Paul

Vladimir Borovikovsky painted Paul in 1800, the last full year of a reign that had begun when Catherine died in November 1796. Dark coat, sash, a star: this is an emperor already seated, not the grand duke she had kept at Gatchina. Do not ask the canvas to do the night in the castle. The last chapter closed on a thicker serfdom and a Charter the gentry could live with. This page is what her son did with that inheritance once the manifesto of accession was no longer a rumour. He reversed much of her local machinery. He drilled an army as if it were a private corps. He died in a bedchamber in March 1801. The painter’s job was likeness. The emperor’s job, as Britannica records it, was to strengthen autocracy by undoing his mother’s habits — and to lose the confidence even of men who had helped him.

He was born on 1 October 1754, 20 September Old Style, in St Petersburg, the son of Peter III and Catherine the Great. Elizabeth, Peter’s aunt, reared him. After 1760 Nikita Ivanovich Panin, Catherine’s learned diplomat, tutored the boy. Good relations with his mother never developed. She wrested the crown from a mentally feeble husband in 1762 and, afterward, consistently refused to allow Paul to participate actively in government. The previous era told that coup. This article does not retell it. It needs the son who waited, the estate he was given, and the four years and four months in which he tried to govern as if waiting had been a programme.

His first wife, Wilhelmina of Darmstadt, Nataliya Alekseyevna in Russian, died. He married Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, Maria Fyodorovna, in 1776. Catherine settled the couple on an estate at Gatchina in 1783. Removed from the centre of government at St Petersburg, Paul held a small court, managed the estate, drilled a private army corps, and contemplated government reforms. The drill is not a joke in a later memoir. It is how a grand duke spent the years in which his mother would not let him near the machine. When he inherited the machine, he treated the empire as if it were Gatchina written large. The Guards, who had made and unmade rulers since 1725, noticed.

Sergey Nemanov photographed the palace in 2005, a later camera on the parade ground. Use it as the place-name made visible, then return to dated facts. A façade across gravel is not a statute of succession. It is where Paul learned to love a corps that was his.

Despite Catherine’s apparent intention to name Paul’s son Alexander her heir, Paul succeeded her when she died on 17 November 1796, 6 November Old Style. He immediately repealed the decree Peter I had issued in 1722 that had given each monarch the right to choose a successor. In its place, in 1797, he established a definite order of succession within the male line of the Romanov family. The gesture is not a footnote. Peter’s open choice had been the legal weather of every palace night since 1725. Paul closed that weather. A son would follow a father. Alexander would follow Paul — unless a conspiracy decided otherwise. The 1797 order is how he tried to make the throne a line instead of a raffle. It did not save him. It did tell the next century who was supposed to come next.

In an effort to strengthen the autocracy he reversed many of Catherine’s policies. He reestablished the centralized administrative agencies she had abolished in 1775. He increased bureaucratic control in local government. He sought to impose limits on the authority of the nobles. In the process he provoked their hostility. When he introduced harsh disciplinary measures in the army and displayed a marked preference for his Gatchina troops, the military, particularly the prestigious guards units, also turned against him. The previous chapter’s Charter to the Gentry is the system he inherited and disliked. This page does not retell 1785. It records a son who tried to pull local power back into offices she had dismantled, and who paid for that attempt in the only currency palace Russia still recognised.

Confidence in his ability dropped even among trusted supporters because of a number of actions. He demonstrated an inconsistent policy toward the peasantry. Britannica does not, in that life, turn the inconsistency into a named statute. This article will not invent one. What it can say is that a reign which reversed noble power and then lurched in its treatment of peasants did not look, to the men who still owned the villages, like a settled programme. Foreign policy lurched harder. He moved from a peaceful line in 1796 to involvement in the second coalition against Napoleon in 1798 to an anti-British policy in 1800. The map of friends and enemies changed faster than a ministry could explain.

By the end of 1800 he had manoeuvred Russia into a disadvantageous position: officially at war with France, unofficially at war with Great Britain, without diplomatic relations with Austria, and on the verge of sending an army through the unmapped khanates in Central Asia to invade British-controlled India. That sentence is the whole of his last winter as policy. A coalition against Napoleon had become a quarrel with Britain. A quarrel with Britain had become a fantasy of marching on India. The men who still had to raise the troops, pay the bills, and stand in the parade grounds of the capital did not need a treatise to see the risk. They needed a different emperor.

He tried to make the empire a drill ground. The Guards remembered that they had made his mother, and they could unmake him.

As a result of the inconsistent policies, and of a tyrannical and capricious manner of implementing them, a group of highly placed civil and military officials gained the approval of Alexander, the heir, to depose his father. Count Peter von Pahlen, governor-general of St Petersburg, and General Leonty Leontyevich, Count von Bennigsen, led them. On 23 March 1801, 11 March Old Style, they penetrated the Mikhaylovsky Palace and assassinated Paul in his bedchamber. Britannica’s Alexander life adds that the plotters had let the son in on the secret, assuring him they would not kill his father but would only demand abdication. Alexander believed them, or wished to believe that all would go well. This page does not invent last words. It records a bedchamber, a castle, and a succession that began as a murder.

St Michael’s Castle, the Mikhaylovsky Palace, was a house Paul had wanted. He occupied it and died in it within weeks of the housewarming, as later captions like to say. The assassination is not a puzzle painting. It is a palace revolution of the kind the eighteenth century had practised, with the difference that this time the victim was an emperor who had tried to fence the nobles and the Guards at once. Alexander became tsar the next day. The next article is his dawn, his committee, and his secretary. This article’s inventory should stay small: a 1797 line of succession, a reversal of 1775, Gatchina troops in the capital’s eyes, a foreign policy that pointed at India, and a bedchamber on 23 March.

Keep 1812 out of this page. Keep Tilsit out of it. Keep the Decembrists out of it. Paul did not live to see a French army on the Moskva. He lived long enough to repeal Peter’s choice of heir, to annoy the class that had backed Catherine, and to die in a castle of his own choosing. Borovikovsky’s 1800 likeness is a year, not a verdict. The parade ground at Gatchina is the habit. The castle across the water is the end. Readers who want the son’s unofficial committee, the raft on the Niemen, or the square in December 1825 will find them in order. This reign was four years of reversal and lurch. It ended as palace Russia still knew how to end a reign: at night, indoors, with the heir already named.

George Shuklin photographed the castle from the Summer Garden on 2 August 2007. A later season on the moat. Use it as the house, then put it aside. The photograph cannot show Pahlen in a corridor.

Stop this page before Alexander’s Private Committee, before Friedland, before a raft in the Niemen. Those are the next articles, not this one’s hidden plot. Paul here is a son kept at Gatchina, a 1797 male line, a reversal of Catherine’s local agencies, harsh drill, a foreign policy that ended pointing at India, and a murder in St Michael’s Castle. Borovikovsky’s coat is the face of that bargain. Nemanov’s parade ground is the habit. Shuklin’s later water is the address. A definite order of succession is not nothing. It is also not a shield against the Guards.

Catherine’s golden age left him the serfs, the gentry’s charter, and a Black Sea shore she had taken. He did not love her system. He still inherited it. He tried to pull administration back to the centre and to make an army look like Gatchina. The nobles and the Guards answered in the only language they still trusted. Alexander woke as emperor on 24 March. The large Russia of the nineteenth century begins on that morning, with a son who had approved a deposition and received a corpse. This article’s last inventory should stay smaller than that century. No new code. No new charter. A bedchamber, a male line, and a castle that had barely been lived in.