Despite Panin’s security precautions, Pahlen’s plot was soon the talk of the town. Paul even asked Pahlen directly whether a plot against his life existed. ‘Impossible, Sire,’ replied Pahlen, with impressive sang-froid. ‘There could be no conspiracy unless I belonged to it.’ Fiendishly, Pahlen used Paul’s fear against him, persuading the unstable emperor to issue a warrant for the arrest of his charismatic and popular son and heir. It was a trap. The warrant became Paul’s suicide note, forcing the hands of Alexander’s allies into action.
On the night of 3 March 1801 Nikolai Zubov – brother of the exiled favourite Platon – threw a dinner for 120 conspirators. They ate off gold plate. Zubov stood to solemnly announce that the Tsarevich Alexander had been informed of the arrest warrant and had consequently approved the overthrow of his father. A general toast was drunk. The same evening Paul himself dined with General Mikhail Kutuzov and members of the royal family, including Alexander himself. Conversation was, understandably from Alexander’s point of view, more than usually strained. The Tsarevich complained of illness and retired early while Paul, in a chilling premonition of his death later that night, looked in the mirror as he left the dining room and remarked, ‘I see my neck, wrung.’
Pahlen, who had been waiting with Alexander for the Tsar to go to bed, rushed from Paul’s grim neo-Gothic Mikhailovsky Palace to Zubov’s house to report that the time to strike had come. The dinner party broke up into two groups, one under Pahlen, which headed for the Mikhailovsky’s main gates, another under Levin August von Bennigsen and Nikolai Zubov, which entered though a side entrance. Ten of the conspirators climbed the seventy-four spiral stairs to the imperial bedroom and forced the door.
They found Paul trying to hide behind a fire screen. The conspirators attempted to ‘force him to abdicate’, according to Bennigsen’s – obviously self-serving – account. Bennigsen claimed that he told the terrified Paul, ‘Remain calm, Your Majesty! This is a matter of your life or death.’ Paul failed to remain calm. A scuffle broke out, and Nikolai Zubov struck Paul on the left temple with a gold tobacco box – the dented box, with a handwritten account of its role on the fateful night carefully folded inside, is now in the Hermitage Museum. Other conspirators piled in and strangled Paul with a silk officer’s sash.
The Guards regiments of the capital at first refused to believe that the Tsar was dead. Two old sergeants had to be taken to the bedchamber to check the beaten corpse. ‘Pavel Petrovich is dead, firmly dead,’ they reported back to their comrades. When Alexander heard the news he burst into tears. ‘Stop being a child and start being a tsar,’ Pahlen snapped at him. As news of Paul’s ‘fatal apoplectic attack’* spread further there was general rejoicing on the streets. By the end of the day, reported Edward Clark, there was not a single bottle of champagne to be found in the shops of St Petersburg.
Footnotes
* Alexander Pushkin purchased a pirated copy, making Catherine the mother of Russian samizdat undergound literature.
* Indeed Catherine designed the world’s first all-in-one romper suit for the baby Alexander.
* Two of Paul’s four sons went on to become tsars – Alexander I and Nicholas I – and two of his five daughters became queens, of the Netherlands and Austria.
* Rezanov had the French translation, dated ‘Paris, Revolutionary Year III’.
* Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin tried to ban foreign-language signs in Moscow in 1996, with similar lack of success. A campaign against foreign words was again mooted by the Russian Duma in 2012, until it was pointed out that this would mean changing the Russian words for Kremlin (a Tatar borrowing), President, Minister, Army, Navy, car and other key concepts.
* Paul was one of only two tsars to ever meet a pope – the other was his son Nicholas I.
* Whose boisterous young sons Moritz and Otto would play an important role in Rezanov’s story as midshipmen on the round-the-world voyage.
* Which Napoleon would sell to the United States in 1803.
* Alas for Napoleon too. In exile in Elba he would claim that if Paul had not been assassinated he would never have made the fatal mistake of invading Russia in 1812.
* This ruthless phrase is often wrongly ascribed to Joseph Stalin – it was in fact Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent, who used Pahlen’s line to describe Stalin’s purges.
* This remained the official cause of death until censorship was partly lifted in 1905.
9
Russia’s East India Company
Our mission, our civilizing mission in Asia . . . a new Russia will be created which shall in time regenerate and resurrect the old one.
Fyodor Dostoevsky1
Having lost two difficult and volatile royal patrons to old age and murder, Rezanov must have felt on safer ground with the third, the twenty-four-year-old Emperor Alexander I. Rezanov had been on good terms with the Tsarevich Alexander since his appointment to the senatorial staff in 1798 and possibly before. To the relief of the court, the young Tsar quickly showed himself temperamentally closer to his grandmother Catherine the Great, who had raised and doted on him, than to his paranoid father.
Alexander had Paul’s killers, including Pahlen and Zubov, quietly exiled, neither rewarded nor punished. Most of the old hands of Paul’s administration were allowed to keep their posts, but Pyotr Obolyaninov, the feared prosecutor-general and author of Paul’s terror, was considered so dangerous to the new regime that the plotters arrested him within hours of the murder. Alexander removed him from his position and reinstated his benign predecessor, Alexander Bekleshev, who was popular with the nobility and another ally of Rezanov. Like his grandmother, who had herself come to power as a result of a noble-led coup in 1763, Alexander understood that the supposedly limitless powers of the Tsar were nothing without the broad support of the aristocracy. Both Alexander’s father and his grandfather Peter III had ignored this principle and had paid with their lives.
Russia may have been the largest empire in the world, but St Petersburg was still a village with the Tsar as its squire. Alexander and his brothers Nicholas and Constantine were intimately connected with the lives and gossip of the capital’s salons and palaces. The two brothers, along with a group of young progressive Anglophile nobles became the new Tsar’s eyes and ears in the capital.* They formed an informal council they jokingly referred to as the Committee for Saving Society. The group met in a suite of rooms on the western side of the Winter Palace that Alexander had had decorated in the fashionable neoclassical style, with round Roman arches and walls painted deep Pompeian red. These impressive and rather pompous interiors survive to this day; the view, across the street to the Admiralty and over the Neva to the Stock Exchange, is also unchanged.
Alexander had been taught the humanitarian principles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by a radical tutor, Frédéric-César de La Harpe, who by the time of his pupil’s coronation was leading a French-backed Jacobin government in his native Switzerland. Catherine the Great had employed La Harpe to teach her young grandson despite her own misgivings about Jacobinism – perhaps she wished the frustrated liberalism of her own youth to be resurrected by a future generation. Alexander now determined to impose a version of La Harpe’s liberal ideas on the empire he had inherited. The committee’s plans were as radical as they were familiar from the reformist days of the young Catherine – the establishment of a constitutional monarchy and the abolition of serfdom. Derzhavin, though something of a free thinker himself in his youth, was shocked by some of the ideas coming from the inexperienced ‘band of Jacobins’ that now surrounded the Tsar.2
For Rezanov and his newly chartered Russian American Company, Alexander’s questing ambition could only be good news. Rezanov had sold the idea of Russian America to Paul by appealing to his paranoia. He now set out to sell the idea again to Alexander, this time appealing to the young man’s ambition. The idea of extending Russian dominion to the mouth of the Amur River and sending Russian ‘tradi
ng ships to Canton, Macao, Batavia, the Philippine and Maram islands with products and productions obtained in America’3 had originally of course been Shelikhov’s. But Shelikhov had failed because his sovereign had been wary of merchant adventurers in general and suspicious of Shelikhov’s tainted reputation in particular. Rezanov had no such problem. He was an insider, an experienced courtier and a nobleman whose motives were – by his own account at least – loftily strategic rather than basely commercial. And his tsar was young, intelligent and zealous about expanding and improving the empire.
The Company’s charter was renewed by the new monarch in the early summer of 1801. The Grand Duke Constantine, Alexander’s younger brother, had been a shareholder since 1799. Now Rezanov, salesman extraordinaire, also persuaded Alexander himself, as well as his wife and brother Nikolai to invest their personal money. With such luminaries at the head of the list of shareholders, and with the Company again claiming to be ‘Under His Imperial Majesty’s Highest Protection’, fashionable St Petersburg flocked to subscribe to Rezanov’s initial public offering of shares.
The Russian American Company had a considerable way to go before it could rival the numbers of ships, men, guns and capital that the British East India Company had built up over its two centuries of trade. By 1801 the EIC was wealthier and more powerful than most European states, ruling 90 million Indians with a standing army of 200,000 men. It controlled trading posts in India, China and Singapore, and dominated world trade in cotton, silk, indigo dye, saltpetre and tea from its headquarters in Leadenhall Street in the City of London.4 But the Russian American Company did have one great competitive advantage against other great nations’ chartered companies of the day: it already possessed, according to its own charter at least, a swathe of American territory to rival India. Paul had granted the RAC a monopoly on all trade and minerals found ‘on the shore of America from 55° latitude [roughly the southern border of modern Alaska] to the Bering Strait and beyond and also on the Aleutian, Kurile and other islands lying in the Northeastern [Pacific] Ocean’. Continental Russian America, not counting the Aleutian Islands, stretched 1,400 miles from its eastern tip (today called Cape Prince of Wales, by Little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait) to its southwestern boundary near Sitka. If laid on top of the continental United States, the territory – which closely corresponds to the modern state of Alaska – would stretch from California to Florida. Moreover, unlike the British in India or China, the Russians did not face organized enemies, only belligerent natives and – if Vancouver was to be believed – indolent Spanish colonists. The Spanish settlements were ‘wide from each other and unprotected in themselves’, Vancouver reported, creating ‘irresistible temptations in the way of strangers to trespass over their boundary.’
Rezanov’s grand design, then, was nothing less than to make Russia the all-powerful master of the whole northern Pacific.5 He proposed the further expansion of Russia along the west coast of America including California, to the Hawaiian Islands and also the island of Sakhalin, north of Japan. He argued for a new naval base at the mouth of the Amur River to guard against Chinese aggression* and proposed a new road connecting Irkutsk to the Pacific.* For Rezanov, the fate of Russian America was nothing less than a litmus test for Russia’s worthiness to succeed in the new nineteenth century. As Rezanov wrote to Count Nikolai Petrovich Rumiantsev, who had recently succeeded Derzhavin as minister of commerce,
‘As decidedly as I am convinced of the success of this proposed undertaking just as positive am I that if its merits are not recognized and embraced in the time of Alexander I we never need expect to reap the potential benefits, missed by not being seized in time. Then it will be evident to the world that the Russians, recognized for initiative and possessed of a faculty for surmounting obstacles – our national traits – must have submitted to circumstances and sunk into inactivity with souls dead to everything meritorious and of moment. In a word, we shall be compared to a worn flint from which wearied hands struggle to strike a spark which, if secured, is impotent – a flint whose original potent fire was not utilized.’
The point was taken. Alexander considered himself a new emperor for a new century and did not share his grandmother’s aversion to merchant monopolies. He was inspired almost immediately with the idea of expanding Russia to the Pacific and beyond, ensuring that no enemies could threaten his empire’s backyard. It was a rare moment when imperial power combined with visionary imagination.
News of the Tsar’s nocturnal discussions over the map table became the talk of St Petersburg. The worried Spanish ambassador, desperate for information about Alexander’s intentions, scattered bribes among Winter Palace servants for scraps of gossip.6 The rumours that he gleaned sped by packet boat back to the gloomy corridors of the Escorial outside Madrid, where courtiers were so alarmed that orders were sent to Mexico City and thence to San Francisco to fortify the settlement’s defences in anticipation of Russian attack. Ripples of Rezanov’s vision were spreading round the world as fast as trade winds and galloping couriers could carry them.
Rezanov, however, was not the only man in St Petersburg with a head full of ideas and high hopes of the new regime. Alexander’s reformist enthusiasms had triggered a stampede of petitions from bright young men from all over Europe who believed their schemes would transform the empire’s commerce, arts and sciences. Rumiantsev’s papers are filled with projects for canals, shipyards, roads, crop rotation, steam-powered mine lifts and swamp-drainage systems.
One of these petitioners was thirty-one-year-old Captain Adam Johann von Krusenstern, known in Russian as Ivan Fyodorovich, the scion of an aristocratic Swedish family which had retained its estates in Estonia after it was ceded to the Russian Empire in 1710. Krusenstern had entered the Russian Naval Academy at Kronstadt in 1785 at the age of fifteen and served under both Chichagov and Mulovsky, the greatest Russian admirals of the age, in action against the Swedes in 1788.
In 1793 Catherine the Great, horrified by news of the execution of Louis XVI of France, had sent Krusenstern and nine other promising young Russian officers to the British Royal Navy to help fight the Jacobins at sea. The young Russians visited America, India and China on British ships and in the process became the best-trained officers in the Russian service.7 On his return to St Petersburg in 1799, Krusenstern penned a treatise on how and why Russian ships and shipbuilders should be dispatched to Kamchatka to build a Pacific fleet as powerful as the Baltic force. But, more practically, Krustenstern suggested that a round-the-world naval expedition could supply the colonies in America and also begin a Russian fur trade between Alaska, Japan and China.
In early 1802 Krusenstern’s proposal caught Rumiantsev’s eye and imagination. He passed it to the minister of the navy, Admiral Nikolai Mordvinov, who also liked the idea. Since the proposed round-the-world voyage focused on resupplying Russian America, Rumiantsev also showed the plans to Rezanov – and made a delicate enquiry as to how much of the vast cost of the proposed expedition the Russian American Company would be willing to meet.
Rezanov took the proposal to the Company directors and browbeat the conservative Buldakov into agreeing to finance the venture.* On 13 July 1802 Rezanov rode to Rumiantsev’s magnificent family mansion on the English Embankment to inform the minister that the Company had approved financing for the bulk of the projected 700,000-ruble cost of the expedition as long as the state lent the Company 250,000 rubles up front. Rumiantsev agreed, and the following month the emperor formally approved the rest of the funding and appointed Krusenstern head of the expedition.
In September Rezanov and Krusenstern met for the first time to discuss the timing of the voyage and the practicalities of bankers’ drafts for the purchase of one of the expedition’s two ships. The Company, as principal backers, had set the departure date for the following June. Already the misunderstanding that was to be the cause of deep rancour between the two men was appearing. To Rezanov, the main purpose of the expedition was ‘the trade of the RAC, at whose ex
pense the vessels were bought, armed and supplied with appropriate cargoes’.8 He believed, therefore, that he was interviewing a captain who would be carrying out the Company’s wishes. Krusenstern, for his part, considered he was serving his tsar and that Rezanov was merely the money man Rumiantsev had lined up to part-finance the naval expedition that he had conceived and would command.
Krusenstern, armed with the RAC’s letters of credit as well as gold from the Treasury, sent Lieutenant Yury Lisiansky, an old comrade from British Royal Navy days, to Hamburg to buy two ships. Russian-built ships of the time were by no means bad, and had acquitted themselves well in the Russo-Swedish war of 1788, but the Baltic shipyards founded by Rezanov’s grandfather General Okunev worked slowly and were famous for theft and corruption. Pressed for time, Krusenstern judged that buying foreign keels would be cheaper and quicker.
Lisiansky, accompanied by Vasiliy Shelikhov, Grigory’s elder brother and a Company naval architect, together toured the shipyards of Hamburg. However Lisiansky professed himself unhappy with the vessels on offer and insisted that he continue on his own to London with the bankers’ drafts. At Gravesend, guided by wily Royal Navy ship agents, Lisiansky inspected various second-hand English frigates. He settled on the 430-ton, 16-gun Leander and the 14-gun, 373-ton Thames.9 He paid £22,000 sterling for the two ships.
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 15