Paul 1 Peter Pavel I Petrovich. "institution on the imperial family"
In November 1796, after the death of Catherine II, Emperor Paul 1 ascended the Russian throne. The short, but extremely important and eventful reign of one of the most mysterious and controversial figures in Russian history began. In order to understand and correctly evaluate what happened during the four and a half years of Pavlov’s reign, it is necessary to remember that at the time of his accession to the throne, the emperor was already 42 years old, i.e. he was a mature man with an established character, established political convictions and ideas about the needs of Russia and the best ways to manage it. The character and political views of the emperor were formed in very difficult and unusual conditions.
The birth of Paul in 1754 was greeted at the court of grandmother Elizabeth Petrovna as a long-awaited event, since the empress was extremely worried about the continuation of the dynasty. Immediately after birth, the child was taken to Elizabeth’s chambers, where his parents were allowed only with her special permission. In fact, until the coup of 1762. Pavel is raised without the participation of his parents, not really knowing either his mother or his father. The latter was completely indifferent to him. It is significant that in the manifesto about Peter’s accession to the throne, neither Paul nor Catherine were even mentioned. From 1761, N.I. Panin was appointed Pavel’s chief educator.
Panin sincerely became attached to his pupil. Himself a supporter of the Enlightenment, he dreamed of raising Paul to be an ideal sovereign for Russia. And indeed, according to the memoirs of his contemporaries, young Pavel was a well-educated romantic youth who also believed in the ideals of enlightened absolutism. He was prepared for the state career and he grew up with the consciousness that he would have to rule Russia.
In 1773, Pavel married Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt, who was named Natalya Alekseevna upon baptism into Orthodoxy. The young man, who had just left the care of teachers and educators, fell madly in love with his young wife, but the happiness was short-lived - three years later Natalya Alekseevna died in childbirth. A few months later, Paul married again to Princess Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, who received the name Maria Feodorovna in Orthodoxy. In 1777, their first-born, the future Emperor Alexander 1, was born, and in 1779, their second son, Constantine. They were taken from their parents and raised under the supervision of their grandmother. In 1781-1782 Pavel and Maria Feodorovna traveled around Europe, where they made a favorable impression on European courts. But during the trip, Pavel behaved carelessly, openly criticizing the policies of Catherine and her favorites. Apparently, this became known to the empress, who, upon her son’s return, tried to remove him from the court by donating the Gatchina manor, where Paul henceforth spent most of his time. Like Peter I once did in Preobrazhenskoye and Peter III in Oranienbaum, Paul created his own small army in Gatchina and enthusiastically took up drill, taking the Prussian military system as a model. Discipline, order, and a certain asceticism seemed to be contrasted with the luxury and disorderly life of the St. Petersburg court. He enjoyed the unquestioning submission of his soldiers, dreaming of a time when all of Russia would submit to him in the same way. He believed that for a true autocrat, Catherine was too feminine and soft and liberal. The harmfulness of such a rule was increased in his eyes by the revolutionary danger, especially after the collapse of the monarchy in France. Under these conditions, Pavel saw the salvation of Russia only in strengthening power.
Paul's intention to deal with the rebels with the help of cannons should not, however, be considered only a manifestation of ruthlessness or political myopia. Behind this there was a certain system of views, according to which, in order to avoid revolution, it was necessary, with the help of military discipline and police measures, to preserve the existing regime for as long as possible, removing corrupting elements from it. According to Paul, this primarily concerned various manifestations of personal and public freedom and was expressed in the lifestyle and behavior of the nobles, in neglect of public service, in elements of self-government, in the excessive luxury of the court, in the relative freedom of thought and self-expression. Paul saw the reasons for the disintegration in the mistakes of Catherine's policies.
Paul contrasted the Enlightenment ideals of civil liberty with the ideals of medieval chivalry with its ideas about nobility, loyalty, honor, courage, and service to the sovereign.
And finally, on November 6, 1796, when the empress died, Paul received the long-awaited crown and power. The spirit of the military changed the appearance of the court and the capital.
Domestic policy of Paul I
The very first steps of Paul the Emperor demonstrated his intention to act contrary to his mother’s policies in everything. This desire colored, in fact, his entire reign. So, of course, it is not at all liberal sympathies that explain the release of Pavel Novikov, Radishchev, T. Kosciuszko, and with him other Poles, and the replacement of many senior officials on charges of corruption. The new emperor tried, as it were, to cross out the previous 34 years of Russian history, to declare them a complete mistake.
In Paul's domestic policy, several interrelated areas are highlighted - public administration reform, changes in class politics and military reform. At first glance, the reform of public administration carried out by Paul, just like Catherine’s policy, was aimed at further centralization of power, but this task was solved differently. Thus, if under Catherine the importance of the Prosecutor General of the Senate especially increased, and he was in charge of many state affairs, including all financial policy, then under Pavel the Prosecutor General turned into a kind of prime minister, concentrating in his hands the functions of the ministers of internal affairs. , justice, partly finance.
A further change in the functions of the Senate as a whole, for which Catherine in her later projects essentially prepared the role of the body of supreme legal supervision, is associated with the reorganization of central and local government. Back in the 80s. a number of collegiums were liquidated and only three remained - the Military one. Admiralty and Foreign Affairs. This was due to the fact that, declaring freedom of enterprise, Catherine believed it was possible to transfer the minimum necessary control over economic development into the hands of local authorities. Paul restored some colleges, considering, however, that it was necessary to transform them into ministries, replacing the principle of collegial government with one-man rule. Thus, in 1797, a completely new Ministry of Appanages was created, which was in charge of lands that belonged directly to the royal family, and in 1800, the Ministry of Commerce. Paul even more decisively destroyed the entire system of local government created on the basis of the Institutions of 1775.
Firstly, the positions of governors were eliminated, who, in the opinion of the new emperor, enjoyed too much independence. Secondly, the orders of public charity and the deanery council were closed; The city estate administration was merged with the police, and the city council was liquidated. The judicial system created by Catherine also underwent reform: a number of judicial instances were eliminated altogether, and the chambers of the civil and criminal courts were merged into one. In this regard, the role of the Senate as a judicial body was again strengthened.
Paul also changed the administrative-territorial division of the country, the principles of managing the outskirts of the empire. Thus, 50 provinces were transformed into 41 provinces and the Region of the Don Army. Traditional governing bodies were returned to the Baltic provinces, Ukraine and some other peripheral territories. All these transformations are obviously contradictory: on the one hand, they increase the centralization of power in the hands of the tsar and eliminate elements of self-government, on the other, they reveal a return to a variety of forms of governance on the national outskirts. This contradiction stemmed primarily from the weakness of the new regime, the fear of not being able to control the entire country, as well as the desire to gain popularity in areas where there was a threat of outbreaks of the national liberation movement. And, of course, there was a desire to redo everything in a new way. It is significant that the content of Paul’s judicial reform and the liquidation of class self-government bodies meant, in essence, a step back for Russia. This reform affected not only the urban population, but also the nobility.
The attack on noble privileges, legalized by the Charter of 1785, began almost from the first days of Pavlov's reign. Already in 1797, a review was announced for all officers on the lists of the regiments, and those who did not appear were dismissed. This measure was due to the fact that under Catherine there was a custom of enrolling young noble children in the regiment, so that by the time they reached adulthood they would already have officer ranks. Also, a large number of officers were listed as sick, on vacation, etc. In addition, many of the highest dignitaries of the state, along with positions in the state apparatus, had the ranks of generals and were listed in various, usually guards regiments. Therefore, the measure taken by Paul seemed quite reasonable and fair, although it embittered the nobles. It was followed by a restriction of the privileges of non-serving nobles. Having requested lists of such nobles in August 1800, Paul ordered that most of them be assigned to military service. Prior to this, since October 1799, a procedure had been established according to which special permission from the Senate was required to transfer from military service to civilian service. Another decree of the emperor prohibited non-serving nobles from participating in noble elections and holding elected positions.
In 1799, provincial noble assemblies were abolished, the rights of district members were limited and, conversely, the right of governors to interfere in noble elections was strengthened. In 1797, the nobles were obliged to pay a special tax for the maintenance of the provincial administration, and in 1799 the amount charged was increased. Historians are also aware of cases of the use of corporal punishment, abolished by Catherine for the nobility, in Pavlov’s time. But in general it would be a mistake to consider Paul’s policy as anti-noble. Rather, it shows a clear desire to transform the nobility into a knightly class - disciplined, organized, serving without exception and devoted to their sovereign. It is no coincidence that Paul made an attempt to limit the influx of non-nobles into the ranks of the nobility, prohibiting their promotion to non-commissioned officers. From these positions, the emperor’s policy towards the peasantry becomes clearer.
Paul's reign, like the previous one, was marked by massive distributions to peasants as a reward for service, and in four years Paul managed to distribute almost as many peasants as his mother did in 34 (about 600 thousand). However, the difference was not only in quantity. If Catherine gave her favorites either estates left without an owner or estates in newly conquered territories, then Paul distributed first of all to state peasants, thereby significantly worsening their situation. Having declared at the beginning of his reign that every subject had the right to file a complaint with him personally, Paul brutally suppressed such attempts on the part of the peasants. In December 1796, a decree was issued on assigning peasants to private owners in the Don Army Region and in Novorossiya, in March 1798 - on allowing merchant breeders to buy peasants for their enterprises with and without land. On the other hand, a number of legislative acts appeared that objectively contributed to the weakening of serfdom. So, in February 1797 The auction sale of courtyard and landless peasants was prohibited, and in October 1798, the sale of Ukrainian peasants without land was prohibited. For the first time in many years, upon Paul’s accession to the throne, serfs had to take an oath to the new emperor on an equal basis with free peasants; in December 1797, the arrears in the per capita tax were removed from the peasants and townspeople, and the recruitment set assigned by Catherine was canceled. The most famous is the so-called Manifesto on the Three-Day Corvee, published by Paul along with other important documents on the day of his coronation on April 5, 1797.
It is noteworthy that the main meaning of the manifesto is related to the ban on work on Sundays. i.e., it confirms the legal norm that existed in the Council Code of 1649. The limitation of corvee to three days in the Manifesto is spoken of rather as a desirable, more rational distribution of the working time of farmers. The ambiguity of the manifesto led to an ambiguous interpretation by both contemporaries and historians. The peasants perceived the manifesto as a relief of their situation and tried to complain about the landowners who did not comply with it. There are cases when landowners were actually subjected to penalties and punishments for this.
However, the fact of non-fulfillment of the manifesto should not be discounted. Moreover, in some areas, for example in Ukraine, where corvee was limited to two days a week, the manifesto, on the contrary, worsened the situation of the peasants. The manifesto's ambiguity was most likely deliberate. Firstly, Paul, fearing peasant uprisings, tried to prevent them with populist measures, and secondly, he acquired another instrument of pressure on the nobles. Thirdly, he also could not openly weaken serfdom, since the dependence of the throne on the nobility was great, and he most likely had no such intentions.
Paul's policy towards the army looked more definite, to which he decided to transfer the Prussian military order, which he had so successfully used in Gatchina. The reform began with the introduction of a new uniform that completely copied the Prussian one: a long uniform, stockings and black patent leather shoes, a powdered head with a braid of a certain length; officers were given sticks with bone heads to punish offending soldiers. In December 1796, a new charter was issued, in which the main attention was paid to training soldiers in “shagistics”. Since it was based on the Prussian charter of 1760, no new achievements of Russian military thought, tested on the battlefields during Catherine’s reign, were reflected in it. Soon, several more regulations were issued for individual branches of the military, based on the idea of the army as a machine, the main thing in which is the mechanical coherence of the troops and efficiency. Initiative and independence are harmful and unacceptable.
Endless parades, drills, combined with harsh measures against officers - dismissals, exiles and even arrests - caused great discontent in the army, not only in the capital, but also in the provinces. So, already in 1796-1798. In the Smolensk province there was an anti-government circle, which included officers of several regiments stationed there, officials of local institutions, as well as a number of retired military personnel.
Speaking about the internal policy of Paul I, it is worth mentioning some of his innovations related to the status of the sovereign and the royal family. On the day of his coronation, Paul published a decree on succession to the throne, establishing the transfer of the throne by inheritance strictly through the male line. The decree continued to be in force in Russia until 1917. What was also new was the creation of the already mentioned Ministry of Appanages, which meant the actual inclusion of the personal economy of the royal family in the sphere of state jurisdiction. Convinced of the divine origin of royal power, Paul did a lot to organize the external manifestations of the monarchical idea. He was a great lover of various ceremonies and rituals, which were carried out scrupulously, with observance of the smallest details, were distinguished by extraordinary pomp and lasted for many hours. The entire life of the court was given a strictly regulated ritual, which was further strengthened with the proclamation of Paul in 1798 as Grand Master of the Order of Malta. It should be noted, however, that all this Europeanized ritual was alien to Russia, and in Europe itself it was already perceived as archaic, and therefore caused only grins among most contemporaries, in no way contributing to the goals of glorifying the monarchy that Paul set for himself.
Petty regulation extended to the daily lives of his subjects. In particular, special decrees prescribed certain styles and sizes of clothing; it was forbidden to wear round hats, shoes with ribbons instead of buckles, etc. Some prohibitions concerned appearance and behavior at the ball. It is characteristic that all these restrictions applied not only to Russian citizens, but also to foreigners. Thus, the charge d'affaires of Sardinia in Russia was expelled from St. Petersburg for wearing a round hat.
In Paul's policy there is clearly a desire to unify all spheres of life, to exclude the diversity of opinions, judgments, the possibility of choosing a lifestyle, style of behavior, clothing, etc. In this very possibility, Paul saw a revolutionary danger. The introduction of censorship and the ban on the import of books from abroad were aimed at combating the penetration of revolutionary ideas.
Foreign policy of Paul I
The main foreign policy problem of Pavlov's reign was the relationship with France. The war with her was already being prepared by Catherine II. It was planned to send a 50,000-strong corps under the command of Suvorov to Europe in 1797. Catherine's death caused the cancellation of this campaign. The French saw this as a sign of a change in Russia's attitude towards their country and tried to take advantage of the moment to exclude Russia from the number of their potential enemies. However, they were wrong. From the first months of his reign, Paul made it clear that his hatred of republican France was no weaker than Catherine’s. In 1797, Russia recruited regiments of French monarchists under the command of the Prince of Condé (a relative of the executed Louis of the 16th century), accepted the French king in exile, Louis XVIII, and assigned him an annual pension of 200,000 rubles. In 1798, all immigrants from France were prohibited from entering Russia. However, this was not enough. The countries of Europe, fearing the victorious troops of France, made all kinds of diplomatic efforts to involve Russia in the war. In 1798, a second anti-French coalition was created (Russia, Austria, Great Britain, Turkey, Sicily, Portugal and the South German states). One of the reasons for Russia’s entry into the coalition was Bonaparte’s seizure of Malta and the expulsion of the Order of Malta (Order of the Johannites) from there, after which Paul took him under his protection and promised to take revenge for the insult inflicted on the Order. The war was to be fought in three theaters: 1. in Holland together with England; 2. in Italy (the main forces under the command of Suvorov were sent here) together with Austria and 3. in the Mediterranean Sea (Ushakov’s fleet) together with England and Turkey.
Already in the fall of 1798, the Russian-Turkish squadron under the command of F.F. Ushakova entered the Mediterranean Sea to act against the French. The English squadron under the command of the famous Nelson acted independently against the garrison of Malta. Nakhimov focused his efforts on conquering the Ionian Islands, which were of great importance in the struggle for dominance in the Mediterranean. The apogee of the struggle for the islands was the storming of the fortress on the island of Corfu (Kerkyra) on February 18, 1799. The islands liberated by Ushakov formed the Republic of the Seven Islands - the first Greek state in modern history. After this, Russian naval detachments landed in various parts of Southern and Central Italy and captured Naples and Rome. In January 1800, the Russian squadron was recalled by Paul to Russia due to a change in the political situation.
The fighting on land began in 1799. In Holland, a joint Russian-English landing under the command of the Duke of York, more than doubling the French forces, acted indecisively and ultimately failed. The Allies intended to deliver the main blow to the French in Italy, where large forces of the Russian and Austrian armies were concentrated. Overall command was transferred to Suvorov, but the subordination of the Austrians was rather formal. in just one month - April 1799, Suvorov defeated the French army of General Moreau and captured all of Northern Italy (except Genoa). The army of General MacDonald came to the rescue of Moro from Southern Italy. Suvorov decided not to wait until the two enemy armies united and to defeat them piece by piece. He made a rapid march towards MacDonald and defeated him in the Battle of the River. Trebbii (6-9 June 1799). Now Suvorov had a great opportunity to finish off the remnants of Moreau’s troops, but the French were saved by the indecisiveness of the Austrians, who prohibited any risky operations. Only at the end of July did the Austrian troops unite with the Russians, and already on August 4, at Novi, a battle took place with the French army, the new commander-in-chief of which was General Joubert (died in battle). After this victory, Suvorov became the master of Italy. The French were again saved from complete defeat by the inconsistency of the allies (the Austrian Gofkriegsrat forbade its troops to participate in the pursuit of the retreating ones). Relations between the Russians and the Austrians deteriorated to such an extent that their governments decided to henceforth act separately. It was decided that the Russians would move to Switzerland, and the Austrians would remain in Italy. At the end of August, Suvorov led his troops on the now famous Swiss campaign (September - October 1799).
In Switzerland, in the Zurich area, it was planned to connect with the 30,000-strong corps of the general. Rimsky-Korsakov. However, at the time when Suvorov’s troops, knocking down the French barriers, were approaching the Alps, Rimsky-Korsakov’s corps was already defeated. Abandoned by their Austrian allies, the Russians lost 18 thousand people, almost all their guns and banners. This was the heaviest defeat of the Russian army in the entire 18th century. Having defeated Rimsky-Korsakov, the French considered Suvorov doomed, because. his troops were trapped (with enemies in front and behind). To save the army, Suvorov decided to try to break through the Alps, which were considered completely impassable for large masses of troops. At the cost of incredible efforts, Suvorov withdrew his army to Bavaria on October 19. Here he received orders from Paul to return to Russia. The alliance with Austria was dissolved. For outstanding military achievements, Suvorov received the title of Generalissimo and the title of Prince of Italy. It was ordered to give him royal honors, even in the presence of the emperor himself. This was Suvorov's last and, perhaps, most brilliant campaign. Soon after returning to Russia, he died.
Disillusioned with his allies (who, moreover, were greatly weakened), after the coup of the 18th Brumaire (November 9, 1799) in France, Paul began to lean toward rapprochement with Napoleon. In the next 1800, both sides took steps towards mutual rapprochement. In particular, France freed all Russian prisoners, and Bonaparte approached Paul with a proposal to establish friendly relations between the two sides. This appeal caused Paul's consent and on the eve of the new year 1801, 22,500 Don Cossacks were sent to conquer India. In development of this new line in relation to France, Paul I demanded that Louis XVIII leave the country and deprived him of his pension.
Coup of March 11, 1801
It is quite possible that if Paul’s transformations concerned only the sphere of administrative and police management and were carried out carefully and consistently, his fate would have turned out differently. But society, having already tasted the fruits of “enlightened absolutism,” did not want to part with that, albeit minimal, freedom that it acquired during Catherine’s reign. In addition, the impetuous, hot-tempered, fickle and unpredictable character of the emperor created a climate of uncertainty about the future, when the fate of the Russian nobleman turned out to be dependent on the random whim or change of mood of someone who was seen only as a tyrant on the throne, Moreover, if in the preparation of previous coups of the 18th century. The decisive role belonged to the guard, now discontent has spread to virtually the entire army. Paul failed to find support in any social system.
Paul's fate was thus sealed. The conspiracy was brewing virtually from the very beginning of his reign, and many dignitaries, courtiers, senior officers, and even the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Alexander Pavlovich, were involved in it (or at least were aware of it). The night of March 11, 1801 became fatal for Paul, when several dozen conspirators broke into the emperor’s chambers in the newly built Mikhailovsky Castle and killed him. Alexander I was proclaimed Emperor of All Russia.
Historians, as already mentioned, evaluate Pavlovsk’s reign differently, equally agreeing that the continued existence of Pavlov’s regime would have delayed the socio-political development of Russia. There is also a point of view according to which Paul’s policy corresponded to the interests of the absolute monarchy, and the means he chose corresponded to his goal. The reign of Alexander I became a new era in the history of Russia. For with the murder of Paul the Russian history of the 18th century ended.
wiki.304.ru / History of Russia. Dmitry Alkhazashvili.
There is a historical anecdote about how Alexander III instructed Chief Prosecutor Pobedonostsev to find out who the father of Paul I was: Catherine II’s lover Sergei Saltykov or her legal husband Peter III. First, the dignitary informed the emperor that the rumors about Saltykov’s paternity were confirmed, to which he replied: “Thank God, we are Russians!” When Pobedonostsev later found evidence in favor of Peter III, Alexander III no less joyfully declared: “Thank God, we are legitimate!”
Save Russia!
The aging Elizaveta Petrovna increasingly realized that in choosing Peter III (grandson of Peter the Great) as heir to the throne, she had made a mistake. The scion of the Holstein-Gottorp dynasty stubbornly showed no interest in state affairs; moreover, he worshiped the Prussians, was idle and drank heavily.
The only thing that remained for Elizabeth was to wait for the birth of an heir from the crowned couple in order to formally remove Peter from power. But here another problem arose. After 8 years of marriage, Peter and Catherine still had no children.
Chancellor Bestuzhev-Ryumin, realizing that this could wait until the end of the century, frankly reported to the Empress that Peter and Catherine did not have an intimate relationship. Elizabeth allegedly responded to this: “Save Russia, save the state, save everything, figure out what to do - act as you see fit.”
The cunning chancellor came up with a simple solution. He proposed bringing the handsome chamberlain Sergei Saltykov closer to Catherine, who was languishing alone, and moving her husband to the far part of the palace. Elizabeth moved on. In order to finally separate Catherine and Peter into different bedrooms, she gave the latter the Lyubertsy estate near Moscow.
“Sergei Saltykov made me understand the reason for his frequent visits,” Ekaterina recalled. “I continued to listen to him, he was as beautiful as day, and, of course, no one could compare with him at court. He was 25 years old, and in general both by birth and by many other qualities he was an outstanding gentleman. I didn’t give in all spring and part of the summer.”
Next, Catherine describes in detail all the stages of her romance, right up to her rapprochement with Saltykov in the summer of 1752. In December of the same year she became pregnant, but on the way to Moscow she had a miscarriage. The second pregnancy also ended in miscarriage in May 1753. Subsequently, the lovers separated, and in April 1754 Saltykov was removed from the court. And in September 1754, the Grand Duchess gave birth to her long-awaited first child.
Incriminating evidence
Catherine’s notes, albeit indirectly, still hint that Peter III has nothing to do with Paul. Emperor Alexander II was so impressed by the revelations of his great-grandmother that he tried to shed light on his ancestry in conversations with old courtiers.
Rumors that Paul was Catherine’s illegitimate son were also fueled by the fact that the heir appeared only in the 10th year of the fruitless union. In addition, from Catherine’s diaries we know that her husband suffered from phimosis before the surgery, and this could seriously interfere with the intimate contacts of the spouses.
Peter was more interested not in the charms of young Catherine, but in military maneuvers. He was also partial to the weaker sex, but he gave preference to stupid ugly girls. Until the summer of 1752, Catherine was still an involuntary virgin.
On Easter 1752, the maid of honor Choglokova introduced the Grand Duchess to two handsome men - Sergei Saltykov and Lev Naryshkin, who immediately began to vigorously court the unapproachable Catherine. In order to somehow stir her up, Choglokova, in communicating with her, implanted the idea that adultery, of course, is a condemned thing, but there are “positions of a higher order for which an exception should be made.” And Catherine made her choice.
In addition to Catherine's memoirs, another document - the report of Chancellor Bestuzhev-Ryumin to Empress Elizabeth - may also indicate that the mission entrusted to Saltykov was completed. There are the following lines:
“What was drawn, according to the wise consideration of Your Majesty, took on a good and desired beginning - the presence of the executor of Your Majesty’s highest will is now not only not necessary here, but even to achieving perfect fulfillment and concealing the secret for eternal times would be harmful. Based on these considerations, you are pleased, most gracious empress, to command Chamberlain Saltykov to be Your Majesty’s ambassador in Stockholm to the King of Sweden.”
In other words: “The Moor has done his job, the Moor can leave.” At that time, an honorary exile was awarded to those who did their job well in the interests of the state.
The version about the paternity of Sergei Saltykov was supported by the Soviet historian Nikolai Pavlenko, who, in particular, wrote: “Some courtiers who observed the family life of the grand ducal couple whispered that the baby should be called Sergeevich, not Petrovich, after his father. That's probably what happened."
Chukhon version
The mystery surrounding the birth of Paul I was never resolved. Over time, new rumors began to appear. There was a rumor spread by the writer Alexander Herzen in 1861 during his “London sitting”. In the 20th century, it was resurrected by the writer Nathan Eidelman, who published the historical essay “Reverse Providence” in the New World magazine.
According to this version, the third child, whom Catherine conceived from Saltykov, was also born dead, and desperate Elizabeth ordered an urgent replacement of the baby. A living child was found nearby, in the village of Kotly, in a Chukhon family.
So that Catherine would not suspect a substitution, the Empress did not allow her to look at her son for more than a month. Exhausted by childbirth, the Grand Duchess was abandoned to the mercy of fate, left without proper care. According to Herzen, the “empty and evil Empress Elizabeth” wanted the woman in labor to die.
No matter how fantastic this story looks, it had witnesses. At that time, near the village of Kotly there was the estate of Karl Tizenhausen. The young aristocrat remembered very well that in one night the village was wiped off the face of the earth, and its inhabitants were loaded onto carts and taken to Kamchatka.
In the early 1820s, an event occurred that can also confirm the “Chukhon legend.” A certain Afanasy arrived from Kamchatka to St. Petersburg, declaring himself the brother of the late Paul I. The too talkative old man, of course, was sent to the Peter and Paul Fortress.
However, a member of the State Duma, Dmitry Lanskoy, told his nephew, the writer Alexander Odoevsky, that Emperor Alexander Pavlovich secretly visited an old man at night who looked like his late father, talked to him for a long time about something and often sighed.
Doubts remain
Many researchers, including Sergei Aldanov, are confident that Catherine in her notes deliberately created the impression that Pavel’s father was not her husband. Not everyone trusts what Ekaterina wrote. Thus, the historian Yakov Barskov believed: “Lies were the queen’s main tool: all her life, from early childhood to old age, she used this tool, mastered it like a virtuoso.”
According to historians, Catherine had to justify her seizure of power in various ways. After her husband's overthrow, she made up so many stories about him and their relationship that it is extremely difficult to separate fact from fiction. Catherine benefited from the bad reputation of her son - a direct competitor in the struggle for the throne. And fueling rumors about his illegitimacy in this sense was an effective weapon.
Alexander Mylnikov, the author of a book about Peter III, notes that Catherine was afraid of potential supporters of Paul, who could demand the throne for a ruler of royal blood and get rid of the foreigner who had usurped power. The historian has no doubt that Catherine knew very well who Paul’s real father was, which is why she behaved very formally and coldly towards him.
Peter III himself considered Paul his son. And if he declared this so confidently, it means that there was still an intimate relationship between him and Catherine. Melnikov in his book compares the notice of the birth of his son, sent by Peter to Frederick II, with a similar notice of the birth of his daughter Anna, who was from Catherine’s next lover, Stanislav Poniatovsky. There is a huge difference between them.
Paul repeatedly heard gossip about his origins, and this left an indelible mark on his soul. Chulkov in the book “Emperors: Psychological Portraits” wrote: “He himself was convinced that Peter III was really his father.”
It is enough to compare the portraits of Peter III and Sergei Saltykov to understand who Pavel is more like. Many of Paul's contemporaries claim that Ekaterina and Saltykov, “both beautiful as day,” could not give birth to such an ugly offspring, whom Admiral Chichagov called “a snub-nosed Chukhon with the movements of a machine gun.”
There is one more thing. As can be seen from the date of birth (September 20), Paul was most likely a product of the New Year holidays. And, as you know, the spouses celebrated them together. However, the final verdict on this pressing issue could be made by a genetic examination of the remains of our courtiers. However, it is unlikely that they will do it as long as there is even the slightest suspicion that Paul I was not of Romanov blood.
Paul I (short biography)
After the death of Catherine the Second, her son Pavel the First ascended to the Russian throne. During his lifetime, his mother actually removed him from power and their relationship was strained. In 1794, she tried to deprive him of the right of inheritance, transferring power to her grandson, but this was not destined to happen.
Having become emperor, Paul completely changes the order that had previously existed at his mother’s court. His policies (both foreign and domestic) were distinguished by their inconsistency. He restores the abolished boards, changes the administrative division of Russia, returning the previous forms of government. Paul deprives the nobility of privileges, limiting the effect of letters of grant and constrained local self-government. In 1797, he established a standard for peasant labor (three days of corvee per week) - the first of the restrictions on the power of landowners. But during the four years of his reign, he was able to distribute to the same landowners more than six hundred thousand peasants who belonged to the state.
In carrying out his ruling activities, Paul the First allowed extremes, pursuing inappropriate policies. For example, he banned the use of the words “club”, “citizen”, “council” and “fatherland”. The ruler also prohibits certain clothes and dances.
He grants amnesty to prisoners convicted of political crimes under Catherine II, but continues to fight manifestations of revolution in society. In 1797 - 1799, he established the most severe censorship - more than three hundred publications were banned, and on July 5, 1800, printing houses were sealed for a special censorship inspection. In addition, Paul intervenes in the affairs of the clergy, trying to unite Orthodoxy and Catholicism.
In 1798, an anti-French coalition was formed which included Russia, Turkey, Austria, and England. A year later, a major battle takes place for the island of Corfu and Russian soldiers enter Rome and Naples.
A year later, the second phase of the war begins, but already in 1800 Paul ceased hostilities, breaking the alliance with Austria and England and withdrawing his troops. After this, an agreement is concluded with France and Prussia against Austria.
The aggravation of relations with England causes great discontent among the nobility, because it was Russia’s main partner in the purchase and trade of grain.
Paul the First was killed as a result of a conspiracy and a palace coup, which occurred on the night of March 11th to 12th, 1801 and was organized by senior guards officers.
Pavel I Petrovich (1754-1801)
The ninth All-Russian Emperor Pavel I Petrovich (Romanov) was born on September 20 (October 1), 1754 in St. Petersburg. His father was Emperor Peter III (1728-1762), born in the German city of Kiel, and received the name Karl Peter Ulrich of Holstein-Gottorp at birth. By coincidence, Karl Peter simultaneously had rights to two European thrones - Swedish and Russian, since, in addition to kinship with the Romanovs, the Holstein dukes were in a direct dynastic connection with the Swedish royal house. Since the Russian Empress Elizaveta Petrovna had no children of her own, in 1742 she invited her 14-year-old nephew Karl Peter to Russia, who was baptized into Orthodoxy under the name Peter Fedorovich.
Having come to power in 1861 after the death of Elizabeth, Pyotr Fedorovich spent 6 months in the role of All-Russian Emperor. The activities of Peter III characterize him as a serious reformer. He did not hide his Prussian sympathies and, having taken the throne, immediately put an end to Russia's participation in the Seven Years' War and entered into an alliance against Denmark, Holstein's longtime offender. Peter III liquidated the Secret Chancellery, a gloomy police institution that kept all of Russia in fear. In fact, no one canceled denunciations; from now on they simply had to be submitted in writing. And then he took away the lands and peasants from the monasteries, which even Peter the Great could not do. However, the time allotted by history for the reforms of Peter III was not great. Only 6 months of his reign, of course, cannot be compared with the 34-year reign of his wife, Catherine the Great. As a result of a palace coup, Peter III was overthrown from the throne on June 16 (28), 1762 and killed in Ropsha near St. Petersburg 11 days after that. During this period, his son, the future Emperor Paul I, was not yet eight years old. With the support of the guard, the wife of Peter III came to power and proclaimed herself Catherine II.
The mother of Paul I, the future Catherine the Great, was born on April 21, 1729 in Stettin (Szczecin) in the family of a general in the Prussian service and received a good education for that time. When she was 13 years old, Frederick II recommended her to Elizabeth Petrovna as a bride for Grand Duke Peter Fedorovich. And in 1744, the young Prussian princess Sophia-Frederike-Augusta-Anhalt-Zerbst was brought to Russia, where she received the Orthodox name Ekaterina Alekseevna. The young girl was smart and ambitious, from the first days of her stay on Russian soil she diligently prepared to become a Grand Duchess, and then the wife of the Russian Emperor. But the marriage with Peter III, concluded on August 21, 1745 in St. Petersburg, did not bring happiness to the spouses.
It is officially believed that Pavel’s father is Catherine’s legal husband, Peter III, but in her memoirs there are indications (indirect, however) that Pavel’s father was her lover Sergei Saltykov. This assumption is supported by the well-known fact of the extreme hostility that Catherine always felt towards her husband, and against it is Paul’s significant portrait resemblance to Peter III, as well as Catherine’s persistent hostility towards Paul. A DNA examination of the emperor’s remains, which has not yet been carried out, could finally discard this hypothesis.
On September 20, 1754, nine years after the wedding, Catherine gave birth to Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich. This was a most important event, because after Peter I the Russian emperors had no children, confusion and confusion reigned at the death of each ruler. It was under Peter III and Catherine that hope for stability of the government appeared. During the first period of her reign, Catherine was concerned about the problem of the legitimacy of her power. After all, if Peter III was still half (on his mother’s side) Russian and, moreover, was the grandson of Peter I himself, then Catherine was not even a distant relative of the legal heirs and was only the wife of the heir. Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich was the legitimate but unloved son of the empress. After the death of his father, he, as the only heir, was supposed to take the throne with the establishment of a regency, but this, by the will of Catherine, did not happen.
Tsarevich Pavel Petrovich spent the first years of his life surrounded by nannies. Immediately after his birth, Empress Elizaveta Petrovna took him to her place. In her notes, Catherine the Great wrote: “They had just swaddled him when her confessor appeared, by order of the Empress, and named the child Paul, after which the Empress immediately ordered the midwife to take him and carry him with her, and I remained on the birthing bed.” The whole empire rejoiced at the birth of the heir, but they forgot about his mother: “Lying in bed, I cried and moaned continuously, I was alone in the room.”
Paul's baptism took place in magnificent surroundings on September 25th. Empress Elizaveta Petrovna expressed her favor towards the mother of the newborn by the fact that after the christening she herself brought her a decree to the cabinet on a golden platter to give her 100 thousand rubles. After the christening, ceremonial celebrations began at court - balls, masquerades, fireworks on the occasion of Paul's birth lasted about a year. Lomonosov, in an ode written in honor of Pavel Petrovich, wished him to compare with his great great-grandfather.
Catherine had to see her son for the first time after giving birth only 6 weeks later, and then only in the spring of 1755. Catherine recalled: “He lay in an extremely hot room, in flannel diapers, in a crib upholstered in black fox fur, they covered him with a satin blanket quilted on cotton wool, and on top of that, with a pink velvet blanket... sweat appeared on his face and all over his body "When Pavel grew up a little, the slightest breath of wind gave him a cold and made him sick. In addition, many stupid old women and mothers were assigned to him, who, with their excessive and inappropriate zeal, caused him incomparably more physical and moral harm than good." Improper care led to the fact that the child was characterized by increased nervousness and impressionability. Even in early childhood, Pavel’s nerves were so upset that he would hide under the table when doors slammed any loudly. There was no system in caring for him. He went to bed either very early, around 8 pm, or at one o'clock in the morning. It happened that he was given food when he “asked”; there were also cases of simple negligence: “Once he fell out of the cradle, so no one heard it. We woke up in the morning - Pavel was not in the cradle, looked - he was lying on the floor and very rests soundly."
Pavel received an excellent education in the spirit of the French enlightenment. He knew foreign languages, had knowledge of mathematics, history, and applied sciences. In 1758, Fyodor Dmitrievich Bekhteev was appointed his teacher, who immediately began teaching the boy to read and write. In June 1760, Nikita Ivanovich Panin was appointed chief chamberlain under Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich, Pavel’s tutor and teacher of mathematics was Semyon Andreevich Poroshin, a former aide-de-camp of Peter III, and the teacher of the law (since 1763) was Archimandrite Platon, hieromonk of the Trinity. Sergius Lavra, later Moscow Metropolitan.
On September 29, 1773, 19-year-old Pavel got married, marrying the daughter of the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, Princess Augustine-Wilhelmina, who received the name Natalya Alekseevna in Orthodoxy. Three years later, on April 16, 1776, at 5 a.m., she died in childbirth, and her child died with her. The medical report, signed by doctors Kruse, Arsh, Bock and others, speaks of a difficult birth for Natalya Alekseevna, who suffered from a curvature of the back, and the “large baby” was incorrectly positioned. Catherine, however, not wanting to waste time, begins a new matchmaking. This time the queen chose the Württemberg princess Sophia-Dorothea-Augustus-Louise. A portrait of the princess is delivered by courier, which Catherine II offers to Paul, saying that she is “meek, pretty, lovely, in a word, a treasure.” The heir to the throne falls more and more in love with the image, and already in June he goes to Potsdam to woo the princess.
Having seen the princess for the first time on July 11, 1776 in the palace of Frederick the Great, Paul writes to his mother: “I found my bride as she could only wish for in her mind: not ugly, large, slender, answers intelligently and efficiently. As for her heart, then She has it very sensitive and tender... She loves to be at home and practice reading and music, she is greedy to study in Russian..." Having met the princess, the Grand Duke passionately fell in love with her, and after parting, he wrote her tender letters declaring his love and devotion.
In August, Sophia-Dorothea comes to Russia and, following the instructions of Catherine II, on September 15 (26), 1776, receives Orthodox baptism under the name of Maria Fedorovna. Soon the wedding took place, a few months later she writes: “My dear husband is an angel, I love him to madness.” A year later, on December 12, 1777, the young couple had their first son, Alexander. On the occasion of the birth of the heir in St. Petersburg, 201 cannon shots were fired, and the sovereign grandmother Catherine II gave her son 362 acres of land, which laid the foundation for the village of Pavlovskoye, where the palace-residence of Paul I was later built. Work on the improvement of this wooded area near Tsarskoe Selo began already in 1778 The construction of the new palace, designed by Charles Cameron, was carried out mainly under the supervision of Maria Feodorovna.
With Maria Feodorovna, Pavel found true family happiness. Unlike mother Catherine and great-aunt Elizabeth, who did not know family happiness, and whose personal life was far from generally accepted moral standards, Pavel appears as an exemplary family man who set an example for all subsequent Russian emperors - his descendants. In September 1781, the grand ducal couple, under the name of Count and Countess of the North, set off on a long journey across Europe, which lasted a whole year. During this trip, Paul not only saw the sights and acquired works of art for his palace under construction. The journey also had great political significance. For the first time freed from the tutelage of Catherine II, the Grand Duke had the opportunity to personally meet European monarchs and paid a visit to Pope Pius VI. In Italy, Paul, following in the footsteps of his great-grandfather Emperor Peter the Great, is seriously interested in the achievements of European shipbuilding and becomes acquainted with the organization of naval affairs abroad. During his stay in Livorno, the Tsarevich finds time to visit the Russian squadron located there. As a result of assimilating new trends in European culture and art, science and technology, style and lifestyle, Pavel largely changed his own worldview and perception of Russian reality.
By this time, Pavel Petrovich and Maria Fedorovna already had two children after the birth of their son Konstantin on April 27, 1779. And on July 29, 1783, their daughter Alexandra was born, in connection with which Catherine II gave Pavel the Gatchina manor, bought from Grigory Orlov. Meanwhile, the number of Paul's children is constantly increasing - on December 13, 1784, daughter Elena was born, on February 4, 1786 - Maria, on May 10, 1788 - Ekaterina. Paul's mother, Empress Catherine II, rejoicing for her grandchildren, wrote to her daughter-in-law on October 9, 1789: “Really, madam, you are a master of bringing children into the world.”
All the older children of Pavel Petrovich and Maria Fedorovna were raised by Catherine II personally, having actually taken them away from their parents and without even consulting them. It was the empress who came up with names for Paul’s children, naming Alexander in honor of the patron saint of St. Petersburg, Prince Alexander Nevsky, and gave this name to Constantine because she intended her second grandson for the throne of the future Constantinople Empire, which was to be formed after the expulsion of the Turks from Europe. Catherine personally searched for a bride for Pavel’s sons, Alexander and Konstantin. And both of these marriages did not bring family happiness to anyone. Emperor Alexander only at the end of his life would find a devoted and understanding friend in his wife. And Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich will violate generally accepted norms and divorce his wife, who will leave Russia. Being the governor of the Duchy of Warsaw, he will fall in love with a beautiful Pole - Joanna Grudzinskaya, Countess Łowicz, in the name of preserving family happiness, he will renounce the Russian throne and will never become Constantine I, Emperor of All Rus'. In total, Pavel Petrovich and Maria Fedorovna had four sons - Alexander, Konstantin, Nikolai and Mikhail, and six daughters - Alexandra, Elena, Maria, Ekaterina, Olga and Anna, of whom only 3-year-old Olga died in infancy.
It would seem that Pavel’s family life was developing happily. Loving wife, many children. But the main thing was missing, what every heir to the throne strives for - there was no power. Paul patiently awaited the death of his unloved mother, but it seemed that the great empress, who had an imperious character and good health, was never going to die. In previous years, Catherine wrote more than once about how she would die surrounded by friends, to the sounds of gentle music among flowers. The blow suddenly overtook her on November 5 (16), 1796, in a narrow passage between two rooms of the Winter Palace. She suffered a severe stroke, and several servants barely managed to drag the empress’s heavy body out of the narrow corridor and lay it on a mattress spread on the floor. The couriers rushed to Gatchina to tell Pavel Petrovich the news of his mother’s illness. The first was Count Nikolai Zubov. The next day, in the presence of her son, grandchildren and close courtiers, the empress died without regaining consciousness at the age of 67, of which she spent 34 years on the Russian throne. Already on the night of November 7 (18), 1796, everyone was sworn in to the new emperor - 42-year-old Paul I.
By the time he ascended the throne, Pavel Petrovich was a man with established views and habits, with a ready-made, as it seemed to him, program of action. Back in 1783, he broke off all relations with his mother; there were rumors among the courtiers that Paul would be deprived of the right to succession to the throne. Pavel dives into theoretical discussions about the urgent need to change the governance of Russia. Far from the court, in Pavlovsk and Gatchina, he creates a unique model of the new Russia, which seemed to him a model for governing the entire country. At the age of 30, he received from his mother a large list of literary works for in-depth study. There were books by Voltaire, Montesquieu, Corneille, Hume and other famous French and English authors. Paul considered the goal of the state to be “the happiness of each and all.” He recognized only monarchy as a form of government, although he agreed that this form was “associated with the inconveniences of mankind.” However, Paul argued that autocratic power is better than others, since it “combines in itself the force of the laws of the power of one.”
Of all the activities, the new king had the greatest passion for military affairs. Advice from military general P.I. Panin and the example of Frederick the Great attracted him to the military path. During his mother's reign, Pavel, removed from business, filled his long leisure hours with training military battalions. It was then that Pavel formed, grew and strengthened that “corporal spirit” that he sought to instill in the entire army. In his opinion, the Russian army of Catherine’s time was more of a disorderly crowd than a properly organized army. Embezzlement, the use of soldiers' labor on the estates of commanders, and much more flourished. Each commander dressed the soldiers according to his own taste, sometimes trying to save money allocated for uniforms in his favor. Pavel considered himself a successor to the work of Peter I in transforming Russia. His ideal was the Prussian army, by the way, the strongest in Europe at that time. Paul introduced a new uniform uniform, regulations, and weapons. Soldiers were allowed to complain about abuses by their commanders. Everything was strictly controlled and, in general, the situation, for example, of the lower ranks became better.
At the same time, Paul was distinguished by a certain peacefulness. During the reign of Catherine II (1762-1796), Russia participated in seven wars, which in total lasted more than 25 years and caused heavy damage to the country. Upon ascending the throne, Paul declared that Russia under Catherine had the misfortune of using its population in frequent wars, and affairs within the country were neglected. However, Paul's foreign policy was inconsistent. In 1798, Russia entered into an anti-French coalition with England, Austria, Turkey and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. At the insistence of the allies, the disgraced A.V. was appointed commander-in-chief of the Russian troops. Suvorov, into whose jurisdiction the Austrian troops were also transferred. Under the leadership of Suvorov, Northern Italy was liberated from French domination. In September 1799, the Russian army made the famous crossing of the Alps. For the Italian campaign, Suvorov received the rank of generalissimo and the title of Prince of Italy. However, already in October of the same year, Russia broke the alliance with Austria, and Russian troops were recalled from Europe. Shortly before his murder, Paul sent the Don army on a campaign against India. These were 22,507 men without convoys, supplies or any strategic plan. This adventurous campaign was canceled immediately after the death of Paul.
In 1787, going into the active army for the first and last time, Paul left his “Order”, in which he outlined his thoughts on governing the state. Listing all the classes, he stops at the peasantry, which “contains with itself and with its labors all other parts, and therefore is worthy of respect.” Paul tried to implement a decree that serfs should work no more than three days a week for the landowner, and on Sunday they should not work at all. This, however, led to their even greater enslavement. After all, before Paul, for example, the peasant population of Ukraine did not know corvée at all. Now, to the joy of the Little Russian landowners, a three-day corvee was introduced here. In Russian estates it was very difficult to monitor the implementation of the decree.
In the area of finance, Paul believed that state revenues belonged to the state, and not to the sovereign personally. He demanded that expenses be coordinated with the needs of the state. Paul ordered part of the silver services of the Winter Palace to be melted down into coins, and up to two million rubles in banknotes to be destroyed to reduce the state debt.
Attention was also paid to public education. A decree was issued to restore the university in the Baltic states (it was opened in Dorpat already under Alexander I), the Medical-Surgical Academy, many schools and colleges were opened in St. Petersburg. At the same time, in order to prevent the idea of “depraved and criminal” France from entering Russia, the study of Russians abroad was completely prohibited, censorship was established on imported literature and music, and it was even forbidden to play cards. It is curious that, for various reasons, the new tsar paid attention to improving the Russian language. Soon after ascending the throne, Paul ordered in all official papers “to speak in the purest and simplest style, using all possible precision, and to always avoid pompous expressions that have lost their meaning.” At the same time, strange decrees that aroused distrust in Paul’s mental abilities were those prohibiting the use of certain types of clothing. Thus, it was forbidden to wear tailcoats, round hats, vests, or silk stockings; instead, a German dress with a precise definition of the color and size of the collar was allowed. According to A.T. Bolotov, Pavel demanded that everyone honestly perform their duties. So, driving through the city, writes Bolotov, the emperor saw an officer walking without a sword, and behind him an orderly carrying a sword and a fur coat. Pavel approached the soldier and asked whose sword he was carrying. He replied: “The officer who is in front.” “Officer! So, is it difficult for him to carry his sword? So put it on yourself, and give him your bayonet!” So Paul promoted the soldier to officer, and demoted the officer to private. Bolotov notes that this made a huge impression on the soldiers and officers. In particular, the latter, fearing a repetition of this, began to take a more responsible attitude towards the service.
In order to control the life of the country, Pavel hung a yellow box at the gates of his palace in St. Petersburg for submitting petitions in his name. Similar reports were accepted at the post office. This was new to Russia. True, they immediately began to use this for false denunciations, libels and caricatures of the Tsar himself.
One of the important political acts of Emperor Paul after ascending the throne was the reburial on December 18, 1796 of his father Peter III, who was killed 34 years earlier. It all started on November 19, when “by order of Emperor Pavel Petrovich, the body of the buried late Emperor Peter Fedorovich was removed from the Nevsky Monastery, and the body was placed in a new magnificent coffin, upholstered in gold, with imperial coats of arms, with the old coffin.” On the same day in the evening, “His Majesty, Her Majesty and their Highnesses deigned to arrive at the Nevsky Monastery, to the Lower Annunciation Church, where the body stood, and upon arrival, the coffin was opened; they deigned to venerate the body of the late sovereign... and then it was closed.” . Today it is difficult to imagine what the tsar was doing and forcing his wife and children to do. According to eyewitnesses, the coffin contained only bone dust and pieces of clothing.
On November 25, according to a ritual developed by the emperor in great detail, the coronation of the ashes of Peter III and the corpse of Catherine II was performed. Russia has never seen anything like this before. In the morning, in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, Paul laid the crown on the coffin of Peter III, and in the second hour of the day, Maria Feodorovna in the Winter Palace laid the same crown on the deceased Catherine II. There was one eerie detail in the ceremony in the Winter Palace - the chamber cadet and valets of the empress “raised the body of the deceased” during the laying of the crown. Obviously, it was simulated that Catherine II was, as it were, alive. In the evening of the same day, the empress’s body was transferred to a magnificently arranged funeral tent, and on December 1, Paul solemnly transferred the imperial regalia to the Nevsky Monastery. The next day, at 11 o’clock in the morning, a funeral cortege slowly set off from the Lower Annunciation Church of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. Ahead of the coffin of Peter III, the hero of Chesma, Alexey Orlov, carried the imperial crown on a velvet pillow. Behind the hearse, the entire august family walked in deep mourning. The coffin with the remains of Peter III was transported to the Winter Palace and installed next to Catherine’s coffin. Three days later, on December 5, both coffins were transported to the Peter and Paul Cathedral. They were displayed there for worship for two weeks. Finally, on December 18 they were interred. The tombs of the hated spouses indicated the same date of burial. On this occasion N.I. Grech remarked: “You would think that they spent their whole lives together on the throne, died and were buried on the same day.”
This whole phantasmagoric episode struck the imagination of contemporaries, who tried to find at least some reasonable explanation for it. Some argued that all this was done in order to refute rumors that Paul was not the son of Peter III. Others saw in this ceremony a desire to humiliate and insult the memory of Catherine II, who hated her husband. Having crowned the already crowned Catherine at the same time as Peter III, who did not have time to be crowned during his lifetime, with the same crown and almost simultaneously, Paul, as if anew, posthumously, married his parents, and thereby nullified the results of the palace coup of 1762. Paul forced the murderers of Peter III to wear imperial regalia, thereby exposing these people to public ridicule.
There is information that the idea of a secondary funeral for Peter III was suggested to Pavel by the freemason S.I. Pleshcheev, who by this wanted to take revenge on Catherine II for the persecution of “free masons”. One way or another, the ceremony of reburial of the remains of Peter III was performed even before the coronation of Paul, which followed on April 5, 1797 in Moscow - the new tsar attached such importance to the memory of his father, emphasizing once again that his filial feelings for his father were stronger than his feelings for the imperious mother. And on the very day of his coronation, Paul I issued a law on succession to the throne, which established a strict order of succession to the throne in a direct male descendant line, and not according to the arbitrary desire of the autocrat, as before. This decree was in effect throughout the 19th century.
Russian society had an ambivalent attitude towards the government measures of Pavlov's time and towards Pavel personally. Sometimes historians said that under Paul, the Gatchina people - ignorant and rude people - became the head of the state. Among them they call A.A. Arakcheev and others like him. The words of F.V. are cited as a characteristic of the “Gatchina residents”. Rostopchin that “the best of them deserves to be wheeled.” But we should not forget that among them were N.V. Repnin, A.A. Bekleshov and other honest and decent people. Among Paul's associates we see S.M. Vorontsova, N.I. Saltykova, A.V. Suvorova, G.R. Derzhavin, under him the brilliant statesman M.M. Speransky.
A special role in Paul's politics was played by relations with the Order of Malta. The Order of St. John of Jerusalem, which appeared in the 11th century, was associated with Palestine for a long time. Under the pressure of the Turks, the Johannites were forced to leave Palestine, settling first in Cyprus and then on the island of Rhodes. However, the struggle with the Turks, which lasted for centuries, forced them to leave this refuge in 1523. After seven years of wandering, the Johannites received Malta as a gift from the Spanish King Charles V. This rocky island became an impregnable fortress of the Order, which became known as the Order of Malta. By the Convention of January 4, 1797, the Order was allowed to have a Grand Priory in Russia. In 1798, Paul's manifesto "On the Establishment of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem" appeared. The new monastic order consisted of two priories - Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox with 98 commanderies. There is an assumption that Paul thereby wanted to unite the two churches - Catholic and Orthodox.
On June 12, 1798, Malta was taken by the French without a fight. The knights suspected Grand Master Gompesh of treason and deprived him of his rank. In the autumn of the same year, Paul I was elected to this post, and willingly accepted the signs of the new rank. Before Paul, the image of a knightly union was drawn, in which, in contrast to the ideas of the French Revolution, the principles of the order would flourish - strict Christian piety, unconditional obedience to elders. According to Paul, the Order of Malta, which had fought so long and successfully against the enemies of Christianity, should now gather all the “best” forces in Europe and serve as a powerful bulwark against the revolutionary movement. The residence of the Order was moved to St. Petersburg. A fleet was being equipped in Kronstadt to expel the French from Malta, but in 1800 the island was occupied by the British, and Paul soon died. In 1817 it was announced that the Order no longer existed in Russia.
At the end of the century, Pavel moved away from his family, and his relationship with Maria Fedorovna deteriorated. There were rumors about the empress's infidelity and unwillingness to recognize the younger boys - Nicholas, born in 1796, and Mikhail, born in 1798 - as her sons. Trusting and straightforward, but at the same time suspicious, Pavel, thanks to the intrigues of von Palen, who became his closest courtier, begins to suspect all the people close to him of hostility towards him.
Paul loved Pavlovsk and Gatchina, where he lived while awaiting the throne. Having ascended the throne, he began to build a new residence - St. Michael's Castle, designed by the Italian Vincenzo Brenna, who became the main court architect. Everything in the castle was adapted to protect the emperor. Canals, drawbridges, secret passages, it seemed, were supposed to make Paul's life long. In January 1801, construction of the new residence was completed. But many of Paul I’s plans remained unfulfilled. It was in the Mikhailovsky Palace that Pavel Petrovich was killed on the evening of March 11 (23), 1801. Having lost his sense of reality, he became maniacally suspicious, removed loyal people from himself, and himself provoked dissatisfied people in the guard and high society into a conspiracy. The conspiracy included Argamakov, Vice-Chancellor P.P. Panin, favorite of Catherine P.A. Zubov, Governor General of St. Petersburg von Palen, commanders of the guards regiments: Semenovsky - N.I. Depreradovich, Kavalergardsky - F.P. Uvarov, Preobrazhensky - P.A. Talyzin. Thanks to treason, a group of conspirators entered the Mikhailovsky Castle, went up to the emperor’s bedroom, where, according to one version, he was killed by Nikolai Zubov (Suvorov’s son-in-law, Platon Zubov’s older brother), who hit him in the temple with a massive gold snuffbox. According to another version, Paul was strangled with a scarf or crushed by a group of conspirators who attacked the emperor. "Have mercy! Air, air! What have I done wrong to you?" - these were his last words.
The question of whether Alexander Pavlovich knew about the conspiracy against his father remained unclear for a long time. According to the memoirs of Prince A. Czartoryski, the idea of a conspiracy arose almost in the first days of Paul’s reign, but the coup became possible only after it became known about the consent of Alexander, who signed a secret manifesto in which he pledged not to prosecute the conspirators after his accession to the throne. And most likely, Alexander himself understood perfectly well that without murder, a palace coup would be impossible, since Paul I would not voluntarily abdicate. The reign of Paul I lasted only four years, four months and four days. His funeral took place on March 23 (April 4), 1801 in the Peter and Paul Cathedral.
Maria Fedorovna devoted the rest of her life to her family and perpetuating the memory of her husband. In Pavlovsk, almost on the edge of the park, in the middle of the forest, above a ravine, the Mausoleum of the benefactor-spouse was erected according to the design of Thomas de Thomon. Like an ancient temple, it is majestic and silent, all nature around seems to be mourning along with a porphyry-bearing widow sculptured from marble, crying over the ashes of her husband.
Paul was ambivalent. A knight in the spirit of the outgoing century, he could not find his place in the 19th century, where the pragmatism of society and the relative freedom of representatives of the elite of society could no longer exist together. Society, which a hundred years before Paul tolerated any antics of Peter I, did not tolerate Paul I. “Our romantic king,” as A.S. called Paul I. Pushkin failed to cope with a country that was waiting not only for a strengthening of power, but also, above all, for various reforms in domestic policy. The reforms that Russia expected from every ruler. However, due to his upbringing, education, religious principles, experience of relationships with his father and, especially, with his mother, it was in vain to expect such reforms from Paul. Pavel was a dreamer who wanted to transform Russia, and a reformer who displeased everyone. An unfortunate sovereign who died during the last palace coup in the history of Russia. An unfortunate son who repeated the fate of his father.
Madam dearest mother!
Please take a break, please, for a moment from your important activities in order to accept the congratulations that my heart, submissive and obedient to your will, brings on the birthday of Your Imperial Majesty. May Almighty God bless your days, precious for the entire fatherland, to the most distant times of human life, and may Your Majesty never dry up for me the tenderness of a mother and ruler, always dear and revered by me, the feelings with which I remain for you, Your Imperial Majesty , the most humble and most devoted son and subject of Paul.
The night from November 5 to 6, 1796 in St. Petersburg turned out to be restless. Empress Catherine II suffered a stroke. Everything happened so unexpectedly that she did not have time to make any orders about the heir. According to Peter's law on succession to the throne, the emperor had the right to appoint an heir at his own request. Catherine’s desire in this regard, although unspoken, was long known: she wanted to see her grandson Alexander on the throne. But, firstly, they could not (or did not want) to find an official will drawn up in favor of the Grand Duke. Secondly, 15-year-old Alexander himself did not express an active desire to reign. And thirdly, the empress had a legitimate son, Alexander’s father, Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich, whose name had not left the lips of the courtiers since the morning.
Pavel arrived in Zimny in the middle of the night, accompanied by hundreds of soldiers of the Gatchina regiment and immediately went into his mother’s bedroom to make sure that she was really dying. His entry into the palace was like an assault. The guards in German uniforms placed everywhere caused a shock among the courtiers, accustomed to the elegant luxury of the last years of Catherine’s court. The Empress was still alive while the heir and Bezborodko, locked in her office, burned some papers in the fireplace. There was noticeable excitement in the square under the palace windows. The townspeople were sad about the death of the “mother empress,” but noisily expressed their joy when they learned that Paul would become king. The same thing was heard in the soldiers' barracks. Only in the court environment it was completely sad. According to Countess Golovina, many, having learned about the death of Catherine and the accession of her son to the throne, tirelessly repeated: “The end has come for everything: both her and our well-being.” But in order to understand what kind of person ended up on the Russian throne on that November day in 1796, we need to take a closer look at the history of his life.
He waited 34 years
This story begins on September 20, 1754, when a long-awaited and even required event took place in the family of the heir to the Russian throne: the daughter of Peter I, Russian Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, had a great-nephew, Pavel. The grandmother was much more pleased with this than the child’s father, the Empress’s nephew, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp Karl-Peter-Ulrich (Grand Duke Peter Fedorovich) and even more so the newborn’s mother, Sophia-Frederica-Augusta, Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst (Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseevna ).The princess was discharged from Germany as a birthing machine. The car turned out to have a secret. From the first days of her arrival, the seedy Zerbst princess set herself the task of achieving supreme power in Russia. The ambitious German woman understood that with the birth of her son, her already weak hopes for the Russian throne would collapse. All subsequent relationships between mother and son developed like this - like the relationship of political opponents in the struggle for power. As for Elizabeth, she did everything possible to widen the gap between them: special signs of attention to the newborn, emphasized coldness towards the Grand Duchess, who had not been very pampered with attention before. The hint is clear: if you have produced what you ordered, you can leave the stage. Did Elizaveta Petrovna understand what she was doing? In any case, at the end of her reign, she changed her attitude towards her daughter-in-law, finally giving up on her nephew. She saw that the modest Zerbst princess had turned into an important political figure at the Russian court, and appreciated her efficiency and organizational talent. Elizabeth realized too late what a serious enemy she had created for her beloved grandson, but there was no time left to correct her mistakes.
Elizaveta Petrovna died on December 24, 1761, when Pavel was only 7 years old. These first seven years were probably the happiest of his life. The child grew up surrounded by the attention and care of numerous palace servants, mostly Russian. In early childhood, the Grand Duke rarely heard foreign speech. The Empress spoiled her grandson and spent a lot of time with him, especially in the last two years. The image of a kind Russian grandmother, who sometimes came to visit him even at night, remained forever in the memory of the Grand Duke. His father also visited him occasionally, almost always drunk. He looked at his son with a touch of sad tenderness. Their relationship could not be called close, but Pavel was offended to see how those around him openly neglected his father and laughed at him. This sympathy and pity for his father increased many times after his short reign, which ended with a palace coup in favor of Catherine.
The death of Elizabeth, the unexpected disappearance of Peter, and vague rumors about his violent death shocked the eight-year-old boy. Later, pity for the murdered father grew into real worship. Growing up, Pavel was very fond of reading Shakespearean tragedies and secretly compared himself to Prince Hamlet, called upon to avenge his father. But real life was complicated by the fact that the “Russian Hamlet” did not have a treacherous uncle and a deceived mother. The villain, who did not hide her involvement in the murder, was the mother herself.
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First of all, they tried to deprive the heir of any systematic education. The first mentor Pavel loved, Poroshin, was soon fired, and the new, skillfully selected teachers did not enlighten Pavel, but rather overloaded his childish mind with many incomprehensible and scattered details that did not give a clear idea of anything. In addition, many of them guessed about their role and boldly taught according to the principle “the more boring, the better.” Here, the teacher of “state sciences” Grigory Teplov was especially zealous, overwhelming the teenager with court cases and statistical reports. After these classes, all his life Pavel hated the rough, painstaking work with documents, trying to resolve any problem as quickly as possible, without delving into its essence. It is not surprising that after seven years of such “education,” supplemented by difficult impressions from rare meetings with his mother, who poured out “witty remarks” about his mental development, the child developed a capricious and irritable character. Rumors spread at court about the heir's wayward actions, and many seriously thought about the consequences of his possible reign. Ekaterina brilliantly won the first fight.
But Paul was too small to retaliate. He grew up under the supervision of the Russian diplomat Nikita Panin, who was chosen as a teacher by Elizabeth. Panin spent 13 years with the boy and sincerely became attached to him. Of all the Russian court nobility, he was best able to understand the reasons for the heir’s strange behavior and ardently supported the idea of transferring the throne to him.
Catherine, trying to quarrel her son, who had barely reached adulthood, with his mentor, finally stopped his studies and in 1773 autocratically married his son to the Hesse-Darmstadt Princess Wilhelmina (who received the name Natalya Alekseevna in baptism). However, the new Grand Duchess turned out to be a very determined woman and directly pushed Paul to seize power, which he refused. Panin was at the head of the conspiracy. Unfortunately for the heir, he was also a major freemason, the first Russian constitutionalist. The coup was doomed to fail. Catherine had too many admiring fans and volunteer assistants at court. When in 1776 the Empress learned that her son could ascend the throne, and even with a constitution, measures were taken immediately. Panin was removed from government affairs (he cannot be executed: he is too big a political figure), he was forbidden to see the heir. Grand Duchess Natalya died after an unsuccessful birth (presumably she was poisoned on the orders of the Empress). Six years later, Pavel also lost Panin. The Grand Duke himself went into exile or exile for 20 years - from St. Petersburg to Gatchina. He was no longer dangerous.
These 20 years finally shaped Paul's character. He was remarried to Princess Sophia of Württemberg (Maria Feodorovna) for the same purpose as his father had once done. Catherine took the two children born next - Alexander and Konstantin - from their parents and raised the eldest as the future heir. Occasionally, Catherine called her son to the capital to participate in the signing of diplomatic documents in order to once again humiliate him in the presence of others. Locked in Gatchina, he was completely deprived of access to even the most insignificant government affairs and tirelessly drilled his regiment on the parade ground - the only thing he could truly control. All the books that could be obtained were read. He was especially fascinated by historical treatises and novels about the times of European chivalry. The heir himself was sometimes not averse to playing in the Middle Ages. The fun is all the more forgivable because at the mother’s court, completely different games were in fashion. Each new favorite sought to outdo its predecessor in enlightened, refined cynicism. The heir had only one thing to do - wait. It was not the desire for power, but the constant fear of death at the hands of killers hired by his mother that tormented Pavel. Who knows, maybe in St. Petersburg the Empress was no less afraid of a palace coup? And maybe she wanted her son to die...
Meanwhile, the general situation of the empire, despite a number of brilliant foreign policy successes of Catherine II and her associates, remained very difficult. The 18th century in general was in many ways decisive for the fate of Russia. The reforms of Peter I put it among the leading world powers, advancing it a century forward in technical terms. However, the same reforms destroyed the ancient foundations of the Russian state - strong social and cultural ties between classes, in order to strengthen the state apparatus, opposing the interests of landowners and peasants. Serfdom finally turned from a special “Moscow” form of social organization (service) into a standard aristocratic privilege. This situation was extremely unfair. After all, after the death of Peter, the Russian nobility bore less and less of the burdens of the service class, continuing to actively oppose universal equalization of rights. In addition, the nobility, which since the time of Peter was overwhelmed by the flow of Western European culture, was increasingly divorced from traditional Russian values, less and less able to understand the needs and aspirations of its own people, arbitrarily interpreting them in the spirit of newfangled Western philosophical teachings. The culture of the upper and lower strata of the population already under Catherine began to develop separately, threatening to destroy national unity over time. Pugachev's uprising showed this very clearly. What could save Russia from an internal fault or at least push it aside?
The Orthodox Church, which usually united the Russian people in difficult times, since the time of Peter I, was almost deprived of the opportunity to seriously influence the development of events and the policies of state power. Moreover, she did not enjoy authority among the “enlightened class.” At the beginning of the 18th century, the monasteries were actually removed from the work of education and science, transferring it to new, “secular” structures (before that, the Church successfully carried out educational tasks for almost seven centuries!), and in the middle of the century the state took away from them the richest, inhabited by wealthy peasants land. It was taken away only in order to obtain a new resource to continue the policy of continuous land distributions to the military-noble corporation, which was growing by leaps and bounds. But if the previous, outlying distributions and redistributions of land really strengthened the state, then the instant destruction of dozens of the oldest centers of cultural agriculture and trade in non-Black Earth Russia (most of the fairs were timed to coincide with the holidays of the Orthodox monasteries that patronized them), which were simultaneously centers of independent small credit, charity and widespread social assistance, only led to further erosion of local markets and the economic strength of the country as a whole.
The Russian language and national culture, which at one time made it possible to save the cultural integrity of Russia from fragmentation into principalities, were also not held in high esteem at court. What remained was the state, the endless strengthening of which was bequeathed by Peter to all his heirs. The machine of the bureaucratic apparatus launched by Peter had such power that in the future it was capable of crushing any class privileges and barriers. In addition, it relied on the only ancient principle, not violated by Peter and sacredly revered by the majority of the population of Russia - the principle of autocracy (unlimited sovereignty of the supreme power). But most of Peter's successors were too weak or indecisive to use this principle in its entirety. They obediently followed in the wake of noble class politics, cleverly using the contradictions between court groups in order to at least slightly strengthen their power. Catherine brought this maneuvering to perfection. The end of the 18th century is considered the “golden age of the Russian nobility.” It was stronger than ever and calm in the consciousness of its strength. But the question remained open: who, in the interests of the country, would risk disturbing this calm?
What did he want?
On November 7, 1796, the “golden age of the Russian nobility” ended. The emperor, who had his own ideas about the importance of classes and state interests, ascended the throne. In many ways, these ideas were constructed “by contradiction” - in opposition to the principles of Catherine. However, a lot was thought out independently; fortunately, 30 years were allotted for reflection. And most importantly, a large supply of energy had accumulated that had no outlet for a long time. So, redo everything your way and as soon as possible! Very naive, but not always meaningless.
Although Paul disliked the word “reform” no less than the word “revolution,” he never discounted the fact that since the time of Peter the Great, the Russian autocracy has always been at the forefront of change. Trying on the role of a feudal overlord, and later the chain of the Grand Master of the Order of Malta, Paul remained entirely a man of modern times, dreaming of an ideal state structure. The state must be transformed from an aristocratic freemen into a rigid hierarchical structure, headed by a king who has all possible powers of power. Estates, classes, social strata are gradually losing their special inalienable rights, completely submitting only to the autocrat, personifying God’s heavenly law and earthly state order. The aristocracy must gradually disappear, as well as the personally dependent peasantry. The class hierarchy must be replaced by equal subjects.
The French Revolution not only strengthened Paul's hostility to the philosophy of the 18th century Enlightenment, but also once again convinced him that the Russian state mechanism required serious changes. Catherine's enlightened despotism, in his opinion, slowly but surely led the country to destruction, provoking a social explosion, the formidable harbinger of which was the Pugachev rebellion. And in order to avoid this explosion, it was necessary not only to tighten the regime, but also to urgently reorganize the country’s governance system. Note: Paul was the only autocratic reformer after Peter who planned to start it “from above” in the literal sense of the word, that is, to curtail the rights of the aristocracy (in favor of the state). Of course, in such changes, the peasants at first remained silent extras; they were not going to be involved in management for a long time. But although, by order of Paul, it was forbidden to use the word “citizen” in printed publications, he, more than anyone else in the 18th century, tried to make peasants and townspeople citizens, taking them beyond the boundaries of the class system and “attaching” directly to the state.
The program was quite coherent, corresponding to its time, but did not take into account at all the ambitions of the Russian ruling layer. It was this tragic discrepancy, generated by the Gatchina isolation and the emotional unrest experienced, that was accepted by contemporaries, and after them by historians, as “barbaric savagery”, even madness. The then pillars of Russian social thought (with the exception of the amnestied Radishchev), frightened by the revolution, stood either for carrying out further reforms at the expense of the peasants, or not carrying them out at all. If at the end of the 18th century the concept of “totalitarianism” already existed, contemporaries would not have thought to apply it to Pavlov’s regime. But Paul's political program was no more utopian than the philosophy of his time. The 18th century is the century of the heyday of social utopias. Diderot and Voltaire predicted the creation by enlightened monarchs of a unitary state based on the Social Contract and saw elements of their program in the reforms of the beginning of Catherine's reign. If you look closely, the real supporter of the idea of a single equal state was her son, who hated the French “enlightenment”. At the same time, his political practice turned out to be no more cruel than the democratic terror of the French Convention or the counter-revolutionary repressions of the Directory and Napoleon that followed.
The first “victim” of the transformations already in 1796 was the army. Many times already, scientists and journalists have examined the notorious “Gatchina legacy”: parades, wigs, sticks, etc. But it is worth remembering the disbanded recruitment of 1795, half of which was stolen by officers for their estates; about a complete audit of the army supply department, which revealed colossal theft and abuse; about the subsequent reduction in the military budget; on the transformation of the guard from a court guard into a combat unit. (The entire personal officer corps was called to the review in 1797, which put an end to service on estates and the entry into regimental lists of unborn babies, like Pushkin’s Grinev.) The same endless parades and maneuvers marked the beginning of regular exercises of the Russian army (which was very useful later, in era of the Napoleonic Wars), which had previously been in winter quarters in the absence of war. Under Paul, the soldiers, of course, were driven more to the parade ground and punished more severely, but at the same time they finally began to be fed regularly and dressed warmly in the winter, which brought the emperor unprecedented popularity among the troops. But most of all the officers were outraged by the introduction of corporal punishment. Not for soldiers in general, but specifically for the noble class. It smelt of unhealthy class equality.They also tried to squeeze the landowners. For the first time, serfs began to take a personal oath to the emperor (previously, the landowner did this for them). When selling, it was forbidden to separate families. The famous decree-manifesto “on the three-day corvee” was issued, the text of which, in particular, read: “The Law of God, taught to us in the Decalogue, teaches us to dedicate the seventh day to God; why on this present day, glorified by the triumph of faith and on which we were honored to receive the sacred anointing and the royal wedding on our ancestral throne, we consider it our duty before the Creator of all good things, the Giver, to confirm throughout our entire empire about the exact and indispensable fulfillment of this law, commanding everyone to observe so that no one, under any circumstances, dares to force peasants to work on Sundays..."
Although there was no talk yet about the abolition or even serious limitation of serfdom, enlightened land and soul owners became worried: how could the government, even the royal one, interfere with how they dispose of their hereditary property? Catherine did not allow herself to do this! These gentlemen did not yet understand that the peasants were the main source of state income, and therefore it was unprofitable to ruin them. But it wouldn’t be a bad idea to force landowners to pay the costs of maintaining elected local government bodies, since they consist exclusively of the nobility. There was another attempt on the “sacred right of the noble class” - freedom from taxation.
Meanwhile, the overall tax burden has eased. The abolition of the grain tax (according to the Russian agronomist A.T. Bolotov, which produced “beneficial effects throughout the state”) was accompanied by the addition of arrears for 1797 and the preferential sale of salt (until the middle of the 19th century, salt was actually the national currency). As part of the fight against inflation, palace expenses were reduced by 10 (!) times, a significant part of the silver palace services was transferred to coins, which were put into circulation. At the same time, the unsecured mass of paper money was withdrawn from circulation at state expense. Over five million rubles in banknotes were burned on Palace Square.
The officials were also in fear. Bribes (given openly under Catherine) were mercilessly eradicated. This was especially true of the capital’s apparatus, which was shaken by constant inspections. An unheard of thing: employees must not be late and be in their place the entire working day! The emperor himself got up at 5 am, listened to current reports and news, and then, together with his heirs, went to inspect the capital's institutions and guards units. The number of provinces and districts was reduced, and therefore the number of bureaucrats needed to fill the corresponding places.
The Orthodox Church also received certain hopes for a religious revival. The new emperor, unlike his mother, was not indifferent to Orthodoxy. His teacher and spiritual mentor, the future Metropolitan Platon (Levshin), who later crowned Paul to the throne, wrote about his faith this way: “The high pupil, fortunately, was always disposed towards piety, and reasoning and conversation regarding God and faith were always with him pleasant. This, according to the note, was introduced to him with milk by the late Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, who loved him dearly and raised him with very pious women assigned to her.”
According to some evidence, the emperor often showed traits of clairvoyance under the guise of foolishness. Thus, there is a case known from memoirs when Pavel Petrovich ordered an officer who had performed unsatisfactorily in military maneuvers to be sent to Siberia, but, bowing to the requests of those around him for clemency, he nevertheless exclaimed: “I feel that the man for whom you are asking - scoundrel! It was subsequently discovered that this officer killed his own mother. Another case: a guards officer who had a wife and children decided to take away a young girl. But she did not agree to go without a wedding. Then this officer’s comrade in the regiment disguised himself as a priest and enacted a secret ritual. After some time, the woman, left with a child adopted by the seducer, having found out that her imaginary husband had a legitimate family, filed a complaint with the sovereign. “The Emperor found himself in an unhappy position,” recalled E.P. Yankova, - and made a wonderful decision: he ordered her kidnapper to be demoted and exiled, the young woman to be recognized as having the right to the surname of the seducer and their legitimate daughter, and the officer who married her to be tonsured a monk. The resolution said that “since he has an inclination towards spiritual life, he should be sent to a monastery and tonsured a monk.” The officer was taken somewhere far away and given a haircut. He was beside himself at such an unexpected outcome of his frivolous act and did not live at all like a monk, but then the grace of God touched his heart; he repented, came to his senses and, when he was no longer young, led a very strict life and was considered an experienced and very good old man.”
All this, however, did not prevent Paul from accepting the title of head of the Catholic Order of Malta. However, this was done not only for political reasons. This was an attempt to resurrect within the framework of the order (which, by the way, had never previously submitted to the Pope of Rome) the ancient Byzantine brotherhood of St. John the Baptist, from which the Jerusalem “Hospitaliers” once arose. In addition, it is worth noting that the Order of Malta, for the purpose of self-preservation, put itself under the protection of Russia and Emperor Paul. On October 12, 1799, the shrines of the order were solemnly brought to Gatchina: the right hand of St. John the Baptist, a particle of the Cross of the Lord and the Philermos Icon of the Mother of God. Russia possessed all these treasures until 1917.In general, Paul is the first emperor to soften in his policy the line of Peter I to infringe on the rights of the Church in the name of state interests. First of all, he strove to ensure that the priesthood had a more “important image and condition corresponding to the importance of its rank.” Thus, when the Holy Synod made a proposal to rid priests and deacons of corporal punishment, the emperor approved it (it did not come into force until 1801), continuing to adhere to the practice of restoring such punishments for noble officers.
Measures were taken to improve the life of the white clergy: for those on regular salaries, their salaries were increased, and where salaries were not established, parishioners were entrusted with the responsibility of processing the priestly allotments, which could be replaced by a corresponding grain contribution in kind or in cash. In 1797 and 1799, regular salaries from the treasury for the ecclesiastical department, according to annual state estimates, were doubled compared to the previous one. State subsidies to the clergy thus reached almost one million rubles. In addition, in 1797 the plots of land for bishops' houses were doubled. Additionally (for the first time since Catherine’s secularization!), mills, fishing grounds and other lands were allocated to bishops and monasteries. For the first time in the history of Russia, measures were legalized to provide for widows and orphans of the clergy.
Under Emperor Paul, the military clergy was allocated to a special department and received its own head - the protopresbyter of the army and navy. In general, to encourage more zealous performance of their service, the emperor introduced a procedure for awarding clergy with orders and signs of external distinction. (Now this order is deeply rooted in the Church, but then it caused some confusion.) At the personal initiative of the sovereign, an award pectoral cross was established. Before the revolution, on the reverse side of all synodal crosses there was the letter “P” - the initial of Pavel Petrovich. Under him, theological academies were also established in St. Petersburg and Kazan and several new seminaries.
Unexpectedly, such a large segment of Russian society as schismatics received some civil rights. For the first time, the Emperor compromised on this issue and allowed loyal Old Believers to have their own houses of worship and serve in them according to ancient custom. The Old Believers (of course, not all), in turn, were ready to recognize the Synodal Church and accept priests from it. In 1800, the regulations on churches of the same faith were finally approved.
Peter's traditions of cooperation with the merchants were also revived. The establishment of the College of Commerce at the end of 1800 looked like the beginning of a global reform of management. Of course, 13 of its 23 members (more than half!) were chosen by merchants from among themselves. And this was at a time when noble elections were limited. Naturally, Alexander, having come to power (by the way, with the slogan of a constitution), was one of the first to cancel this democratic order.
But none of Paul’s heirs even thought of canceling the most important state act he adopted - the law of April 5, 1797 on succession to the throne. This law finally closed the fatal gap made by Peter's decree of 1722. From now on, inheritance of the throne (only through the male line!) acquired a clear legal character, and no Catherine or Anna could any longer lay claim to it on their own. The importance of the law is so great that Klyuchevsky, for example, called it “the first positive fundamental law in our legislation”, because it, strengthening the autocracy as an institution of power, limited the arbitrariness and ambitions of individuals, and served as a kind of prevention of possible coups and conspiracies.
Of course, next to the serious innovations, you can also notice a huge number of detailed details: the prohibition of certain types and styles of clothing, instructions on when citizens should get up and go to bed, how to drive and walk along the streets, what color to paint houses... And for violations of everything This means fines, arrests, dismissals. On the one hand, Teplov’s fatal lessons affected him: the emperor did not know how to separate small matters from large ones. On the other hand, what seems like small things to us (the style of hats) at the end of the 18th century had an important symbolic meaning and demonstrated to others a commitment to one or another ideological party. In the end, “sans-culottes” and “Phrygian caps” were by no means born in Russia.
Perhaps the main negative feature of Pavlovsk’s rule was the uneven trust in people, the inability to select friends and associates and arrange personnel. Everyone around him - from the heir to the throne Alexander to the last St. Petersburg lieutenant - was under suspicion. The emperor changed senior dignitaries so quickly that they did not have time to get up to speed. The slightest offense could result in disgrace. However, the emperor also knew how to be magnanimous: Radishchev was released from prison; the quarrel with Suvorov ended with Pavel asking for forgiveness (and then promoting the commander to generalissimo); Father's killer Alexei Orlov was given a “severe” punishment - to walk several blocks behind the coffin of his victim, taking off his hat.
Yet the emperor's personnel policy was highly unpredictable. The people most devoted to him lived in the same constant anxiety for their future as the notorious court scoundrels. By instilling unquestioning obedience, Paul often lost honest people in his circle. They were replaced by scoundrels, ready to carry out any hasty decree, caricaturing the imperial will. At first they were afraid of Paul, but then, seeing the endless stream of poorly executed decrees, they began to quietly laugh at him. Just 100 years ago, ridicule of such transformations would have cost the merrymakers dearly. But Paul did not have such indisputable authority as his great-grandfather, and he understood people worse. And Russia was no longer the same as under Peter: then it obediently shaved off its beards, now it was indignant at the ban on wearing round hats.
In general, the whole society was outraged. Memoirists later presented this mood as a single impulse, but the reasons for the indignation were often opposite. The combat officers of Suvorov's school were irritated by the new military doctrine; generals such as Bennigsen were worried about their income being cut from the treasury; the guards youth were dissatisfied with the new strict service regulations; the highest nobility of the empire - “Catherine’s eagles” - are deprived of the opportunity to mix state interests and personal gain, as in the old days; officials of lower rank still stole, but with great caution; City dwellers were angry at new decrees about when they must turn off the lights. The enlightened “new people” had the hardest time: they could not come to terms with the revival of autocratic principles, calls were heard to put an end to “Asian despotism” (who would have tried to say this under Peter!), but many clearly saw the injustices of the previous reign. Most of them were, after all, convinced monarchists; Paul could have found support for his reforms here, he just needed to be given more freedom in action, and not have his hands tied by constant petty orders. But the king, not used to trusting people, interfered in literally everything. He alone, without initiative assistants, wanted to manage his empire. At the end of the 18th century this was absolutely impossible.
Why didn't they love him?
Moreover, it was impossible to play the European diplomatic game on a knightly basis. Pavel began his foreign policy as a peacemaker: he canceled the upcoming invasion of France, the campaign in Persia, and the next raids of the Black Sea Fleet to the Turkish shores, but he was not in his power to cancel the all-European world fire. An advertisement in a Hamburg newspaper proposing to decide the fate of states by a duel between their monarchs and their first ministers as seconds caused general bewilderment. Napoleon then openly called Paul “the Russian Don Quixote”; the other heads of government remained silent.
Nevertheless, it was impossible to stand aside from the European conflict for long. Frightened European monarchies turned to Russia from all sides: requests for protection were brought by the Knights of Malta (whose island was already under the threat of French occupation); Austria and England needed an allied Russian army; even Turkey turned to Paul with a plea to protect its Mediterranean shores and Egypt from the French landing. The result was the second anti-French coalition of 1798–1799.
The Russian expeditionary force under the command of Suvorov was already ready to invade France in April 1799. But this did not fit with the plans of the allied Austrian government, which sought to round out its possessions at the expense of the “liberated” Italian territories. Suvorov was forced to submit, and by the beginning of August northern Italy was completely cleared of the French. The Republican armies were defeated and the fortress garrisons surrendered. The joint Russian-Turkish squadron under the command of the now canonized Admiral Fyodor Ushakov showed itself no less seriously, liberating the Ionian Islands off the coast of Greece from September 1798 to February 1799. (By the way, one of the reasons for the emperor’s consent to this campaign was the danger of the French desecrating the relics of St. Spyridon of Trimythous, which had been kept on the island of Corfu (Kerkyra) since the 15th century. Paul greatly revered St. Spyridon as the patron of his eldest son and heir Alexander. Almost impregnable the fortress of Corfu was taken by storm from the sea on February 18, 1799.) It is noteworthy that Ushakov established an independent republic on the islands he liberated (the archipelago was later occupied and held by the British for more than half a century) and organized elections of local authorities with the full approval of Paul, who showed amazing political tolerance here. Next, Ushakov’s squadron, having a minimum number of marines, carried out operations to liberate Palermo, Naples and all of southern Italy, which ended on September 30 with the rush of Russian sailors to Rome.Russia's coalition allies were frightened by such impressive military successes. They did not at all want to strengthen the authority of the Russian Empire at the expense of the French Republic. In September 1798, the Austrians left the Russian army in Switzerland alone with fresh, superior enemy forces, and only Suvorov’s military leadership saved it from complete destruction. On September 1, the Turkish squadron left Ushakov without warning. As for the British, their fleet, led by Nelson, blocked Malta and did not allow Russian ships to approach it. The “allies” showed their true colors. An angry Pavel recalled Suvorov and Ushakov from the Mediterranean.
In 1800, Paul concluded an anti-English alliance with Napoleon that was beneficial for Russia. France offered Russia Constantinople and the complete division of Turkey. The Baltic and Black Sea fleets were put on full combat readiness. At the same time, with the approval of Napoleon, Orlov's 30,000-strong Cossack corps was moving towards India through the Kazakh steppes. England was faced with the most terrible threat since the days of Elizabeth I.
What if the interests of England and the internal Russian opposition coincided?.. British diplomacy in St. Petersburg used all its means and connections to stir up the smoldering internal conspiracy. The secret sums of the English embassy rained down on favorable soil. The dissatisfied finally found a common language: the army was represented by Bennigsen, the higher nobility by Zubov, and the pro-English bureaucracy by Nikita Panin (nephew of Pavel’s teacher). Panin brought the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Alexander, to participate in the conspiracy. Having learned about the possible abolition of the boring army regulations, dozens of young guards officers happily joined in. But the soul of the conspiracy was the favorite of the emperor, the Governor-General of St. Petersburg, Count von der Palen. Paul was confident in his devotion until the last day.
The conspiracy very clearly illustrated the paradoxical situation that developed at the Pavlovsk court. The fact is that the emperor was not confident in anyone, but precisely because of this, he had to show his trust in fits and starts to generally random people. He had no friends, no like-minded people - only subjects, and not of the very first class. It was not possible to destroy the conspiracy as such also because it had always existed. The latent dissatisfaction of various noble groups with one or another government measures during Pavlov's reign reached dangerous heights. When anyone who disagrees is considered a conspirator in advance, it is psychologically easier for him to cross the line that separates passive rejection of change from active opposition to it. With all this, one must remember that there were still many “Catherine’s men” at court. The emperor’s anger was as terrible as it was fleeting, so Paul turned out to be incapable of any consistent repression. His gentle character was not suitable for the political system that he himself tried to introduce.
As a result, when after midnight on March 11, 1801, the conspirators broke into the Mikhailovsky Palace, there was not a single officer there who could defend the emperor. The main concern of the conspirators was to prevent soldiers from entering the palace. The sentries were removed from their posts by their superiors, and two lackeys had their heads smashed. In the bedroom they finished off Pavel in a few minutes. Like Peter III once, he was strangled with a long officer's scarf. Petersburg greeted the news of his death with pre-prepared fireworks and general rejoicing. As funny as it may seem, everyone rushed to show up on the streets in recently banned outfits. And in the main hall of the Winter Palace all the highest dignitaries of Russia gathered, the name of the young Emperor Alexander was already on everyone’s lips. A 23-year-old young man came out of the chamber and, to the joyful whisper of those present, solemnly said: “Father died of an apoplexy. With me everything will be the same as with my grandmother.”
These words seemed to be the posthumous and final victory of Catherine II over her son. The loser paid with his life. How should Russia pay?
The books of Russian historians available to the mass reader today evaluate Pavlovsk’s reign differently. For example, N.M. Karamzin, in his “Note on Ancient and New Russia” (1811), written in hot pursuit, said: “Let conspiracies intimidate sovereigns for the peace of the people!” In his opinion, no useful lessons can be learned from despotism; it can only be overthrown or endured with dignity. It turns out that the inconsistency of Pavlov’s decrees is nothing more than the tyranny of a tyrant? By the end of the 19th century, this point of view already seemed primitive. IN. Klyuchevsky wrote that “Paul’s reign was the time when a new program of activity was announced.” “Although,” he immediately made a reservation, “the points of this program were not only not implemented, but gradually even disappeared from it. Paul’s successors began to implement this program much more seriously and consistently.” N.K. Schilder, the first historian of Paul’s reign, also agreed that the anti-Catherine state-political orientation “continued to exist” throughout the first half of the 19th century, and “the continuity of Paul’s legends largely survived.” He blamed them for the military settlements, and for December 14, for the “knightly foreign policy”, and for the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War. The historical publicist Kazimir Valishevsky and the famous Russian writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky apparently held the same point of view. Only the work of M.V., published in a scanty edition during the First World War. Klochkova - the only one who has scrupulously studied Paul's legislative policy - counters these reproaches with the fact that it was under Paul that military reform began, preparing the army for the War of 1812, the first steps were taken in limiting serfdom, and the foundations of the legislative body of the Russian Empire were laid . In 1916, a movement even began in church circles to canonize the innocently murdered emperor. At least, his grave in the Peter and Paul Cathedral of St. Petersburg was considered miraculous among the common people and was constantly strewn with fresh flowers. There was even a special book in the cathedral in which miracles that occurred through prayers at this grave were recorded.
Left-liberal historians, and after them Soviet historians, tended to downplay the significance of Pavlov’s reign in the history of Russia. They, of course, did not feel any reverence for Catherine II, however, they viewed Paul only as a special case of a particularly cruel manifestation of absolutism (what “special cruelty” consisted of was usually kept silent), fundamentally not different from either his predecessors or his heirs. Only in the mid-1980s did N.Ya. Eidelman tried to understand the social meaning of Pavlov's conservative-reformist utopia. This author is also credited with rehabilitating the name of Paul in the eyes of the intelligentsia. Books published over the past 10–15 years basically summarize all the points of view expressed, without drawing particularly deep and new conclusions. Apparently, the final judgment about who exactly Emperor Pavel Petrovich was, as well as how realistic his political program was and what place it occupied in subsequent Russian history, has yet to be made. The Russian Orthodox Church, once again faced with the question of the possibility of glorifying Paul I as a martyr for the faith, has to make such a judgment.
I would like to once again draw attention to the fact that Paul was not only a far-sighted or, on the contrary, an unsuccessful statesman. Like the recently glorified martyr Emperor Nikolai Alexandrovich, Pavel Petrovich was, first of all, a man of a very tragic fate. Back in 1776, he wrote in a private letter: “For me there are no parties or interests other than the interests of the state, and with my character it’s hard for me to see that things are going wrong and that the reason for this is negligence and personal views. I would rather be hated for a just cause than loved for a wrong cause.” But the people around him, as a rule, did not even want to understand the reasons for his behavior. As for the posthumous reputation, until recently it was the worst after Ivan the Terrible. Of course, it is easier to explain a person’s actions that are illogical from our point of view by calling him an idiot or a villain. However, this is unlikely to be true. Therefore, I would like to end this article with a quote from the thoughts of the poet Vladislav Khodasevich: “When Russian society says that Paul’s death was retribution for his oppression, it forgets that he oppressed those who spread too widely, those strong and many-righted who should be constrained and curbed for the sake of the powerless and weak. Maybe this was his historical mistake. But what moral height does she have! He loved justice - we are unfair to him. He was a knight - killed from around the corner. We scold from around the corner...”
