly convinced of the strategic importance of the American colonies, was unmoved. He berated Makarii for leaving his post without his superiors’ permission and sent the whistle-blowers away with only a gold coin each to buy themselves new clothes.

  Tales of disorder and abuse had made Catherine wary of granting the merchant adventurers any government-like powers. Makarii’s visit had the opposite effect on Paul. On 4 June he sent a ukaz to the governor of Irkutsk charging him ‘to give strict orders to protect the inhabitants of the Islands from future oppression’, the usual hypocritical bluster. But, crucially, he also stipulated that the colonists’ affairs must be ‘in accord with the interests of the State’. 6 Paul, as Rezanov had hoped and envisioned, was starting to consider the Company an extension of the Russian crown. And yet Paul did not sign the renewed Company charter that Rezanov so badly needed. The obstacle was Prince Pyotr Lopukhin, father of Paul’s mistress Anna Lopukhina.

  Anna had caught the Tsar’s eye at a Moscow ball in 1796. Lopukhin’s allies, noticing the attraction, told Paul that the girl was so in love with him that she was on the verge of suicide. Despite an attempt by Paul’s wife Maria Feodorovna – born Sophie Dorothea, Duchess of Württemberg – to prevent the lovesick Anna being brought to St Petersburg, a passionate affair ensued. Lopukhina’s father was, exactly as he had calculated, duly showered with honours. Paul made Lopukhin a prince, with the title His Serene Highness, and appointed him procurator-general of the Senate – and therefore Rezanov’s immediate superior. Lopukhin had always disliked Zubov, who had with characteristic arrogance cruelly mocked his daughter’s homely looks. This dislike extended to Zubov’s old cronies, which included Rezanov and Derzhavin.

  Despite Lopukhin’s smouldering hostility, Rezanov buckled down to everyday Senate business. He busied himself drafting new laws on land and factories, for which he was given the Order of St Anne second class, which brought with it a modest 200-ruble-a-year pension. But Rezanov, who had learned his court politics at the knee of Derzhavin, was at the same time plotting a coup against Lopukhin. They just had to wait until Paul’s ardour for Lopukhin’s ugly daughter faded.

  Anna Lopukhina’s relationship with the irascible Tsar indeed deteriorated quickly. After less than a year as Paul’s official mistress she asked for, and received, permission to marry her childhood friend Prince Pyotr Gagarin. With the end of the affair came the end of Pyotr Lopukhin’s mayfly political career. On 4 July 1799 Commerce Minister Derzhavin recommended to Paul that he sign the charter of the new Russian American Company at a meeting of the Imperial Council. Three days later Lopukhin was relieved of his post in favour of Rezanov’s ally General Alexander Bekleshev, former governor of Riga. On the following day, 8 July 1799, the charter was finally signed. It was Rezanov’s thirty-fifth birthday. The Tsar’s present to him was America.

  The terms of the charter were more generous than anything Shelikhov had ever dared to ask for. The new company was ‘Under His Majesty’s Special Protection’, meaning that it could not go bankrupt. Moreover, the state guaranteed its military security, in theory at least. ‘All military officers of Our country as well as Ou
r naval officers are to provide support wherever the Company may request it to do its business,’ read the charter. And lest there be any doubt as to the backing of the state, the Company’s official standard was to be the Russian imperial eagle on a tricolour background. Better still, the emperor himself became a shareholder with twenty shares with a face value of 10,000 rubles. The Tsarina Maria and Paul’s younger son Constantine each bought two 500-ruble shares. The lion’s share of the new company’s capital, though, went to the Shelikhov family, who between them held an impressive 935,700 rubles’ worth of stock. Four directors were appointed, including Rezanov’s brother-in-law Buldakov and two former Irkutsk rivals-turned-partners, the brothers Mylnikov. Rezanov himself, as a government official, could not be a director, though he was by now the acknowledged de facto head of the Company. Officially he appeared on the books as the Company’s ‘High Representative in the Capital’.

  On 16 September 1799 the new Russian American Company held its first board meeting at which its headquarters were officially transferred from Irkutsk to St Petersburg – symbolically, from the world of merchants to that of courtiers. Business was also booming. In October 1798 James Shields’ Alaska-built brig the Phoenix had landed a bumper harvest of furs in Okhotsk which had fetched over a million rubles in the markets of Kiakhta and St Petersburg.7

  ‘Please persuade Mother [Natalia Shelikhova] to be gracious to the Company’s directors,’ Rezanov wrote to Buldakov on 30 October 1799. ‘Make sure to provide the directors with money. Do not forget about me either. But I am asking that they be provided with money first of all. Please forgive them. They did not have opportunities such as we did. You invested your money in your business, and I bought a village. So we have to thank God, and Mother.’ 8