March 1959
Here, among other differences, is an absolute contrast of early childhood. Within minutes of Paul’s birth he was removed on a purple velvet cushion by his great aunt the Empress Elizabeth, who had planned that he should inherit the throne direct from her. Paul saw his mother twice every three months, but never alone, and grew up terrified of her. He was brought up ‘in rooms much too hot’ by nurses who ruined his indigestion and fed him on backstairs gossip of a peculiarly horrifying kind - the ‘nameless prisoner’, Ivan IV, kept in a dungeon from the age of six months, unaware of his identity and with the vocabulary of a child, etc. - so that by the time Elizabeth was dead, Paul’s father had abdicated and his mother was Catherine the Great, his relationship with her was a complex of fear and bitterness which the assassinations of his father and the ‘nameless prisoner’ did nothing to alleviate.
He suffered from appalling nightmares, a deeply affectionate nature which after the removal of his nurses was starved, and constant terror about his own future. The inexorable pattern of violence repeats through his life when after his second marriage (his first wife died in childbirth) his mother removes the first two sons exactly as he had been removed from her. The inference is clear - that Catherine may appoint either of his sons to reign after her death and he may be killed.
This unnatural strain continues until his mother dies, when at the age of forty-two he ascends the throne - by then so unbalanced and dangerous that during his reign of five years he tries to turn his Empire into an eighteenth-century concentration camp. His reign ends as the nightmare of his earliest years comes true with his brutal and clumsy murder.
And yet this man enjoyed the whole-hearted devotion of two women. His second wife, the Grand Duchess Marie, when she was betrothed at seventeen wrote to him: ‘Most solemnly do I vow to love and worship you. Nothing in the world would ever change me’. Nothing ever did. Throughout their marriage, their ten children, the agonising difficulties with her mother-in-law, the increasing strain of Paul’s depressions and temper which bordered on madness, his frenzied passion for Prussian military order, his real and imagined wrongs and the final misery of his furiously maladministered reign, she never stopped loving him, ‘believing in his true self’ and serving his interest with a loyalty utterly unshakeable - even enduring and making friends with his mistress whose love for Paul matched hers.
Miss Almedingen handles her understanding of this period of Russian history with a skill which conceals her formidable knowledge: her writing is beautifully clear, easy and simple, and out of a terrible story of the short cycle of violence emerges a moving portrait of this desperate and damaged man.