take care of their dogs and horses, and to remember to water their flowers.
The highborn children were schooled in gymnastics, fencing, and swimming; in the summer they were told not to be ashamed of their tan and in the winter not to fear the cold and to bear pain without medicine if possible. Catherine instructed, “Teach the children not to interrupt, not to rush to express their opinion, not to speak too loudly or persistently, but simply, without raising their voice.”
All this was good and reasonable. Yet dreamy and mystically inclined Alexander, like Zhukovsky, acutely sensed the absence of an important spiritual vitamin: “Catherine was a wise and great woman, but as for teaching the heart in the spirit of true piety, the St. Petersburg court was … like almost everywhere else. I sensed an emptiness and my soul was tormented by a vague foreboding.”5
This vague foreboding came true. At the age of twenty-three, Alexander took part in a real tragedy, fully comparable to the grimmest of Shakespeare’s imaginings. Catherine intended to make Alexander heir to the throne, bypassing her son, Paul. Both father and son knew this. What could be more dramatic? Catherine’s cold-blooded manipulations wounded both.
When Catherine was struck by apoplexy in 1796, Paul, then forty-two, took the throne. Derzhavin described the event succinctly and energetically: “Immediately everything in the palace changed: rattling spurs, jack boots, broadswords, and as if they were conquering a city, army people burst into the rooms with great noise.”6
The first, quite understandable, impulse of the new emperor was to annul his mother’s ukases, which he considered unfair. The persecution of Masons was stopped, their leader Novikov was released from prison, and Radishchev returned from Siberian exile.
But unlike his mother, Paul was an utterly unpredictable ruler. Here is a typical story: on the basis of a denunciation, the emperor sent the well-known playwright Vassily Kapnist to Siberia for his pointed comedy
Censorship was virulent in Paul’s reign: with a general decline in printed matter (almost a third less than under Catherine), the number of banned books grew, including Jonathan Swift’s
Paul had been terrified by the French revolutionary storm of 1789. He felt that Louis XVI “would still be alive and reigning if he had been firmer.”7 Thus came Paul’s notorious imperial decree of 1800: “Since books brought in from abroad wreak the corruption of faith, civil laws and decency, from now on we order that any kind of foreign book, in any language, be seized before entering our state, and music as well.”8 As a result, sheet music of works by Bach, Haydn, and Mozart were confiscated on Russia’s borders.
Paul’s decrees, regulating things large and small, rained upon the country. He banned topcoats and vests, round hats and wing collars, appearing in public places wearing spectacles, combing hair onto the forehead (it was supposed to be combed back), growing sideburns, dancing the waltz, or applauding in theaters.
No one knew what would be permitted or banned tomorrow, who would be sent to Siberia or for what, or be punished with rods—one could get up to a thousand blows. Everyone trembled in fear. The demoralized and embittered elite started to whisper and then gradually say out loud that Paul was mad.
As Karamzin later summed it up, “Russians regarded this monarch as a dangerous meteor, counting the minutes and impatiently waiting for the last one. It came, and the news of that throughout the land was like emancipation: in houses and on the street people wept with joy, embracing the way they do on Holy Easter.”9
Karamzin’s description of the way residents of the capital greeted the overthrow of Paul’s four-year reign was apt. At midnight on March 11, 1801, a group of conspirators burst into the Mikhailovsky Castle, the newly built residence for Paul in St. Petersburg. While the Imperial Guards tried to stop them, their commander, Lieutenant Sergei Marin, a poet and adventurer, unexpectedly switched sides, pointing his pistol at Paul’s defenders. Confused, they surrendered; Paul’s fate was sealed. Marin was the second poet after Derzhavin (who took part in the “revolution,” as he called it, that brought Catherine to the throne in 1762) to participate in a palace coup in Russia.
Paul leaped out of bed in his nightshirt and tried to hide, but the armed intruders caught him, beat him, and then strangled him with a scarf. Their leader, Count Peter Palen, “an enlightened cynic” in Catherine’s mode, quickly went to Alexander’s rooms. The heir had been warned of the conspiracy, but he had not expected his father to be killed.
Learning of the fatality, Alexander fell to the floor, groaning, “How dare you! I never wanted that and did not order it!” The impatient conspirators found the “despair rather natural but inappropriate.” Palen cut off Alexander’s moaning: “
That was a rather rude send-off. But perhaps Alexander was stung more painfully by his mother (who at forty- one was suddenly a widow) in the morning, who said coldly and scornfully, “I congratulate you, now you are emperor.” Hearing those words, the new monarch, twenty-three, fainted.
Alexander I was tormented by his father’s assassination all his life, and it probably hastened his untimely end. Of course, he had not strangled his father with his own hands, but everyone blamed Alexander for the regicide and patricide (or, at least, so it seemed to him). It’s not clear what was worse: to feel responsible for his father’s death or for the sacrilegious murder of the imperial figure.
In the former, Alexander broke God’s commandment and man’s laws. In the latter, he violated the principle that was the foundation of the state that he would now lead, that of the sacredness of the divine person of the tsar, which was particularly important in Russia, where the sovereign, especially during the early Romanov reign, symbolized the unity and prosperity of the nation.
Alexander, who appeared in public with red-rimmed eyes, could find some comfort, albeit cold, in Karamzin’s description quoted above of the joy of the residents of the capital. This apparent happiness was reinforced also by the stark contrast in physical appearance between the short, hunched, rickety Paul, with a pug nose in the center of his chapped face and always hoarse voice, and his tall, slightly stoop-shouldered, and handsome son, a blue-eyed blonde with polite, gentle manners.
Karamzin published a special edition of his new poem, “To His Imperial Majesty Alexander I, Autocrat of All Russia, on His Accession to the Throne,” in which he expressed the emotions and hopes of Russia’s cultural elite: “It is spring for us, / We are with You!”
Alexander I hastened to justify the hopes, in the first few days of his rule pardoning twelve thousand people arrested by his father, permitting foreign publications into Russia again, and repealing the limitations on travel to and from the country decreed by Paul I.
Calling in some of his young liberal friends, Alexander started to discuss potential radical reforms: limitations on
