dangerous time for Russian autocracy. The victory over Napoleon had seismic international effects and brought about important changes inside Russia. While energizing Russia’s educated classes, especially young people, the epic war had wearied and disillusioned Alexander I.
The emperor returned to Russia gray-haired, heavier, and suddenly aged. His irritability had increased sharply, and his reactions were unpredictable. He became much more conservative.
By contrast, the young Russian officers who had picked up revolutionary ideas in Europe had become radicalized. Many of them were friends and acquaintances of Pushkin. They saw that the poet shared many of their views, but they refrained from inviting him to join any of their organizations.
Later, a beautiful legend took root that the revolutionaries did not bring Pushkin into their plans because they wanted to protect his genius from possible repercussions. But Prince Vyazemsky, who knew them well, quite reasonably noted that some of the conspirators, poets themselves, did not rate their own literary potential lower than Pushkin’s; they simply did not trust him. In their opinion, he was merely “the Aeolian harp of liberalism at the feasts of young people, responding to any which wind.”16
It didn’t matter. Pushkin was starting to claim the role of poetic spokesman for the political opposition to Alexander I. Finally, he wrote a satire that managed to insult the emperor personally. In the satire, Pushkin has Alexander returning from Europe (he calls him the “nomadic despot”) and declaring,
O be happy, people: I am well fed, healthy, and fat;
The newspaper writers glorify me;
I drank and ate and promised—
And I’m not exhausted by work.
Pushkin’s frequent jabs at Alexander spread through the capital instantly. One of them was particularly popular. After a tame bear cub escaped its chain in the park at Tsarskoe Selo and attacked the emperor, Alexander ran away. The poor bear cub was put down. Acerbic Pushkin quipped, “Finally one good man was found, and even he was a bear!”17
Angered, Alexander ordered the military governor of St. Petersburg, Count Mikhail Miloradovich, to start a dossier on Pushkin. We know the tsar’s stated intentions: “Pushkin should be exiled to Siberia: he’s inundated Russia with outrageous poems; all the young people know them by heart.”18
Count Miloradovich called in the poet. Pushkin showed up, and when Miloradovich announced that he was sending a police officer to Pushkin’s apartment to seize all his manuscripts, the poet quickly responded, “Count! All my poems are burned! There is nothing in my apartment; but if you wish, everything will be found here,” and he pointed to his head. “Better give me pen and paper, and I will write everything down for you.”
Sitting at the table, Pushkin filled an entire notebook, pleasing Miloradovich with his spontaneous frankness. The governor shook the poet’s hand and cried, “
Alexander asked, “And what have you done with the author?” Hearing that the governor had pardoned Pushkin in the emperor’s name, Alexander frowned and grumbled, “Isn’t that premature?”19 He still wanted Pushkin sent to Siberia. But Karamzin was already petitioning on the poet’s behalf.
In the end, Pushkin was not sent to Siberia, but he was exiled from St. Petersburg and dispatched to the south of the country. Liberal St. Petersburg society perceived this imperial act as “a declaration of war against freethinking,” meant “to strike horror” in real and potential oppositionists. The consequences were predictable: “What has happened to liberalism? It vanished, went underground; all grew quiet. But that is when it started being dangerous.”20
There was something providential in Pushkin being the first victim (“you could say, the only martyr then,” as an observer put it) of yet another switch in Alexander’s domestic policy. The man who liberated Europe from Napoleon’s rule and who had once been beloved by all was once again feeling alone, misunderstood, and deceived, as he had in his youth.
Not a single one of his ideas—constitutional reform, abolition of serfdom, or the ideal pan-Christian alliance of European monarchs—had come to pass. Alexander I lamented that people “had forgotten him, like an abandoned fad,” feared that he would die at the hands of conspirators, as had his father and grandfather, and concluded bitterly, “I no longer have any illusions about the gratitude and loyalty of people and therefore have turned all my thoughts to God.”21
The denouement of this quasi-Romantic drama, which could have been written by Friedrich Schiller, was swift —in fact too fast and sudden for some of his contemporaries, and therefore mysterious. Unexpectedly, Alexander announced that he would take his ailing wife for treatment to the remote town of Taganrog in the south of Russia. (Anton Chekhov was born there thirty-five years later.)
In a modest one-story house in that provincial town, the emperor and his wife lived for some two months, filled with spiritual talk, prayer, and, as far as we can judge, quiet family joys. Not long before his forty-eighth birthday, Alexander, who had been known for his robust health, caught a chill, which quickly turned into a fatal fever.
On November 19, 1825, the emperor died, far from the capital, the court, and his beloved army. (His wife died, just as suddenly, six months later.) This quick death on the outskirts of the empire stunned contemporaries and gave rise to instant rumors and legends. Alexander was said to have been murdered, or to have committed suicide, or to not be dead at all. The last version gained some credence and has its adherents to this day.
According to this version, Alexander traveled to Taganrog in order to fake his death. This was to be his chance to realize his dream, which he had shared with people close to him: to abdicate from the throne and live a private life. Proponents of this theory argued that a different person was buried in March 1826 in St. Petersburg, which was why it was a closed-coffin funeral, which is against Orthodox custom.
There are numerous historical works seriously debating the question of whether the holy man Fedor Kuzmich, who appeared in Siberia ten years after Alexander I was declared deceased, was in fact the emperor, who had fulfilled his longing for a different kind of life.22
The mysterious elder Fedor Kuzmich, who had resolutely refused to tell anything about himself and was buried in Siberia in 1864, had a remarkable resemblance to Alexander I: the same height, slightly stooped, and with blue eyes; he spoke several languages and had undoubtedly belonged to higher society in his past.
In fact, the story of Fedor Kuzmich being Alexander was taken seriously at court and even in the Romanov family. Grand Duke Nicholas (the future Nicholas II) stopped in Tomsk on a return trip from Japan in 1891 to visit the elder’s grave at a local monastery.
But the greatest memorial stone for that legend is Leo Tolstoy’s short novella
When younger, Tolstoy had been very skeptical of Alexander, as can be seen in
