Discontent with Paul had been growing almost since he came to the throne among the court and military elite of St. Petersburg. Paul had several sons, the eldest Alexander, born in 1777, was an agreeable and well-educated young man. Furthermore, Paul had replaced Peter the Great’s succession law with his own in 1797, a law that prohibited women from taking the throne and specified primogeniture in the male line. Thus in the event of Paul’s removal or death, the succession was secure.
Paul himself was afraid of assassination, and he built an entire new palace – the Castle of St. Michael – on the bank of the Fontanka River and surrounded by newly dug canals to make it inaccessible except by drawbridge. The “castle” was a strange combination of classical style and elements meant to recall a medieval Western castle, a conceit that delighted the tsar. He moved in at the end of 1800. In one sense, his fears were not in vain, for removal of the tsar was exactly what several of the officers of the guards had in mind. Their leader was the Baltic German Count Peter von der Pahlen, whom Paul had earlier exiled for trivial offenses, then forgiven and appointed military governor of St. Petersburg. Paul was too self-centered to realize what others thought of him, and regularly took friends for enemies and vice versa. In this case his mistake was to be literally fatal.
Pahlen had long harbored resentment and fear of the tsar since his earlier disgrace, and he had like-minded associates, chief among them Count N. P. Panin, the nephew of Paul’s old tutor. Panin was in disgrace for opposing the rapprochement with Napoleon and Pahlen was afraid not only for himself but for the rest of the imperial family. He believed that Paul was so far alienating the nobility that disorder might ensue, a frightening possibility in the unstable condition of Europe. As the plot thickened, Alexander became aware of it and did nothing to stop it. On the night of March 11, 1801, after an evening of heavy drinking, the conspirators made their way into the Castle of St. Michael. They found Paul after he tried to hide and arrested him: a struggle ensued and one of the officers strangled the tsar. It was the last and most violent palace coup in Russian history. A public announcement asserted that Paul had died of apoplexy and Alexander was now the tsar. The rejoicing was universal throughout St. Petersburg.
Alexander I ruled Russia for the next quarter of a century, a time full of drama. His personal imprint on the age was considerable, not least because he was the last of Russia’s tsars to display a personal desire to keep Russia in step with the rapidly changing political world to the west. After Alexander, Russia’s rulers opposed any political change or allowed it only under extreme duress. Toward the end of his life Alexander too began to move away from his early liberalism, but until the eve of the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 Alexander pursued a distinctly reformist policy.
Much of Alexander’s liberalism was a matter of attitude rather than institutional reorganization. Censorship was radically relaxed and in 1804 a new statute appeared that established relatively mild rules and gave the task of censorship over to university professors under the Ministry of Education. New publications began to appear, such as the writer Nikolai Karamzin’s journal Messenger of Europe, which was to remain the country’s leading literary and intellectual voice for several decades. A writer of sentimental novellas and an account of his travels in Europe, he used the journal to publish on a wide variety of topics, from the latest in French literature to the revolution in Haiti. It so impressed the tsar that in 1803 he appointed Karamzin the official historian of Russia, charged with composing a history of Russia that was scholarly but in readable prose. Alexander’s initiatives were a major step forward for Russian higher education, for he founded new universities in Kazan’ (1804), Khar’kov (1805), and St. Petersburg (1819), at the side of the older university in Moscow. In largely Polish Wilno the academy was transformed into a university and the German university in Dorpat (Estonia) was revived. The Imperial Lycée founded in Tsarskoe Selo under the eye of the tsars became one of the principal seedgrounds of Russian culture. All of these initiatives flowed from the rather nebulous liberalism taught the young tsar by his former tutor, Frederic LaHarpe of Switzerland. LaHarpe was later execrated by conservatives as the evil genius of Alexander’s reign, but in fact the tutor simply provided his pupil with the standard reading and ideas of the late Enlightenment, ideas that were still championed in the heir’s boyhood by his grandmother Catherine. Alexander’s youth coincided with the French Revolution, but unlike his father he did not see it simply as a threat to be confronted. He took it as part of vast changes sweeping European society and also as a warning to monarchs who failed to move with the times. His response was to try to reform the Russian state in line with the new Europe but keeping the power of the monarchy intact.
Alexander’s youthful friendships were with young noblemen who shared these views and they were to play a major role in the early years of the reign. He appointed five of them, Pavel Stroganov, Nikolai Novosil’tsev, the Polish Prince Adam Czartoryski, and others, to an unofficial committee to advise him on the type of reform that Russia needed. After some initial discussion of constitutions and the evils of serfdom, the talk moved more in the direction of strengthening the administration and legal order. To this end Alexander radically reshaped the Russian government, abolishing the old colleges and other structures left from the time of Catherine and Paul and putting in their place ministries. The new ministries, modeled on those of Napoleonic France, were headed by a single minister, not a committee, and were given a large staff and wide areas of administrative control, if no legislative power. With this new structure Alexander created the bureaucratic state that was to rule Russia under the tsar until 1917. His ministries were supposed to and largely did follow legal guidelines, though the power of the tsar to make law at will introduced a major element of arbitrary power that also lasted until the end of the old regime. The lack of a legal culture was a further obstacle to legal order, but the law faculties of the new universities and the private Demidov law school in Iaroslavl’ were designed to remedy this defect and in time did so, to some extent. The young graduates of these institutions with professional legal education began to replace clerks that operated simply by knowledge of existing practice and the old grandees with their general cultures derived from French literature. Alexander placed the Senate over all these institutions, now that it had been transformed into a place for administrative review and a supreme court.
Figure 8. Central St. Petersburg with the Winter Palace from Four Panoramic Views of St. Petersburg, by John Augustus Atkinson, London, 1802.
The reform process was significantly aided by the appointment of Michael Speranskii to the position of state secretary to the tsar. Speranskii was as a parvenu (his father was a priest, not a nobleman) who had worked his way up by sheer intelligence and hard work. His bland exterior concealed an inner fire, fed by mystical religious beliefs and devotion to the law. He came from a successful career in the new Ministry of Justice to work directly with Alexander at legal reform. In 1809 he compiled a constitution for Russia that included a limited representative legislature and some checks on the tsar’s power. This project never came into existence, but he did manage to establish a Council of State (again on the Napoleonic model) to provide a central locus of power at the side of the tsar. Henceforth new laws were generally discussed in the Council of State before the tsar made a final decision. Speranskii was also instrumental in the granting of a constitution to Russia’s new acquisition, Finland. As a result of fears for Petersburg and foreign policy complications, Russia annexed Finland from Sweden in 1809, in the process giving the country its own government for the first time, if only an autonomous one within the Russian empire. Thus autocratic Russia acquired a constitutional unit within the empire that lasted as such until the empire collapsed. In Finland, the Russian tsar was a constitutional ruler.