Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  Unfortunately Alexander was soon thrown back into an entirely military environment. Immediately after the Moscow coronation, the Tsar set out upon a grand progress through the western provinces of his Empire and he ordered Alexander to accompany him.13 Paul believed, perfectly correctly, that it was essential for the heir to the throne to discover for himself the character of the Russian lands and get away from the artificial constriction of life in the capital. The region through which the Tsar and his party planned to travel had considerable strategic significance. From Moscow, which they left on 14 May, they went first to Smolensk and then entered territories which had belonged to the Polish Kingdom before the partitions of Catherine’s reign. They visited Orsha, Mogilev, Minsk, Vilna, Grodno, Kovno and Mitau before crossing back into Russian Courland (Latvia) at Riga and proceeding to Paul’s summer residence at Pavlovsk by way of Narva. This was the most extensive journey through the Empire which Alexander had as yet undertaken, and it should theoretically have been of considerable educational value.

  It was not. Paul’s obsessive interest in military affairs meant that the expedition became primarily a tour of inspection, and Alexander saw little of the way in which his future subjects lived. All that Paul wished to know was whether or not the army was being drilled and exercised according to his own standards. At Kovno there was a frightful explosion of wrath when it seemed to the Tsar that the Tavrichesky Grenadiers, stationed on the Prussian frontier, had not absorbed the Germanic spirit he was seeking to instil into the older regiments; and Arakcheev was seconded from the Tsarevich’s bodyguard to put the Grenadiers through their paces.14 But for most of the time, both during the journey through the western provinces and back at St Petersburg on garrison duty, Alexander needed Arakcheev’s assistance. ‘Please do me the good service of being here when my guard is mounted so nothing goes wrong’, he wrote in a characteristic note to the General that summer.15 And that autumn, with the Court once more in the capital, ‘good Alexei’ began to assume responsibility for other military duties nominally discharged by the heir to the throne. He even drafted reports for Paul which Alexander signed without bothering to read. Time and time again the General saved Alexander from making a fool of himself on parade. Over military matters he did not question Arakcheev’s advice.

  It was, of course, unwise for the Tsarevich to become so dependent on a General who was far from popular with his brother officers. Alexander, conscious of the uneasiness in the army at his father’s imposition of Prussian customs, sensed the widespread contempt felt for Arakcheev and, though he never in these years doubted the General’s competence or good faith, there were moments when it was obvious that the two men failed to understand each other. Occasionally Alexander censured Arakcheev for acts of harsh discipline, but more frequently he told the General of the quarrels he was having with his father and of the difficulty he was finding in enforcing reforms which the officers disliked and of which he could not see the value. In September 1797 Alexander was so depressed that he confided to Arakcheev his longing to shed responsibilities and retire abroad with Elizabeth.16 But this was not the future which Arakcheev envisaged for him; it was a mood with which he felt little sympathy.

  Nor indeed did it correspond with the wishes of Alexander’s liberal friends in the Czartoryski circle. That autumn they encouraged the Grand Duke to formulate other plans, which are preserved for us in unexpected detail. Novosiltsov had sought, and received, permission to leave Russia and visit England, where he already possessed influential connections. Before he set out from St Petersburg the Tsarevich entrusted him with a letter which was to be forwarded from Sweden to La Harpe. In it he clearly showed the extent to which he had become disillusioned by less than a year of his father’s rule.

  The letter was written at Gatchina on 8 October 1797. Alexander began by admitting that in the last years of the old Empress abuses of government multiplied as she herself became physically weaker. He continued:

  When my father came to the throne he wished to reform everything. The beginning of his reign was indeed bright enough, but its continuation has not fulfilled expectations. Everything has been turned upside down … You have always known my thoughts about leaving my country … Now the wretched condition of my fatherland makes me look differently at my ideas. I think that if ever the time comes for me to reign, rather than go into voluntary exile myself, I had far better devote myself to the task of giving freedom to my country and thereby preventing her from becoming in the future a toy in a madman’s hands. I have been in touch with enlightened people who, on their side, have long thought in the same way. In all we are only four in number, that is to say, M. Novosiltsov, Count Stroganov, the young Prince Czartoryski, my aide-de-camp (a young man in a million) and me. Our idea is that during the present reign we should translate into the Russian language as many useful books as is possible, of which we would print as many as would be permitted, and we will reserve others for a future occasion … Once my turn comes, then it will be essential to work, little by little, of course, for a method of representing the nation … let it be by a free constitution, after which my authority will end absolutely and, if Providence seconds our endeavours, I will retire into some place and I will live contentedly and happily observing the good fortune of my country and rejoicing in it.

  Alexander ended by hoping that La Harpe would support the scheme and give the four liberal enthusiasts his advice.17

  Few documents show so clearly the confusion of purpose and muddled idealism in Alexander’s mind. Had the letter been intercepted, it would have aroused Paul to take strong measures against his son’s friends and almost certainly against Alexander himself, for the Tsar held independent thought to be treasonable and all talk of constitutions indistinguishable from rank Jacobinism. But in content the letter seems harmless enough, more a fairy tale with a happy ending than a revolutionary manifesto. The idea of educating Russians to govern themselves by translating a series of unspecified foreign works was a nostalgic reminiscence, an echo from the earlier ‘Enlightened’ years of Catherine II: it was unrealistic and, in the rigidly anti-intellectual mood of Paul’s reign, impracticable. A leading Russian scholar, Nikolai Karamzin, was severely reprimanded by the Tsar for translating the letters of that dangerous republican, Marcus Tullius Cicero;18 and it is unlikely that the printing of any of ‘the useful books’ which Alexander had in mind would have been permitted. For Alexander, the proposal had another purpose, although he may not have been consciously aware of it. As his letters to Arakcheev show, the Tsarevich was sufficiently Paul’s son to thrill at the sight of well-drilled troops moving in blind obedience across the parade-ground. In gloomier moments of self-analysis this reaction depressed him as much as it worried his liberal aristocratic friends. By showing willingness to encourage the translation of academic works frowned upon by the authorities, Alexander was strengthening his own resistance to that obsessive paradomania which Adam Czartoryski feared he inherited from his father. The fact that nothing came of the project is immaterial: its chief value for the heir to the throne was therapeutic.

  There remains, however, one peculiar feature of Alexander’s letter which suggests he was already haunted by a possibility he dared not admit, even to himself. In the autumn of 1797, when Alexander first began to discuss future policy with his friends, Tsar Paul was still only forty-three years old. Apart from the alarming vagaries of his mind, his health was good and there was no physical obstacle to prevent him from fulfilling his natural life span, reigning in Russia for another quarter of a century or more. Why, then, was his son already planning the programme he would follow upon his own accession? It is not difficult to guess the reason. Alexander sensed that his father’s behaviour was courting disaster. On three occasions in the previous sixty years the Guards Regiments had staged a palace revolution in St Petersburg to rid themselves of a ruler in whom they lacked confidence. Yet no previous Tsar had deliberately flouted traditions as Paul was doing day after day. Many distinguished officer
s either resigned their commissions or were compulsorily retired from active service, among them the great Marshal Suvorov, hero of the wars against the Turks. It seemed, that October, only a matter of months before some exasperated member of the nobility once more led the Guards against their sovereign’s throne. Where would Alexander’s loyalty place him in such a situation? Natural respect for the autocratic principle, and genuine affection for his father and mother, made him dislike the prospect of such a conspiracy, and yet he sympathized with the grievances of many young aristocrats and officers. He, too, was conscious of wasted opportunities. From the letters he exchanged with Arakcheev it is clear be believed there was a risk of army revolt, but he took no counter-measures.19 He did not wish to contemplate hypothetical dilemmas. Waiting upon events better suited his temperament than anticipating them.

  Others, besides Alexander, were alive to the danger. In two private letters written at Pavlovsk in August 1797 Marie Feodorovna mentioned her fear of a Guards mutiny, and in a more revealing note sent from St Petersburg four months later she described how worried she had become when a false fire alarm brought all the troops in the capital hastening to one side of the Palace while Paul was left, momentarily isolated, on the other.20 The Tsar himself had few illusions over his unpopularity with the veterans of Catherine’s wars. He continued to rely on the loyalty of the officers who had been closest to him at Gatchina and Pavlovsk in the old days, but he knew that he needed more protection than they could offer. The Winter Palace was huge and rambling, as easy to break into as the Tuileries in Paris. He therefore decided to build a new fortified palace in the capital, with moats, drawbridges and turreted courtyards, a natural citadel as much as the home of the sovereign. Work began on the foundations towards the end of 1797 and the first stone was laid on 8 February 1798, the day on which Marie Feodorovna gave birth to the last of her nine children. Both son and palace were named in honour of the Archangel Michael, long revered in the Church as a protector of soldiers, and a saint after Paul’s own heart.

  Suvorov in Italy and Switzerland

  It was impossible to build the Mikhailovsky Palace in less than three years. To many it seemed unlikely Paul would reign long enough to reside within its walls. That he did so at all – though only for a few weeks – was largely a consequence of a change in Russia’s relations with the other European Powers. An active foreign policy postponed the final and decisive confrontation between the dissidents in the army and their sovereign.21

  Hitherto the Russians had stood aside from the great struggle on the continent between the French Republic and the defenders of the old order. Shortly before her death Catherine had agreed to plans for despatching an expeditionary force to assist the Austrians against the French in the Rhineland. But, partly from uncertainty over the efficiency of his army and partly from his desire to break with his mother’s policy, Paul had held back his troops. In the summer of 1798, however, Paul decided that his fleet and army should enter the war, associating themselves with Great Britain and the traditional enemy, Turkey, in an effort to curb Bonaparte’s growing strength in the Mediterranean. The reason for Paul’s change of policy was almost absurdly trivial, a claim on the part of the Tsar to champion the rights of the Maltese Order of Knights, who had been deprived of their island by the French:* but, for most of the Russian officers, the cause of hostilities mattered less than the prospect of resuming Catherine’s expansionist adventures. An expeditionary force needed veteran commanders rather than Paul’s parade-ground martinets. Hence Generals and Colonels who had passed into retirement during the first year of Paul’s reign were recalled to their regiments. When, in the early months of 1799, the Second Coalition came into being, Marshal Suvorov himself was reinstated by the Tsar and given command of an Austro-Russian army which challenged the supremacy of France in the Italian peninsula.

  Alexander would have liked to see active service under Suvorov. Paul refused to permit him to leave the Empire, although he allowed Constantine to go to Italy. To his chagrin, Alexander was forced to remain on garrison duty in the capital while Suvorov’s army enacted one of the most brilliant episodes of Russian military history, clearing the enemy from the Lombard Plain and threatening to cross the Alps and make Paris its ultimate objective. Friction between the Russians and their Austrian allies caused Suvorov’s grand strategic plan to fall short of its expectations, and, after a grimly resolute advance into the Swiss Alps, he was ordered to disengage and return to the homeland. Militarily the campaign brought no lasting gains to Russia. But the prestige of having served in regiments which entered Milan and Turin in triumph and scaled the heights of the St Gothard was considerable. The ‘sons of Suvorov’ were an honoured band of brothers: it grieved Alexander not to be among them.

  His father at first identified himself closely with the war, vicariously sharing Suvorov’s days of triumph. He heaped honours upon the old Marshal, creating him ‘Prince of Italy’ and Generalissimo of all the armies of the Russian Empire. The mood soon passed. Envy and suspicion began to eat into Paul’s mind and in the end he turned against Suvorov with a callous insensitivity which alienated all who had fought in Italy and Switzerland. The Marshal returned to St Petersburg at the end of October 1799, a dying man worn out with his exertions. His officers had expected him to receive a triumphant reception. But, at the last moment, Paul cancelled the arrangements. He had heard that Suvorov ignored army regulations when selecting his staff, and the Tsar’s petty spirit insisted on making an example of his greatest commander. A few months later Suvorov died, still officially in disgrace. His burial in the crypt of the Annunciation at the Nevsky Monastery in St Petersburg became a silent demonstration by his officers of their contempt for the Tsar. Paul did not attend the Prince of Italy’s funeral.22

  Mounting Tension in the Capital

  There had been another cause for official celebrations in the capital during the spring of 1799, quite apart from Suvorov’s victories in Italy. For on 29 May the Grand Duchess Elizabeth gave birth to a girl, baptized Maria Alexandrovna. The baby was unusually dark, with black hair and features which seemed to correspond neither to her mother’s nor to Alexander’s. Aristocratic gossip maintained that the child’s father was not the Grand Duke but his friend, Adam Czartoryski.23 There is no doubt the Polish Prince had become passionately attached to the Grand Duchess and that their warm friendship was encouraged by Alexander. The fact that Czartoryski was hurriedly sent on a diplomatic mission in August 1798 and remained in exile until after Alexander’s accession was accepted in some contemporary memoirs as evidence that Paul had discovered the truth about the Pole’s romance with Elizabeth and was determined to keep the lovers apart. But although Paul may have decided that Czartoryski was an unfortunate influence both upon his son and his daughter-in-law, he cannot have suspected the Prince had fathered a child on Elizabeth. For Czartoryski left St Petersburg on 22 August 1798, nine months and one week before the baby’s birth, almost certainly too early for Elizabeth (let alone anyone else) to have discovered she was pregnant. The Tsar treated Elizabeth with kindness rather than displeasure during her confinement and distributed honours to her personal household when the baby was born. Tragically little Maria died from convulsions when she was only fourteen months old, but during her brief life there is no suggestion of coolness between husband and wife. If Czartoryski was indeed the baby’s father, it did not lessen Alexander’s personal regard for him. On the other hand, Marie Feodorovna hardened her attitude towards Elizabeth and made no effort to disguise her dislike of the Czartoryskis. Throughout her life she tended to distrust Poles on principle.

  Meanwhile Alexander’s day-to-day existence changed little. As heir to the throne he was kept in close attendance on his father. More than any other individual he was thus able to perceive the terrors of a darkened mind often tangled in shadows but never enveloped in them. For, though foreign observers might write glibly of the Tsar’s ‘madness’ in their confidential reports, the truth was more complex.24 George
III at Windsor in 1788–9 had suffered from bouts of incoherent loquacity and at times used personal violence on those around him: stripped of authority so long as his mind was wandering, he became an object of pity and sympathy and in a matter of months he recovered his mental health. Paul’s case was different. There was never any moment of complete collapse, and his general vitality prevented his delusions from totally dominating his behaviour. It is questionable whether he was as ‘mad’ as his idol, the founder of St Petersburg; certainly he was not so cruel as Peter. The most terrifying aspect of Paul’s character was the capricious ease with which his mood would change. One day he would honour someone at Court: and on another banish him to his estate in disgrace or order him into Siberian exile. Even his close advisers from Gatchina fell sudden victims to his suspicion, and other people’s tales: thus both Arakcheev and Rostopchin were peremptorily dismissed from service in St Petersburg. And on one extraordinary day Alexander, to whom his father had been especially gracious at a ball the previous night, was visited by one of Paul’s aides who arrived with instructions from the Tsar to read aloud to the Grand Duke a passage from a Russian chronicle which described the sufferings and death of the Tsarevich Alexis, whom Peter the Great believed had plotted against him.25 The psychological intricacies of Paul’s mental condition remained beyond Alexander’s comprehension. In his leisure hours he began to read Roman history: it gave him little comfort.