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 Chicane. Then he decided to see the play for himself, in a private setting. The only viewers of the performance were Paul I and his son Alexander. After the first act the emperor decreed that Kapnist be returned from exile immediately. After the second, that the author be rewarded.
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 Gulliver’s Travels, published under Catherine’s aegis.
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: “C’est assez faire l’enfant! Allez régner!” (“Enough of this childishness! Go rule!”)10
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 the autocracy, and abolition of serfdom. Even though things never went beyond loquacious debates, the conservatives of the court grew extremely concerned.
They panicked even more when Alexander I, in an obvious attempt to turn vague talk of reform into concrete action, made Mikhail Speransky, an open liberal, his closest administrative councilor and then secretary of state.
These actions came on top of the zigzags in foreign policy that flabbergasted Russian public opinion: first Alexander joined the Austrians against Napoleon, but then, after several military failures, the most famous being the humiliating defeat at Austerlitz, he concluded the Treaty of Tilsit with the French emperor, signed in 1807 in a special ceremonial tent on a barge on the Niemen River.
The alliance with Napoleon did not please the Russian elite. The outrage of the conservative opposition reached the boiling point. Their unofficial leader became Alexander’s favorite sister, the beautiful, educated, and energetic Grand Duchess Ekaterina. She was seen as the patroness of Russian culture; Derzhavin, then sixty-four, dedicated elated odes to her.11
Russian patriots were particularly pleased by her refusal of Napoleon’s hand and demonstrative marriage to Georg Oldenburg, a modest Prussian prince in Russian service. When Prince Oldenburg was made governor of Tver Province, the grand duchess settled in provincial Tver, where her salon became the center of oppositionist intrigues.
Karamzin began visiting, calling her “the demigoddess of Tver.” She saw him as the man best able to formulate a conservative program.
It was at the request of Ekaterina that Karamzin wrote his famous “Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia,” a political manifesto of outstanding literary quality. Through the grand duchess, Karamzin sent the “Memoir” to Alexander in March 1811. It came to be a symbolic moment in the history of Russian culture.
Karamzin’s evolution from author of elegant sentimental novellas to energetic and influential political journalist and, later, to the greatest Russian historian was gradual but steady. Karamzin, like Novikov before him, had the personality of a natural enlightener. (This may have been characteristic of Masons; or perhaps people with these qualities were drawn to Masonry.)