Paul succeeded to the throne with relief and rejoicing. He was forty-two years of age, a small and unattractive man with a strangely flat face and a voice that became shrill when he became very angry. He and his family had gathered with ministers and courtiers in the imperial bedchamber as Catherine lay dying. His children were in tears and most of the courtiers were crying openly. But he had shed no tears for the mother who had treated him with contempt and hostility, and had deprived him of his throne for so many years. He had even heard rumors that she intended to exclude him from the succession and to make his son, Alexander, her heir. Even as they waited in the bedchamber, they expected her to regain consciousness and displace him with a last testament. However, she died without regaining consciousness and spared him this final humiliation.

Paul had hated and mistrusted his mother since he was a boy. He had not been close to her and never really got to know her. Empress Elizabeth had carried him away at birth, determined to bring him up herself as a worthy successor to the throne of Peter the Great. In her memoirs, Catherine attributed the estrangement between her son and herself to Elizabeth’s action. But the truth was that she had taken no interest whatsoever in him after Elizabeth’s death. Her indifference had turned to contempt and then to hostile behavior when he grew older because he represented a threat to her throne.

Paul hated Catherine not only because she had rejected him and had cheated him of his birthright by usurping the throne, but also because he believed she was guilty of the murder of Emperor Peter III, whom he looked up to as his father. Paul gave orders for the body of the martyred emperor to be exhumed from its grave in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery and reinterred in the Fortress of Peter and Paul alongside the grave of Catherine. In the somber procession bearing the emperor’s remains, he ordered Count Alexei Orlov, who had murdered Peter III and who was now old and in ill health, to walk behind the coffin, bearing the imperial crown. It was a reminder to the people of St. Petersburg that the splendors and triumphs of the thirty-four years of Catherine’s reign should not erase memories of their legitimate emperor.

Throughout his short reign, Paul tried to erase memories of Catherine from the minds of his people. At times, it seemed as if he was trying to exorcise her from his own mind. He refused to wear at his coronation the imperial crown that she had worn. Although he had protested constantly against her extravagance while she was alive, he did not hesitate to order Duval, the Genevan who served as court jeweler, to make him a new crown that cost several million rubles. He either destroyed or allowed to fall into ruins all of the palaces that his mother and her favorites had occupied. He allowed the cavalry guards to exercise their horses in the halls of the magnificent Tauride Palace, one of the architectural glories of Catherine’s reign. He ordered the desertion of Tsarskoe Selo, one of the most magnificent of the imperial residences. In the savage winters of St. Petersburg, it deteriorated rapidly. Its ornamental lakes, lined with marble, became weed-choked marshes. For his own residence, Paul had workers erect the Mikhailovsky Castle on the ruins of the old Summer Palace. The castle was a somber fortress, which reflected his obsessive fear that he would be assassinated. In fact, he resided in the castle for only three weeks before what he feared came to pass.

Paul was short-tempered, unstable, impetuous, and eccentric. He had periods of kindness and generosity, but his hatred of his mother and the humiliations and anxieties that he had suffered during her long reign had negatively affected his personality. Many who had contact with him believed that he was mentally unbalanced and even insane. In many ways, however, he was intelligent. Elizabeth had appointed as his tutor Nikita Panin, who later became Catherine’s minister of foreign affairs. Nikita Panin and his brother, General Peter Panin, both became close to Paul and strongly influenced his ideas about government. They also appointed his teachers, who gave him a sound general education. He showed ability in mathematics; he learned to speak French and German fluently and he understood Church Slavonic. He possessed a considerable library and was widely read. But instable and impetuous, he was never able to apply his abilities effectively.

Paul was more fortunate in his domestic life. At the age of nineteen, he had married the daughter of the Landgrave of Hesse, but she had died in childbirth in 1776. Six months later he married the young Princess of Württemburg, a niece of King Frederick II of Prussia. He traveled to Berlin to meet his bride and there, like Peter III before him, he fell under the spell of Frederick and the Prussian army. His marriage with Maria Fedorovna, which was her name after her baptism into the Orthodox Church, proved stable and fruitful. She was a devoted wife who gave him affection and companionship during the bleak years while Catherine occupied the throne. She also gave birth to four sons and six daughters.

In 1781-1782, Catherine had allowed them to make an extensive tour of Western Europe. They tried to travel incognito as the Count and Countess du Nord, but everyone gave them the courtesies due to the heir to the Russian throne. Paul made a good impression at the courts that he visited, which annoyed Catherine. She had placed her agents among his entourage and received regular reports on everything that Paul and his wife did and said. Catherine then began to see him as a serious rival and gave him no further opportunities to achieve acclaim. When she was absent from the capital, she did not appoint him in charge of the city or of government affairs, even though it was normal practice for the heir to the throne to be in charge. Although by birth he was a generalissimo of the Russian armies, she would not allow him to command even a regiment in time of war; although he was a grand admiral of the Russian navy, she did not permit him to visit the naval headquarters at Kronstadt.

Paul was bitter about the fact that Catherine virtually adopted his first two sons, Alexander, born on December 12, 1777, and Constantine, born on April 27, 1779. She had indeed repeated the behavior of Elizabeth toward Paul. She personally supervised the education and training of Alexander for the throne. For her second grandson, Constantine, she planned a special future. He would succeed to the throne of the great Byzantine emperor after whom he had been named. Because Greek nurses from the island of Naxos cared for him as a baby, and Greek children were his playmates, as a boy he spoke Greek fluently. In 1786, she planned to take him south to the frontier of the empire over which she intended him to rule. However, he caught measles and could not travel with her on the triumphal journey to the Crimea.

The fear that plagued Paul constantly was that Catherine would disinherit him. He knew that this was her intention. She idolized his eldest son, Alexander, who was handsome, charming, and intelligent, and possessed the qualities that she found lacking in her own son. On September 28, 1793, at the young age of sixteen, Alexander married a young German princess. After his marriage, everyone expected that Catherine would proclaim him as her heir. Evidently, Catherine did not make this pronouncement because Alexander’s Swiss tutor, La Harpe, strongly objected. But, while Catherine was alive, Paul lived under the threat of being disinherited.

Confined to his estate at Gatchina, some thirty miles south of St. Petersburg, Paul lived quietly with his wife, Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna, and their small court. They kept away from the capital and avoided contact with Catherine’s ministers and favorites. Only the Panins and certain others risked incurring Catherine’s displeasure by maintaining relations with the “young court.” Paul especially valued the friendship of Sergei Pleshcheev, a naval officer who had received training in England and who was an enthusiastic freemason. Nikita Panin had introduced Paul to freemasonry, and Paul enjoyed its mystic rituals and secret signs. He took a close interest in the lodges that were active in Russia at this time.

Paul’s fondness for idealistic principles and mystic doctrines led to a platonic affair that greatly upset the small community at Gatchina. The object of his passion was Catherine Nelidov, one of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting. She was romantic and devout and had a calming influence over him. But Maria Fedorovna did not like to see her husband lavishing his attentions on the young lady. Distressed by the disturbance that their friendship was causing, Catherine Nelidov withdrew into the Smolny Convent, but she still visited Gatchina from time to time. On Paul’s accession, however, Maria Fedorovna and Catherine Nelidov put their rivalry aside and promised to work together “for the good of the tsar and the empire.” Later Paul became enamored of a young noblewoman, named Anna Lopukhina, who married Prince Paul Gagarin. She became his mistress, and Maria Fedorovna had to accept their relationship.

At Gatchina, Paul actively tried to improve the conditions of his serfs by providing schools and hospitals, and even founding small industries. He was devout, but tolerant of other faiths, and built Lutheran and Roman Catholic as well as Orthodox churches. But his great obsession was the army and military dress and parades, and he turned Gatchina into a military camp. He completely shared Peter III’s worship of Frederick and all things Prussian. He drilled and paraded daily his private army of about 2,000 troops like a ballet company. All wore Prussian uniforms adapted to his orders. The uniforms were so tight-fitting that officers and troops could not sit and, if they fell down, they could not get to their feet without help. Regimental barbers plaited their hair, setting it in a thick paste made chiefly of lard and flour that gave off a terrible stench after a time. Details of uniform, the wearing of insignia, the number and positions of buttons, and exact obedience to regulations and drill orders were all matters of passionate concern to Paul. He was a savage martinet, obsessed with the paraphernalia of war. A breach of any regulation made him scream with fury, and punishments were summary and harsh.

On his accession, sentries and armed patrols suddenly surrounded the Winter Palace and other parts of St. Petersburg. It was as though the army had taken over the city. Wielding absolute power as emperor, Paul’s military parades now became more elaborate and severe. Officers and men dreaded them. If Paul found an officer guilty of a real or imagined misdemeanor, he sent the officer directly from the parade ground to Siberia in one of the sealed carriages held ready for the purpose. He ordered troops to be flogged mercilessly for mistakes in drill and breaches of discipline. Someone even reported that on one occasion Paul, having inspected a regiment, gave the order: “Files, by the right, to Siberia . . . Quick march!”

By contrast with his futile passion for military parades and paraphernalia, Paul’s domestic policy was rational. He believed in order and equality among his subjects and opposed the privileges of the nobility and gentry. He abhorred Republicanism and thought that the absolute sovereign was the keystone of national life. He cherished the ideal of a society reflecting the order of the parade ground, with all subjects obeying the same regulations. He believed that the only way the nation would flourish was by such unquestioning obedience to the law. But in his insistence on extreme centralization of government with the emperor exercising his power through a series of sharply defined central organs, he contributed greatly to the growth of the bureaucratic regime that was to cripple the nation in the years to come.

One of Paul’s earliest and most important decrees, made public on April 5, 1797, the day of his coronation, regulated the succession to the throne. Peter the Great’s decree of 1722, giving the autocrat the right to nominate an heir of his own choice, had led to disorder. Paul had suffered from the lack of an effective law regulating succession. His decree, establishing the rule of primogeniture, made the eldest son of the autocrat the legal heir. If the autocrat had no son, then his brothers in order of seniority and their sons would inherit. This law remained in force for the remaining years of the dynasty.

Also on April 5, 1797, Paul issued a decree declaring that landowners should not call on their serfs to work their lands for more than three days a week. The serfs would then be free to cultivate their own lands three days each week, and Sunday was to be a day of rest. It was difficult, if not impossible, to enforce this decree. Like his partial restoration of the right of the serfs to petition the emperor, however, it showed his concern to protect the common people. But with typical inconsistency, he also introduced several measures that added to their burdens. He revived the right of merchants to purchase serfs to work in industry; he increased certain taxes paid by the peasantry; and most serious of all, he granted extensive state lands with their peasants to favorites and thus greatly increased the number of privately owned serfs. He ordered that troops should put down all signs of peasant unrest harshly. He even had a manifesto, calling on serfs to show complete obedience to their owners and threatening severe penalties to the rebellious serfs.

In spite of his sporadic efforts to reform conditions, Paul was more reactionary than Catherine had been in the last years of her reign. He banned the import of all books and journals. He applied strict censorship to all correspondence and refused to allow Russians to travel abroad. In his obsession with discipline and conformity, he issued detailed instructions on the dress to be worn by men and women, prohibiting fashions that came from revolutionary France. He produced regulations concerning the carriages and number of horses, appropriate to the ranks of their owners. But the worst aspect of his petty repressive rule was his unpredictable temper and his summary removal and punishment of officials, often for no apparent reason. The army, government officials, and the court were at the mercy of his whims and rages, and all suffered from insecurity and mounting discontent.

In his conduct of foreign policy, Paul was erratic and confusing to both his enemies and allies. He had strongly criticized Catherine’s expansionist ventures; when he ascended the throne, he had tried to free Russia from all military commitments. But he soon reversed his policy of nonintervention in France. The revolutionary movement, which he detested, was spreading into Italy and Switzerland and had to be stopped. In addition, after the success of Napoleon’s campaign in Italy, concluding with the Franco-Austrian Peace of October 1797, Paul had provided refuge for Prince Conde’s small army and generous hospitality for Louis XVIII in Mittau. But his unrealistic defense of the Order of Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in Malta also influenced his decision to join the coalition against France. Soon after Napoleon’s occupation of Malta in June 1798, Paul declared that he had taken the Order under his personal protection; when the Knights elected him to the supreme office of Grand Master of the Order, he accepted. This resulted in an extraordinary situation whereby the Russian autocrat, a devout member of the Orthodox Church, became head of a Roman Catholic Order that owed direct allegiance to the pope.

By 1799, Russia was again a member of the coalition of England, Austria, Turkey, and the Kingdom of Naples against France. Paul ordered an army commanded by Suvorov to join with the Austrians in northern Italy. Age, retirement, and increasing eccentricity had not blunted Suvorov’s military genius. He gained a number of brilliant victories in Italy and was planning to march on Paris, when he received orders to proceed immediately to Switzerland. He led his army over the Alps by way of the St. Gotthard Pass, but his losses of men were heavy. Moreover, the Austrian army had suffered a defeat at Zurich, and Suvorov managed with difficulty to keep his weakened army intact. Disputes between Russians and Austrians grew bitter, and the behavior of Suvorov’s troops in Switzerland and Bohemia aggravated relations even more between the allies. Infuriated by Austrian complaints, Paul suddenly broke off relations and early in 1800 recalled Suvorov and his army. Soon afterward, because of dissatisfaction with English cooperation with Russian forces in Holland and incensed by English occupation of Malta and refusal to give up the island to Russia, he broke off relations with England. He imposed an embargo on English ships that severely damaged Russian trade, and in December 1800 joined with Sweden, Denmark, and Prussia in armed neutrality directed against England. Russia and England were now on the brink of war.

Toward the end of 1799, Paul had decided that Napoleon was not a dangerous adventurer, but the savior of France and Europe. The dramatic change in his opinion resulted from Napoleon’s offer to give him Malta, which the British were about to seize, and from the unconditional release of all Russian prisoners of war held in France. Now completely captivated by Napoleon, Paul dismissed the French force of Prince Conde and gave orders for Louis XVIII to be evicted from Mittau. He envisioned the prospect of a Russo-French alliance in which Austria and Prussia would unite to partition Turkey and destroy English power. The expansionist policies for which he had criticized his mother now became his obsession. In January 1801, he formally annexed Georgia and was planning the conquest of India. Without adequate preparation, he gave orders for an expeditionary force of about 23,000 Cossacks assembled under the command of Vasily Orlov to advance to Khiva and Bokhara, and then into India. It was an ill-conceived venture. After Orlov and his forces had been marching for only a few weeks, Paul recalled them. By this time, they had already suffered severe casualties from heat and other hardships.

The reason for the conspiracy that ended in the coup of March 11, 1801, was his threat to the position of the nobility. They had so recently gained their freedom from the burdens of compulsory service that Peter the Great had imposed. Peter III had released them from this obligation. Then came the golden age of the nobility and gentry in Catherine’s reign. Indeed, she had granted them a charter in May 1785 that confirmed and even extended their rights. This charter guaranteed their exemption from personal taxation, corporal punishment, and state service. Judgment of their peers was the only way they could lose their estates, ranks, and lives; they alone could own estates and serfs.

Paul did not abolish this charter, but he modified certain of its provisions and virtually abolished others. He confirmed that the nobility could choose whether or not they would serve. However, in practice, they could not avoid service, especially in the army. Paul didn’t question exemption from payment of taxes, but he would “invite” members of the nobility to contribute toward the cost of government projects. To refuse would result in disgrace and worse punishments. Immunity from corporal punishment was the right that they especially valued because the savagery of these punishments had not lessened. Many peasants died from these ordeals.

In January 1797, however, Paul declared that anyone who lost the title of nobility because of some transgression could no longer claim immunity from such punishments. In Catherine’s reign, it had been rare for anyone to lose the rank of nobility. But in his fits of temper, Paul frequently deprived offenders of their noble status. His ruling thus made the threat of corporal punishment direct and real.

Unrest among the nobility and gentry grew dangerously as they saw their charter overridden. Because of Paul’s restrictions on their powers of local self-government as he tried to centralize government, they saw their role in the provinces reduced to nothing. They wondered what further assaults the emperor would make on their position and privileges. Another source of unrest was his determination to model the army after the Prussian army. Paul introduced rigid codes of discipline and administration to try to increase efficiency and eliminate the waste and corruption that were widespread in the Russian army. Officers and troops found themselves in the straitjackets not only of their Prussian uniforms but also of Prussian discipline. Paul gave extremely severe punishments for even the most ludicrous misdemeanors. Finally, Paul’s contempt for the guards brought him hostility from the strongest and most united section of the nobility. In these and other measures, Paul repeated all the mistakes of his father, Peter III. As a result, he lost his throne and his life.

From the beginning of his reign, Paul had antagonized all classes of his people. Rumors of plots to depose him had soon begun circulating. His enemies had formed the conspiracy that succeeded in the autumn of 1799. Count Nikita Petrovich Panin, the son of General Peter Panin, and Count Peter Pahlen, the military governor of St. Petersburg, were its chief instigators. In fact, Paul dismissed Panin from the office of vice-chancellor in November 1800 and ordered him to live on one of his country estates. Nevertheless, he had played an important role in the conspiracy, especially in approaching Paul’s eldest son, Alexander, and obtaining his support for the plan to depose his father.

Count Peter Pahlen evidently directed the operation on the night of March 11, 1801. He brought together the other conspirators. They included a group of guard officers, one of whom was Count Leon Bennigsen, and the three Zubov brothers, of whom Plato had been the last of Catherine’s favorites. They met over supper and most of them were drunk before they set out for the Mikhailovsky Castle. They entered without difficulty and made their way to the emperor’s bedchamber.

When he heard noises in the corridor, Paul, who lived in fear of plots and assassination, scrambled from his bed and hid in the fireplace behind a screen. At first the conspirators thought that the room was empty. Then one of them pulled away the screen and saw Paul’s bare feet. As they dragged him from the chimney in which he had been standing, he begged them to spare his life. In the drunken confusion, someone struck him on the head with a heavy gold snuffbox. He fell to the floor, and one of the conspirators strangled him with a scarf. Count Bennigsen, who alone was sober, made sure that the emperor was dead. He had the body dressed and the room set in order. At this point Count Peter Pahlen arrived, having delayed in order to avoid being involved in the actual capture. He and Bennigsen then arranged the proclamation of the death of the emperor. The official cause was given as apoplexy, a plausible explanation, for Paul had been notorious for his rages.

At court and throughout the city, the people were so happy to be free of the harassments of Paul’s rule that few worried about the cause of his death. But his sudden death disturbed many in the army and at court. Certain officers insisted on seeing the body. Although they suspected that someone had murdered him, they did not seek to press their inquiries further. All were, in fact, united in welcoming Alexander as their new emperor.