Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  One of the participants was Alexander’s uncle, the first Alexander, who would vanquish Napoleon. He plotted against his own father. The conspirators had promised him that Paul would be unharmed. He would be made to abdicate and nothing more. How could the heir have believed that, knowing the fate of Peter III? Alexander forced himself to believe them.

  Before murdering the emperor, the guards had a festive dinner. They drank a lot of wine. Their speeches and toasts carried eerie omens of the distant future. Life Guards Colonel Bibikov (whose relative had brought Catherine II to the throne) expressed an opinion that there was no point in just getting rid of Paul, it would be better “to be free of the whole royal family.” But the other conspirators did not support him then.

  At midnight, the drunken guards officers approached the secret entrance to the Mikhailovsky Castle. Among them were Catherine the Great’s last lover, Platon Zubov, and his brother, Nicholas. They were led by Paul’s favorite adjutant. The conspiracy was headed by Count Petr Palen, another of the emperor’s favorites.

  In dress uniforms, swords bared, they burst into Paul’s bedroom. The bedroom was empty. Paul seemed to have escaped, which meant the end for them. While the officers panicked, one of the leaders, General Leonty Benigsen, tall and phlegmatic, leaned on the mantelpiece and looked around calmly. There were drapes in the corner of the enormous room. The general saw the sovereign’s bare feet sticking out from beneath the drapes.

  “Le voilà!” General Benigsen said with a laugh and pointed to the drapes. The guardsmen pulled the tsar out.

  As often happens with despots, he quickly turned pathetic and helpless. Small and snub-nosed, wearing long white underpants and a long-sleeved nightshirt, he looked like a frightened boy. The drunken crowd attacked Paul. He fought them off feebly, begging for mercy, asking for time to say a prayer.

  Count Nicholas Zubov, red-hot, huge, resembling a butcher, struck the tsar of all Russia in the temple with the corner of a gold snuffbox. Paul fell to the floor. According to one version, Zubov’s French valet sat on Paul’s stomach. Guardsman Yakov Skaryatin took off his officer’s sash and they strangled him with it. And then they mocked the corpse drunkenly—kicking and beating the lifeless body of Alexander’s grandfather.

  They came outside to the soldiers guarding the castle and announced merrily: “The emperor died suddenly of apoplexy.” And the soldiers shouted, “Hurrah! Long live Emperor Alexander!”

  Paul was dressed in guard’s uniform, the tricorn pushed forward over his face to cover the bruise from the snuffbox. Only then was the weeping widow permitted to bid him farewell. General Benigsen forcefully asked her, “Please do not draw out the farewell scene, which could harm the precious health of Your Majesty.”

  As in the case of Peter III, the announcement stated that the emperor had died suddenly and peacefully. The emperor’s body lay in state at the Mikhailovsky Castle. But as Madame de Stael had written, “In Russia everything is secret, but nothing is unknown.” St. Petersburg society rushed to look at the suddenly departed. The body was displayed cleverly. The famous journalist Nicholas Grech recalled, “I went to Mikhailovsky Castle a dozen times and could see only the soles of his boots and the brim of his wide hat, pushed low on his forehead. No sooner do you come in the door than they point to another: ‘Move along.’”

  That is how Alexander’s uncle became Alexander I, future vanquisher of Napoleon. The new emperor did not dare act against the regicide guards. When guardsman Skaryatin hung his officer’s sash on the back of his chair when he played cards, everyone tried to guess whether that was the very sash with which they strangled the father of the new emperor. General Benigsen became one of the army commanders in the war with Napoleon. When Alexander called Napoleon “a bloodthirsty monster,” Bonaparte mockingly reminded the tsar about “the exploits of his commander in his father’s bedroom.”

  The Romanov family had many legends about the martyred Paul I. In his favorite palace, Gatchina, there was a room with a door nailed shut. Inside was the bed from the Mikhailovsky Castle with blankets and pillows stained by the murdered emperor’s blood. Servants insisted that they had seen the emperor’s ghost wandering the formal rooms of the Gatchina Palace at night. The ghost allegedly appeared on the eve of fateful events.

  Little Alexander dreamed of seeing his grandfather’s ghost whenever he visited Gatchina. Olga, sister of the last Romanov tsar, Nicholas II, recalled in her memoirs how she and Nicky walked through the palace hoping for and fearing the sight of the restless soul. Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, father of Alexander, is supposed to have seen the ghost on the most terrible day of his life.

  The murdered Emperor Paul I had four sons. Two older boys, Alexander and Konstantin, and two younger ones, Nicholas (Alexander II’s father) and Mikhail. Unlike their father, short and snub-nosed Paul, Alexander and Nicholas were athletic and handsome, with faces that belonged on medals. There would be many more handsome men born in the Romanov family. Paul’s wife, the fecund princess of Württemberg (she gave Paul eight children), brought the Württemberg looks and stature to the royal line.

  There were almost two decades in age difference and an abyss in education between the older brothers and the younger ones. Catherine the Great took the two older boys, Alexander and Konstantin, away from their father. “The best grandmother” supervised their education and invented an amusing primer for them, wrote fairy tales, and even designed “clothing beneficial for the health.”

  Catherine turned bringing up children into a political project. She wanted to pass her throne to her grandson Alexander, rather than her despised son, Paul. She intended Konstantin to become emperor of a revived Byzantium with its capital in Constantinople (hence the choice of his name), which she planned to win from Turkey. Russia and the liberated Balkan Slavs would then create the world’s largest empire, a Slavic one. But she died before putting her plan into action.

  The murder of Paul I implemented “the best grandmother’s” plan for Alexander posthumously. Her favorite grandson became Emperor Alexander I. He would gain worldwide glory with his victory over Napoleon.

  The older the victor grew, the deeper he plunged into black melancholy. He was tormented by the murder of his father and his part in the conspiracy. In 1819 he told his brother Konstantin, “I have to tell you that I am tired and no longer can bear the weight of ruler.” That meant that Konstantin, as next in line, had to wear the crown.

  Konstantin had loved his father. He had his father’s snub nose and big blue eyes. He also had his hot temper. He could never forget that March night, when Prince Platon Zubov, his grandmother’s former lover, came to his room right after the emperor’s murder. Zubov shook him awake and made him get dressed, without any explanation. Konstantin thought they had come to kill him. But he was taken from Mikhailovsky Castle to the Winter Palace, where the conspirators declared his brother emperor.

  Konstantin told guardsman Sablukov, “My brother can be tsar if he wants. But if the throne were to come to me, I would refuse it!” When his brother made his offer in 1819, he replied that he “was prepared to ask for a place as his second valet, just not to be the tsar on the throne!” He hastily wrote an official renunciation: “I do not feel I have the gifts, or the strength, or the spirit…etc.”

  The next in line was Nicholas, father of Alexander. Nicholas adored his brother Alexander and had great respect for Konstantin. He had named his own sons Alexander and Konstantin in their honor. But Nicholas had not been prepared for the throne. His education consisted solely of military training, which he excelled at. He was considered the martinet of the extended Romanov family. Even more dangerously, that was his reputation among the powerful guards regiments. Many of the capital’s intellectuals were in the guards, and it was fashionable to despise “martinet Nicholas.” Emperor Alexander understood the danger for Nicholas if he took the throne.

  But there was no choice, and Alexander I went to see Nicholas. The tsar did not discuss it with him, he simply anno
unced his will to his brother: in the case of his death, the throne went to him, Nicholas. The emperor added, “However, it might happen much sooner. I keep thinking more frequently of freeing myself of responsibility and moving away from worldly things. Europe needs young monarchs, at the peak of their power and energy, and I am no longer what I was.”

  Alexander’s mother described their startled reaction to the emperor’s news. “We listened to the Sovereign, like two statues, with open eyes and shut mouths.” Like Konstantin, Nicholas was also afraid of the offered crown, stained as it was by the blood of his father and grandfather.

  Alexander I had to calm him down. “The moment that will suit you has not yet come…it may be another ten years,” he said in farewell, and left.

  “We were thunderstruck…. In tears and sobbing over this horrible, unexpected news, we were silent,” recorded Alexander’s mother.

  All over the world, brothers fought over the crown, even committed crimes to attain it. In Russia, brothers dreamed of only one thing: to give up the great kingdom. That was the result of the guards’ attacks on the palace.

  Word soon reached Alexander that the guards were hatching another conspiracy, another attack on the palace. In 1820, General Alexander Benkendorf, chief of the guards corps staff, wrote a note, that is, a denunciation, to the emperor about the conspiracy. The victory over Napoleon had brought a very dangerous turn of events: The intellectual officers had caught revolutionary fever in France and brought it home to Russia. “Without understanding how to bring order to their own affairs…they wish to rule the state,” wrote Benkendorf. He appended a list of the conspirators.

  Alexander I, the mystic tsar, must have decided that this was retribution. The guards that had put him on the throne were now removing him. He left his fate in God’s hands. Expressing regret that the conspirators had fallen “victim to the same French air of liberty that had delighted me in my youth,” the emperor put the denunciation in his desk drawer. “I shared and supported those illusions, it is not for me to persecute them,” he later said.

  This was a very new kind of conspiracy in the old guards regiments. For the first time in a century, no one in the royal family participated. Like the old conspiracies, the plan called for killing the tsar, but this time, not in order to put a different tsar in place. This time, they wanted to declare a republic.

  One of the main conspirators was Colonel Pavel Pestel, son of the Siberian governor general. He had fought Napoleon bravely. This Russian Robespierre, who wanted to found a republic, decided that for the security of the future republic not only the tsar but the entire royal family had to die, in order to avoid a civil war. The majority of the conspirators were kinder: They decided to leave the emperor on the throne if he agreed to a constitution. Thus, in snowy Russia, began the path that led to the destruction of a dynasty, the Bolsheviks, and the great schism of the world into two camps.

  Further news of the conspiracy led the tsar to hasten toward a solution of the dynastic problems. On August 16, 1823, Alexander wrote a secret manifesto on succession. It named Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, Alexander’s father, as the heir to the throne. It was placed in a sealed envelope for safekeeping in Russia’s main church, the Cathedral of Assumption in Moscow, where Russian tsars were crowned. Only a very narrow circle knew about the manifesto. Alexander must have had some hope that Konstantin could be persuaded to accept the throne. He did not forget the attitude of the dangerous guards toward Nicholas.

  Alexander I was almost never in Moscow. He attended all the meetings of the monarchs in the Holy Alliance who had fought Napoleon, and he traveled aimlessly around the country. A contemporary wrote, “He rules the country from a carriage.” The emperor avoided the capital, where the regiments were based.

  In 1825 the “nomadic despot,” as the poet Alexander Pushkin called him, set out on yet another journey, to the small town of Taganrog, where the southern climate would be gentler on the empress’s weak lungs. Leaving St. Petersburg late at night, the emperor drove first to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. In the darkness by the gates he was met by a black row of monks headed by the metropolitan, the leader of Russian Orthodox Christians. That was the start of the last church service the emperor would see in his capital. During the gospel reading, Alexander I suddenly sank to his knees and asked the metropolitan to lay the Bible on his head. He prayed for a long time, weeping as he prayed.

  In Taganrog, the emperor died swiftly and unexpectedly. The official diagnosis has been preserved, but it is so vague that it is difficult to guess what disease killed Napoleon’s conqueror. The rumor that reached Moscow right after the news of his death has also survived the centuries: Alexander I did not die. Another corpse was in the coffin, and the emperor went off to be a hermit in Siberia, to pray and repent for his terrible sin against his father.

  The arrival of the coffin bolstered the rumor, since the coffin was not opened when the emperor lay in state. This was the first time that the court said its farewells to a ruler without seeing his face. Even Peter III and Paul I, who had marks of violence upon them, were laid out to be seen.

  The court was told that the heat in Taganrog had caused the body to decay. But everyone knew that the body had been embalmed. People repeated the strange words of Prince Volkonsky, that “the Emperor’s face, despite the embalming, had turned black and even the features had changed completely.”

  Only the royal family saw the open coffin. The final farewell took place in the chapel at Tsarskoye Selo after midnight. The priests were told to leave and sentries were placed at the doors. In the dim candlelight, the Romanovs saw the skeleton of the late tsar. Alexander, named for his uncle, was present at this secret farewell. He was seven years old.

  Eleven years after the death of Tsar Alexander, a holy man appeared in Siberia called Fedor Kozmich. The austere man seemed to be a peasant, but he knew the customs of the court and he spoke foreign languages fluently. It became clear from his stories that he had been in Paris with the victorious Russian army.

  The most popular portrait of the mysterious elder showed a startling resemblance to Alexander I, although he never mentioned the tsar. As his popularity and rumors about him grew, the holy man saw his visitors less and less frequently, and the door to his monastic cell was more often locked.

  Alexander II’s mother noted in her diary that Alexander I had once said to her, in a conversation about his dream of renouncing the throne, “How happy I will be to see you driving past me, and I’ll be in the crowd shouting Hurrah! at you and waving my hat.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Heir to the Throne

  When little Alexander was seven years old, two terrifying memories entered the consciousness of the impressionable, nervous child: the uncontrollability of nature and of men.

  A great flood occurred in the last year of the reign of Alexander I. Alexander and his family were living in the Anichkov Palace, which later became the traditional home of every heir to the throne. It was on a night in November when the worst flooding on record took place in St. Petersburg. At 7:00 P.M. on the seventh, the signal lanterns to warn residents were lit on the Admiralty Spire, opposite the Winter Palace. A violent storm shook the night; wind gusts rattled the enormous windows of the Anichkov Palace. By morning the infuriated Neva River flowed onto the streets. The water roiled like boiling water in a kettle and the wind blew against the current. White foam swirled over the mass of water. Huge waves crashed on the flooded Palace Square.

  The square and the Neva formed a giant lake, fed by the Nevsky Prospect, which had turned into a broad river flowing past the Anichkov Palace. The water of that “river” reached the balconies. Rats from the cellars raced up the marble staircases, leaping, squealing, running up toward safety.

  A woman with a child floated on a large door past their windows, as soldiers in a boat tried to reach her. People climbed rooftops, clung to lampposts. The contents of a library floated out from a nearby house, the books bobbing in the waves outside their bal
cony. Sheets of metal, torn from the roofs by the hurricane-force winds, flew through the air.

  Several days later, when the waters receded, little Sasha, as Alexander was known, was taken by his father to survey the city. The embankment in front of the Winter Palace was strewn with smashed ships. Sasha was given permission to climb up onto one and touch a real mast. On top of the ship’s side was a coffin that had floated from the cemetery.

  The unprecedented rebellion of the waters was a harbinger of more violence of the human kind a year later.

  When the messenger from Taganrog brought the news of the death of Alexander I, Alexander’s father immediately called the military governor of St. Petersburg, Count Mikhail Miloradovich. Nicholas told him of the late emperor’s secret manifesto and his last wish, to hand the throne over to him, Nicholas.

  But Miloradovich was well aware of the feelings of the guards, who did not like the martinet Nicholas. He also knew about the guards’ conspiracy. They were all his friends. They were scions of Russia’s greatest aristocratic families, brilliant officers who had fought Napoleon with Miloradovich.

  The count warned Nicholas, “Unfortunately, no one knows of the secret manifesto, but everyone knows the law on succession. And everyone knows that according to the law, the throne belongs to Konstantin.”

  Alexander’s father hastily, and apparently with great relief, agreed with Miloradovich. Nicholas hurriedly ordered the guards, the Senate, and the State Council to swear fealty to Konstantin. And he swore his, as well. That is how much he feared the dangerous throne.

  But it was all in vain. A messenger galloped from Warsaw with a letter from Konstantin, who refused to be tsar. He wrote: “My previous intention is immutable.” And he demanded that the late tsar’s will, as expressed in the manifesto, be obeyed. Nicholas must become emperor.