Contemptuous of his mother and everything she valued, Paul set about to erase her memory and achievements. The changes at court were dramatic. “Everything in the palace immediately took on a different appearance: spurs, Hessian boots, and cutlasses thundered and clanged, and, almost as if the city had been captured, military people burst into rooms everywhere with a great noise,” observed Gavriil Derzhavin.1
The day of his coronation, Easter 1797, Paul changed Russia’s law of succession to allow only men to rule, specifically denying the crown to the widow of a tsar. (To allow his second wife to succeed him, Peter the Great had changed the long-standing male-only primogeniture law.) Reversing his mother’s anti-French foreign policy, Paul switched his support to Napoleon, who had overthrown the French government in 1799 and become First Consul, and dismissed her long-serving field marshal Alexander Suvorov.
Catherine had long considered Paul unfit to rule. “He is mad,” Platon Zubov said. “I know it as well as you,” Catherine replied. “Unfortunately, he is not mad enough to [enable us to] protect the state from the evils that he is preparing for it.”2 In fact, Paul’s sometimes cruel and bizarre behavior earned him the name “the mad tsar.” Challenging Europe’s rulers to a series of duels and planning to send Cossacks to India to drive out the English were among his stranger ideas.3
Ten days after his mother’s death, Paul dropped in on Zubov and toasted to his prosperity. The favorite soon found himself stripped of his posts and properties and told to leave Russia. Paul reserved the ultimate revenge for Potemkin, whom he’d once threatened with imprisonment. After destroying the mausoleum Catherine built, Paul had his remains exhumed and secretly buried elsewhere. Elegant Tauride Palace was turned into a barracks for the Imperial Guard Mounted Regiment. Ivan Starov’s magnificent rotunda became a riding arena, stalls were added between the elegant white marble columns of the Great Hall, and manure covered the splendid parquetry floors.
With the help of Starov, Giacomo Quarenghi, and Charles Cameron, Catherine had turned neoclassicism into Russia’s national architectural style. Now Paul demolished many of her elegant monuments and buildings. Less than three weeks after his mother’s death, Paul fired Cameron and repossessed Grace and Favor, the house she’d given the architect at Tsarskoe Selo. In nearby Sophia, Cameron’s Rose Field Pavilion and New Gallery disappeared, as did the unfinished Temple of Memory commissioned by Catherine to mark Russia’s 1792 victory over the Turks.
Giacomo Quarenghi fared better, though he too experienced some casualties. Paul turned his English Palace at Peterhof into barracks and ordered two of his unfinished buildings torn down. Meanwhile at the Winter Palace, Vincenzo Brenna began making changes to the Hermitage Theatre. Fortunately, Quarenghi’s newly completed Alexander Palace was spared. During Paul’s reign, the enormous residence was stuccoed and painted deep yellow and white.
Catherine envisioned Pella as Russia’s largest imperial palace with a riverside frontage stretching nearly one-third of a mile. A month after she died, Paul ordered Ivan Starov’s vast complex demolished, scavenging building materials for Pavlovsk and his new city palace, Saint Michael’s Castle. By January 1801, six of Pella’s nine building were destroyed (the rest were razed during Alexander’s reign). Not only were the buildings demolished, images of the palace also vanished. Pella’s only surviving depiction is a drawing on a fan that may have belonged to Catherine, based on Quarenghi’s watercolor sketches.4
As a result of his father’s murder and his mother’s coldness, Paul lived in constant fear. Feeling unsafe at the Winter Palace, he hired Vincenzo Brenna and Vasily Bazhenov (the Muscovite architect whose work Catherine repeatedly rejected) to build Saint Michael’s Castle. Symbolically, he chose the site of his birthplace, his great-aunt Elizabeth’s former wooden palace. Surrounded by canals and the Moika and Fontanka rivers, the castle was accessible by drawbridge. After Paul dreamed that Archangel Michael instructed him to build a church at his birthplace, Brenna added a church to the west façade. In the castle’s octagonal courtyard, Paul installed Carlo Rastrelli’s bronze monument of Peter the Great with the inscription “Great-grandson to Great-grandfather.” Catherine had disliked the baroque depiction.
In early 1797, Paul invited Catherine’s former lover Stanislaus Poniatowski to live in the Marble Palace she’d built for his successor, Gregory Orlov. Russia, Prussia, and Austria agreed to pay Stanislaus’s debts and Paul threw in a 100,000 ducat pension. Of his 2,200-plus paintings, the deposed Polish king brought 100 with him to Russia. After visiting Gatchina, Catherine’s second palace for Orlov, Stanislaus wrote: “Pavlovsk was only a small treasure in comparison with Gatchina, where everything was grandeur.”5 Stanislaus also visited Voltaire’s library at the Hermitage, and sat for two half-length portraits by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.
The following February, with Paul by his side, 66-year-old Stanislaus died of an apoplectic seizure. Paul pulled out all the stops for his funeral. Guard Regiments lined both sides of Nevsky Prospect from the Marble Palace to the Catholic Church of St. Stanislas. Wearing his drawn sword reversed, Paul rode in front of the hearse at the head of the Life Guards. A herald carried the White Eagle standard embroidered with the shields of Poland and Lithuania; ministers and dignitaries followed in parade carriages.6
For all their acrimony, Catherine’s passion for collecting rubbed off on Paul. In the late 1780s, he bought a set of six exquisite 15th-century gouache and gold miniatures removed from a manuscript at the Dominican Monastery of Saints Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. In 1782, the government of Venice had thwarted his bid to buy the Farsetti sculptures. In 1800, with the Venetian Republic fallen to Napoleon, Paul bought the collection.7 The highlight was Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s terra-cotta model for his marble masterpiece The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (Santa Maria della Vittoria, Cornaro Chapel, Rome).
Rubens’s monumental The Union of Earth and Water is considered among Paul’s best painting acquisitions. Starring a voluptuous Cybele, goddess of the Earth and the sea god Neptune, the sensuous picture is an allegory for the reopening of Antwerp’s Scheldt River to commerce. According to contemporaries, Thomas de Keyser’s Portrait of a Knight with a Banner (now titled Portrait of Loef Vredericx as a Standard-Bearer, 1626) decorated Paul’s bedroom at Saint Michael’s Castle, and Nicolas Lancret’s sensual The Bathers hung in his study at Gatchina. After appointing Prince Nicholas Yusupov director of the picture gallery, Paul ordered a new catalogue of the collection in Russian, not French. Paintings with “indecent subject matter” like Pierre Crozat’s Danaë by Rembrandt were relegated to storage.
For a new picture gallery at Pavlovsk, Paul sent Vincenzo Brenna to the Hermitage to select two hundred of his mother’s paintings. Hung close together in decorative style, the works included Pierre Crozat’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman by Pierre Mignard, St. Bartholomew by Ribera, and St Justine by Veronese; along with Robert Walpole’s Holy Family by Matteo Ponzone and View of a Harbour and Landscape with Fountain by Jan Griffier the Elder. In addition, Paul transferred many of Catherine’s best sculptures, busts, and statues from Tsarskoe Selo to Pavlovsk.
Like his mother at the end of her reign, Paul banned foreign books and required Russian books to be submitted to a censorship office. Ignoring her wish for an Imperial Public Library, he fired Vasily Popov, who’d overseen the library’s construction and organization. In January 1800, Paul appointed Count Alexander Stroganov, one of the authors of the original Plan for a Russian Public Library in St. Petersburg, as director of the imperial libraries. Stroganov convinced Paul not to take the nearly finished building away from the library.
As Catherine feared, Paul proved to be one of Russia’s most disliked tsars. During his reign, 12,000 people were arrested, exiled, or dismissed from office without trial. Seven Russian field marshals, 333 generals, and 2,156 officers resigned.8 Paul’s restrictive edicts involved everything from dress (round hats, waistcoasts, and tailcoats were banned) and foreign travel to further cracking down on private printing presses and even regulating sheet music. He also alienated Russia’s landowners by reinstituting corporal punishment for the gentry and decreeing that serfs could be forced to work no more than three days a week—a decree not so much out of concern for the well-being of the serfs, but to further antagonize the landowners.
On the night of March 12, 1801, a small group of aristocrats and military men stormed Saint Michael’s Castle and forced their way into the tsar’s private apartments. Among the intruders was a commander of the elite Semeonovsky Regiment and Platon Zubov’s brother, General Nicholas Zubov (Zubov’s sister Olga Zherebtsova was the suspected leader of the conspiracy).9 The conspirators forced the 46-year-old tsar to a table and tried to get him to sign his abdication. When Paul tried to hide behind a curtain, an assailant hit his head with a heavy snuffbox—said to have belonged to Platon Zubov himself. The injured tsar was then strangled to death just like the man he always believed to be his father.
After less than five years, Paul’s unpopular reign was over. Apoplexy was the official cause of death. It was widely believed that his 23-year-old son and heir, in a nearby bedroom at the time, knew about the plot. Like his grandmother after Peter III’s murder, Alexander did not punish his father’s assassins. Just days after Paul’s murder, his seventeen-year-old daughter Alexandra died in Vienna after giving birth to his granddaughter.