Trying to Save Russia From Itself Was a Thankless Job

Empress Catherine II of Russia didn’t earn the title of “the Great” by being a sweetie.

She was, like almost all successful rulers, capable of playing hardball and cagey about maintaining her power. She was determined to make Russia a world power, and that she would force Europe to give her adopted country the respect she believed it deserved. Catherine was also an autocrat, and was chillingly ruthless if someone seemed to be a threat to her crown. Nevertheless, she was pragmatic and had very realistic expectations of what she could achieve.

Unfortunately, her husband and son didn’t understand any of the political nuances and manoeuvrings that Catherine seemed to do as naturally as breathing. As a result, she ran roughshod over them both during her lifetime. It is also why they quickly became toast without her support to keep them afloat.

Her husband, Peter III, was assassinated shortly after she deposed him by a group of her most loyal adherents. There is no evidence Catherine knew about it or ordered them to do it, but if she hadn’t put Peter at their mercy it couldn’t have happened. Catherine was more careful with the life of her son Paul, but after she died he was no more able to survive without her to protect him than his father had been.

Of course, being a woman, Catherine the Great’s “unfeminine” strengths and weaknesses caused the most common reaction in popular culture and history – she has been slut shamed almost beyond compare (or belief). Her success where her husband and son failed just seems to have poured fuel on the fire of her reputation.

While she was alive, Catherine protected her son, but she also disliked him and feared he was trying to plant his Romanov butt on the throne too early and over her cooling body. The problem was that there was no maternal-child bond between them. She didn’t even get to see or hold Paul before he was snatched from her childbed and swept away to be kept as a kind of pet by his paternal aunt, Empress Elizabeth I of Russia. Catherine only got to see him a handful of times while Elizabeth lived, and after Catherine became Empress it was far too late for her to bond with the 8 year old boy who now actively hated her because he was convinced she had murdered his father. Furthermore, as he grew older she became profoundly afraid of his potential to unseat her, and she made his life at court isolated and miserable with her suspicions of anyone who befriended him.

Alas, the Empress Catherine had learned nothing from her own experience at being denied an opportunity to parent, because she did the exact same thing to Paul that had been done to her – her son’s two eldest children were taken from their biological parents and raised by Catherine in an attempt to assure their loyalty to her.

When her son became Emperor Paul I of Russia, he started an almost immediate reversal of nearly all his mother’s policies.

Many of these reversals were for the best and most intelligent of reasons. He thought (correctly) that Russia “needed substantial governmental and military reforms to avoid an economic collapse and a revolution.” He was, of course, completely correct about this — as his decedent Tsar Nicholas II would find out in 1917. With the goal of making Russia a better place for everyone to live, he “directed reforms which resulted in greater rights for the peasantry, and better treatment for serfs on agricultural estates” and moreover repealed his mother’s laws which had “allowed the corporal punishment of the free classes” by their superiors in rank. 

He also went after the upper strata of society as well, after he discovered egregious levels of corruption in the Russian government and unholy shenanigans in the treasury. He sought to transform.  the venal and self-serving Russian aristocracy into “a disciplined, principled, loyal caste resembling a medieval chivalric order.” 

This is not to say that the new emperor was a paragon of idealistic humanism. He certainly made mistakes, many of them from hubris. He insisted on introducing a Prussian uniforms for the Russian army because he liked the way they looked, but they were uncomfortable, impracticable, and hard to keep clean, so they were hated by his soldiers. His military also hated his yen for parades and the trappings of glory. Paul was unfortunately prone to flogging soldiers who made mistakes during his Wachtparad (“watch parades”), and his men hated him for his niggling demands and his obsession with style over substance. When “attempted to reform the organization of the army in 1796 by introducing The Infantry Codes, a series of guidelines for the army based largely upon show and glamour … his greatest commander, Suvorov, completely ignored them, believing them to be worthless.”

In spite of Paul’s love affair with the military and chivalry, he believed that royal monies should be spent repairing the country internally rather than being wasted on useless European expansion and wars, and for that reason “he recalled all troops outside Russian borders, including the struggling expedition Catherine II had sent to conquer Iran through the Caucasus and the 60,000 men she had promised to Britain and Austria to help them defeat the French.” This made Paul as unpopular with the governments of Western Europe as he was within the Russian court.

There was massive resistance among the upper classes to Paul’s reforms. While Paul’s moves toward human rights were admirable, they also vexed the nobility he needed to secure his crown. Catherine had understood how to move the Russian court along, using the judicious application of both the carrot and the stick and always taking baby-steps toward modernisation, but Paul didn’t appear to know how to use either the arts of coaxing or commanding correctly.

A conspiracy was organized, some months before it was executed, by Counts Peter Ludwig von der Pahlen, Nikita Petrovich Panin, and the half-Spanish, half-Neapolitan adventurer Admiral Ribas. The death of Ribas delayed the execution. On the night of 23 March 1801, Paul was murdered in his bedroom in the newly built St Michael’s Castle by a band of dismissed officers headed by General Bennigsen, a Hanoverian in the Russian service, and General Yashvil, a Georgian. They charged into his bedroom, flushed with drink after supping together, and found Paul hiding behind some drapes in the corner. The conspirators pulled him out, forced him to the table, and tried to compel him to sign his abdication. Paul offered some resistance, and Nikolay Zubov struck him with a sword, after which he was strangled and trampled to death. He was succeeded by his son, the 23-year-old Alexander I, who was actually in the palace, and to whom General Nikolay Zubov, one of the assassins, announced his accession, accompanied by the admonition, “Time to grow up! Go and rule!”. The assassins were not punished by Alexander, and the court physician James Wylie declared apoplexy the official cause of death.

It was a tragic end of an Emperor who sincerely tried to do so much good for his people, and an appalling betrayal by his son. Worse, when Paul’s heirs failed to imitate his liberal reforms, it created such an unbearable state of oppression and misery that the populace turned to communism for hope, and after the Soviets rose to power the Bolsheviks slaughtered the royal family, ending the line of the Romanovs.