Saltykov, almost certainly Paul’s father, had abandoned her to boast about his conquest. Paul thereafter became a reminder of a man who had ruthlessly deserted her. Peter, her husband, was worse. Peter humiliated her for years and threatened to seal her away in a convent. Both of these men, Paul’s dynastically recognized father and his biological father, left her with bitter memories of misery, disillusionment, and loneliness.
In 1762, when Catherine reached the throne and retrieved her son, it was too late to repair their relationship. Paul was eight years old, small for his age, frail, and frequently ill. At first, he missed Elizabeth, the tall, overwhelmingly affectionate woman who had spoiled him by surrounding him with nurses and women who refused to let him do anything for himself. When Catherine was allowed to see him, she came, but she was usually accompanied by the giant figure of Gregory Orlov, who claimed the attention Paul felt should be his.
Catherine’s relationship with Paul, involving as it did the question of the succession, was the most psychologically difficult personal and political problem of her reign. From the beginning, Catherine realized that anyone plotting against her could always point to a Romanov heir in the person of her son. The issue was clouded by the question of whether Paul was the son of Peter III or the child of Catherine’s lover, Sergei Saltykov. In her memoirs, Catherine strongly implies that Paul was Saltykov’s son, and, at the time of Paul’s birth, almost no one at court believed the child to be Peter’s son. There was general knowledge of Peter’s sexual incapacity, of the emotional and physical breach between the married partners, and of Catherine’s affair with Saltykov. The mass of the Russian people, however, were not privy to this information, and believed that the heir to the throne was the son of Catherine’s husband, the future Tsar Peter III. The Moscow crowds cheering Paul at Catherine’s coronation believed that Paul was the legitimate great-grandson of Peter the Great. Catherine, riding in the coronation procession, heard the cheers and understood their meaning: that Paul was her rival. Officially, however, Paul’s status as heir did not hinge on the question of his paternity. Once proclaimed empress, Catherine had made certain that Paul’s succession rights derived from her. Basing her proclamation on Peter the Great’s decree that the sovereign could name his or her successor, she publicly proclaimed Paul her heir. No one ever challenged her right to make this decision.
Then a strange thing happened: Paul’s face began to change. A lengthy illness when Paul was nine eroded his childhood prettiness; his face and features, which had been pleasing, became distorted in a manner that was more than temporary adolescent asymmetry. He developed thin brown hair, a receding chin, and a protruding bottom lip. He looked more like Peter than Sergei, and had the same abrupt, clumsy movements as Peter. Some who had known Peter began to believe that Paul really was the dead tsar’s son.
By the time Paul reached adolescence he, at least, was convinced that he was Peter’s son, and Peter was the paternal figure the boy came to revere. He began to ask people about the death of his father, and why the throne had come to his mother instead of himself. If they hesitated to answer, he said that when he was grown up, he would find out. When he asked about his own chances of ruling, there were long, uncomfortable silences. There were other gaps in his knowledge. He heard rumors that the brother of Gregory Orlov, his mother’s favorite, was suspected of being responsible for his father’s death. Thereafter, the sight of the Orlov brothers at court, and the knowledge of his mother’s relationship with Gregory Orlov, tormented him. At the same time, he was constructing an idealized image of Peter, modeling himself on Peter and imitating Peter’s traits and behavior. Aware that Peter had been passionately fond of everything connected with the army, Paul began playing with soldiers, first toys, then real soldiers, as Peter had done. Again following Peter’s lead, he turned to admire the greatest soldier of the age, Frederick of Prussia.
Since 1760, when Paul was six, Nikita Panin had been his governor and senior tutor. Paul’s lessons had included languages, history, geography, mathematics, science, astronomy, religion, drawing, and music. He learned to dance, ride, and fence. He was intelligent, impatient, and highly strung. “His Highness has the bad habit of rushing things; he rushes to get up, to eat, to go to bed,” said one of his tutors. “At dinner-time, how many ruses will he think of to gain a few minutes and sit down sooner.… He eats too fast, doesn’t chew properly, and so charges his stomach with an impossible task.”
At ten, Paul began to study the works of Jean d’Alembert, the French mathematician and co-editor of Diderot’s
Unfortunately, this approach to d’Alembert elicited a personally humiliating response. Not only did d’Alembert reiterate his refusal to come to Russia, but he privately uttered a remark that traveled far. Referring to the official reason given by Catherine for Peter III’s death, he said, “I am too prone to hemorrhoids which in Russia is a severe complaint. I prefer to have a painful behind in the safety of my home.” The empress never forgave him.
In the summer of 1771, Paul, then seventeen, endured a five-week battle with influenza. Catherine and Panin watched anxiously as he struggled with a high fever and debilitating diarrhea. Once he began to recover, the question of the succession reasserted itself. Catherine knew that she could not postpone his official coming of age much beyond his eighteenth birthday in September 1772. It was Panin who, in this context, suggested that marriage to some healthy young woman might help mature the difficult young man. This way, too, the tutor added, Her Majesty would probably soon have a grandson whom she could raise according to her own views. This reasoning appealed to Catherine.
Three years earlier, in 1768, when Paul was fourteen, Catherine had already begun thinking of a suitable bride for him and had made a list of candidates. Characteristically, she sought a bride in her own image: a sensible German princess from a minor court. The one who appealed to her most was Sophia of Wurttemburg, but Sophia was then only fourteen, too young for marriage. The empress’s eye shifted to the younger daughters of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. Catherine’s plan was to invite the landgravine and her three still-unmarried daughters, Amalie, Wilhelmina, and Louise, to Russia. They were eighteen, seventeen, and fifteen, respectively. Paul would be asked to chose among them. As had been true in her own case years before, the invitation did not include the father.
During the summer of 1772, after Gregory Orlov had been replaced, the relationship between Catherine and her son improved. Living together with Paul at Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine made a companion of her son, and the long estrangement seemed to be over. “We have never had a jollier time at Tsarskoe Selo than these nine weeks I have spent there with my son, who is becoming a nice lad. He really appears to enjoy my company,” she wrote to her Hamburg friend Frau Bielcke. “I return to town on Tuesday with my son who does not want to leave my side, and whom I have the honor to please so well that he sometimes changes his place at the table to sit next to me.” Then, after what Paul assumed was Orlov’s final disappearance, Gregory reappeared at court. Paul was dismayed.
In the spring of 1773, the three Hessian princesses and their mother were invited to Russia. They stopped first in Berlin, where, as he had done with Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst thirty-one years earlier, Frederick reminded them always to remember they had been born Germans. At the end of June, four Russian naval vessels arrived in Lubeck to carry the Hessian party up the Baltic. The commander of the frigate transporting the young women and their mother was Paul’s best friend, Andrei Razumovsky, the son of Catherine’s friend Kyril Razumovsky. Andrei was captivated by the middle daughter, Wilhelmina, and she by him.
In St. Petersburg, Paul took only two days to make his choice: it was the same as Andrei Razumovsky’s— Princess Wilhelmina. Unfortunately, Wilhelmina’s reaction to the small, strange young man soon to be her husband was not enthusiastic. Catherine noticed her hesitation; so did the girl’s mother. Nevertheless, the machinery of diplomacy and protocol ground ahead. As had been the case with Catherine and her own mother, both the bride- to-be and the landgravine were indifferent to the requirement for a religious conversion. Predictably, as the date of the wedding approached, the landgrave wrote from Germany, objecting to his daughter changing her religion. Also predictably, he surrendered to his wife’s decision. On August 15, 1773, Wilhelmina was received into the Orthodox Church as Natalia Alekseyevna. The next day she was betrothed to Paul and became a Russian grand duchess.
There were banquets, balls, and late-summer picnics at which Catherine enjoyed the company of the landgravine, an energetic woman who was a friend of Goethe’s. Prince Orlov invited the three princesses, their mother, Catherine, and the court to Gatchina, where he gave a lavish reception: five hundred guests dined from Sevres porcelain and gold plate. Orlov, hoping to irritate the empress, who had brought along her new favorite,
