Paul I: Russian Hamlet

On the night of March 12, 1801, three battalions of guards, headed by a senior officer, approached Mikhailovsky Castle, the recently completed tsarist residence in St. Petersburg. Easily overpowering the guards and posting their own people about the castle’s corridors, several of the guards climbed a narrow staircase and entered a room on the top floor.

There was no one on the wrinkled bed, and only after some time were the intruders able to make out from the shadows, behind one of the bed shades, a small figure in a nightgown—hunched in a fetal position and trembling with fear. They moved the shades and pulled the person hunched behind it to the center of the room.

A short, tense discussion followed. The guards presented a piece of paper to the person in the nightgown and demanded he sign it. He refused. Suddenly, one of the guards—tall and clearly a very strong individual—struck the master of the bedroom in the temple with his fist, which was wrapped around a golden snuffbox. The victim collapsed and the attackers fell upon him with a fury—someone began to strangle him with a long scarf while someone else kicked his little body.

In just a few moments the deed was done, and the murderers, as if coming to their senses, recoiled in shock. Before them on the floor lay the battered body of a man who, just a few minutes before, had been the ruler of one of the most powerful countries on earth—Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, Paul I.

Paul I is one of the most mysterious and contradictory figures in Russian history. Some have called him “the romantic emperor,” or “the knight-tsar.” Others have spoken of his rule as “unenlightened absolutism” or a “military-political dictatorship,” while still others have simply considered him to be insane. Whatever the final verdict may be, it is clear that, in order to understand the personality of Paul I and the rationale behind his actions, it is essential to look at the history of his life.

Pavel Petrovich Romanov was born in 1754 to heir apparent Peter Fyodorovich (grandson of Peter the Great) and his German wife Catherine (formerly princess of Anhalt-Herbst, Sofia Augustus Frederick). His was a long-awaited birth, the first after nine years of Peter and Catherine’s marriage (indeed, Catherine herself later hinted that the child was the result of her affair with her lover at the time, Sergei Saltykov). Paul’s appearance was particularly anticipated by Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (daughter of Peter I), who immediately cloistered the infant away, surrounding him with unbridled attention. Paul’s parents had to ask Elizabeth for special permission just to see their son. As a matter of fact, Peter was not especially interested in his offspring, while Catherine later recalled: “I could only find out about him on the sly, because to ask about his health would have been to doubt the concern which the empress had for him … As it was, she took him into her own room, and the minute he would cry out, she herself would run to him — the care he was surrounded with left him virtually no air to breathe. He was kept in an extraordinarily hot room, wrapped in flannel and lain in a bassinet lined with black-red fox fur; they covered him with a quilted blanket and laid yet another on top of that … His whole body and face were covered with sweat, which later, after he had grown, made him catch a cold from the slightest draft.”

Paul’s main tutor was Nikita Panin, a former guards officer and later a diplomat, who had spent several years in Sweden, where he had become an advocate of the Enlightment and a supporter of constitutional monarchy. The instructions given him by the empress were these: “Just as a man loves something when he knows its value, and values it when he sees that its usefulness is derived from its preservation, so should you instruct his highness—above all other sciences—in the perfection of his knowledge of Russia.”

Panin not only carried out his orders, but truly bonded with his charge. He dreamed of shaping Paul into the perfect ruler. And, according to recollections of his contemporaries, the young Paul was a well educated yet excitable, romantic youth who believed in the ideals of the Enlightenment. Another of Paul’s educators, Semyon Poroshin, kept a copious diary, in which he noted all the words and actions of the young prince. He noted that his young pupil was agile, restless, and impatient, that he had goodness and a desire for justice, combined with a hot temper and a tendency for sharp mood changes.

At the end of 1761, Empress Elizabeth died and Paul’s father, Peter III, ascended to the throne. Yet the rule of Peter III turned out to be the shortest in Russian history—just six months. In this period, Peter, who did not love Russia and did not respect its customs (he was born and raised in Germany), succeeded in turning Russian society against him. He was seen as merely a stubborn fool on the throne, such that no one could be in the least bit certain of what tomorrow might bring. On June 28, 1762, as the result of a palace coup (see Russian Life, Nov 1996), led by Peter III’s wife, Catherine, who would go down in history as Catherine the Great (Peter III died under suspicious and unknown circumstances just a few days after the coup). Catherine’s rule lasted 34 years, and all of this time Paul was dying to receive the much-coveted crown which he knew belonged to him by right.

In the first years of her rule, Catherine tried to get closer to her son—after all, he was the only one who provided at least a semblance of legitimacy to her power. Their relations were, at that time, seemingly quite warm. But, with time, a cooling crept in. The older Paul grew, the more he began to resent being sidelined from the affairs of state. He was the legal heir to the throne; he was young, energetic and well educated. He believed in his historic destiny and proudly felt that he could be of more use to his homeland than the ever-changing favorites who surrounded his mother’s throne. Paul also began to be surrounded by people who were not squeamish to tell the heir apparent that his mother had, in fact, stolen power from him. The situation became particularly acute in 1772, when the grand prince came of age. There was even a plot to overthrow Catherine and place Paul on the throne, but Paul himself disclosed the plot to his mother.

Catherine, who valued nothing in this world so much as power, and who had no desire to share it with anyone, tried to channel her son’s energies elsewhere. In 1773, he was married to Wilhelmina, Princess of Hessen-Darmstadt (who took the name Natalya Alexeyevna), whom he truly loved. However, three years later his beloved wife died in childbirth. Paul was inconsolable in his grief, but his mother tried to comfort him with an eye-opening confession: Catherine told her son his wife had been unfaithful to him with his best friend. Despite the severity of this bitter “treatment,” Paul was consoled and married again in just a few months  to Princess Sophia Dorothea of Wurtemberg (taken name Maria Fyodorovna) who in 1777 gave Paul a new heir to the throne, Alexander (who would become Emperor Alexander I in 1801). In 1779, his second son, Konstantin, was born. In 1796, a third son, Nicholas was born (he also ascended the throne, after his brother Alexander died in 1825). Catherine acted toward her grandsons the same way Elizabeth had with Paul: she took completely upon herself the task of their education.

In 1781-2, Paul and his wife traveled abroad. Maria began writing daily letters to the empress while the couple was still within the bounds of the Russian empire, recounting all that they saw. However, once they crossed the borders of the empire, they began to meet with such unexpected, luxurious receptions—unlike anything they had experienced in Russia—that Paul’s head began to spin. The Grand Prince finally felt that he was getting what he deserved. His tongue loosened up and, in conversations with foreign monarchs and their courtiers, he allowed himself to sharply criticize his mother, her policies and her ministers.

Still, Paul made a sufficiently positive impression at European courts, and behind his back he was even sympathetically called “the Russian Hamlet.” However, Catherine, who attentively followed her son’s and his young wife’s travels, of course found out about Paul’s inadvertent and rather careless remarks.

When the couple returned to St. Petersburg,the empress distanced them from the court, gifting to the young couple a luxurious palace in Gatchina, not far from the capital. And it was there that Paul now spent the majority of his time, indulging in his favorite pursuits. From his father, he inherited a passion for all things military, in particular those of Prussian origin. In Gatchina, Paul created his own small army, dressed in Prussian-style tunics and trained in the Prussian manner. On the plaza in front of Gatchina he organized countless parades and reviews of his troops, relishing in their unquestioning submission to his every command. Thus did he realize the hidden desire and energy to rule that had been building up inside him. He dreamed of a time when all of Russia would submit as mechanically and unquestioningly to his orders.

As time passed, Paul’s character deteriorated. His natural joviality began to give way to a sullen and bilious irritability. For he lived in a constant state of fear, feeling that his mother would order him seized and arrested, or would send a hired killer to do him in.

Paul’s opinions on social-political issues also changed. The most important factor in this was the revolution in France in 1789. Like many people of that era, Paul subsequently became disenchanted with the ideals of the Enlightenment, deeming them utopian. However, if for many this merely meant a renunciation of radical means of transformation, for Paul it turned into a maniacal fear of revolution and the possibility of its recurrence — on Russian soil. He concluded that any type of revolutionary manifestation had to be quelled with the most severe repression, and thus that one had to take decisive preventive measures.

One of Paul’s biographers, N. Shilder, cites an episode relating to the time of the French revolution: “Once, when Paul was reading the newspapers in the empress’ office, he blurted out, ‘What are they all talking about! I would end all of this with cannons.’ Catherine said to her son, ‘Vous êtes une Bête feroce, [Are you such a severe wretch] or don’t you understand that cannons cannot battle with ideas? If you will rule that way as tsar, you won’t sit on the throne very long.”

So it was that, over time, the conflict between mother and son increasingly focused on ideas. Catherine, for whom a major goal of her rule was carrying out reforms based on the ideas of the Enlightenment, feared that these reforms would not long outlive her. In 1787, while working on one of her legal projects, the empress wrote: “...I don’t really know for whom I am doing all my work, and I wonder whether my labor, my care and my ardent desire to do good to my empire won’t prove in vain, for I can see I cannot bequeath my mind.”   

Paul, however, increasingly considered liberal policies, based on freedom and the rights of individuals, to be pernicious. He was gradually more inclined to postulate that discipline and total submission of the individual to the leader and the state should be the basic principles of state management. That was his proposed salvation from the infection of revolution.

There is reason to presume that, in the last years of her life, Catherine thought quite a bit about how to protect and continue what she had begun. First, she worked up a draft law on succession, proposing a rather complex procedure for affirming the rights of the new monarch only after such time as he proved that his personal qualities were sufficient for this high calling. Later, she decided to grant the throne to her beloved grandson, Alexander, bypassing her son. But she did not succeed in either of these undertakings. On November 6, 1796, Catherine the Great unexpectedly passed away. Paul’s long-awaited hour had arrived. At the age of 42 he became Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias.

The very first steps Paul took as tsar show that, on the one hand, he could not wait to put his ideas into action and make up for lost time, and, on the other hand, he had accumulated huge animosity and vindictiveness for his mother and her policies. He immediately had the body of his father, Peter III, exhumed from Alexander-Nevsky Lavra and buried next to his mother in the tsarist necropolis of Peter and Paul Cathedral. At the same time, he began to introduce “order” in the capital—as he defined it, strictly circumscribing the behavior of the city’s residents. One of his contemporaries recalled: “At the end of Catherine’s reign and with Paul’s accession to the throne, Petersburg was, undoubtedly, one of the most beautiful capitals in Europe … However, as the police measures were meant to be carried out with all possible pomp, the metamorphosis was so rapid that Petersburg stopped looking anything like a modern capital, and took on the dull appearance of a small 18th century German town.”

One of the strongest motivations behind Paul’s policies was a vengeful desire to overturn whatever his mother had done. According to historian Vasily Klyuchevsky, “the best considered undertakings were spoiled by a stamp of personal hatred.” The American historian Roderick McGrew wrote, that, by the time Catherine died, Paul was completely blind to Catherine’s achievements and had no sympathy whatsoever with her objectives. Given the nation’s perilous situation, he was persuaded that he had to carry out a revolution in order to forestall an even worse revolution.

However, one should not think that this was the only guiding motive behind the young tsar’s actions. His policies had a sufficiently well-defined program, based on specific principles designed to achieve concrete goals. Still, Paul’s basic goal was to turn back revolution by disciplining society, by turning it into a mechanism that responded to its ruler. In practice, this inevitably led to limits on personal freedoms and maximizing the extent of state control over all spheres of life of its subjects.

On the whole, Paul’s internal policies can be divided into several interdependent areas: reform of state administration, social policy and military reform. As concerns the first of these reforms, on the surface Paul sought the same ends as Catherine: centralization of power. But he went about it very differently. Thus, under the late empress, the position of Prosecutor General of the State Senate had been significantly reinforced, impinging on many aspects of state affairs, in particular financial policy. But under Paul, the Prosecutor General became a sort of prime-minister who concentrated into his hands the functions of the ministers of interior, justice and, to some degree, finance. Not surprisingly, Paul said to one of his Procurators General (he replaced three in his four years on the throne): “You and me, me and you, we alone will take care of business.”

Changing the functions of the Senate and its Prosecutor General was part of the reorganization of all central and local administration. As early as the 1780s, Catherine, embracing the principles of free entrepreneurship, had abolished a number of collegia (i.e. ministries supervising specific industries—the central administrative organ created by Peter the Great). Instead, the empress transferred the minimal necessary control over economic development to local administrative bodies.

Paul resurrected the collegia, but at the same time gradually renounced the very principle of collegiality in reaching decisions and introduced the principle of strict subordination. All of this resulted in the creation of more bureaucratic structures. Thus, as early as 1797, soon after his coronation, Paul established the Ministry of Appanages, with the sole purpose of having a state body overseeing all the land owned by the tsar’s family. And in 1800 the Ministry of Commerce was created. Paul clamped down even more decisively on the relatively progressive system of local administration which his mother had worked long and hard to create. First of all, Paul liquidated the position of governor (namestnik) established by Catherine. The governor administered large regions of the country and the new emperor believed that the governors enjoyed too much independence, siphoning power away from himself. Second, he liquidated the Social Charity Boards established by Catherine—the first-ever social security bodies in the history of Russia. The City Dumas–the organs for estates’ self-government—were also axed. Even the Catherinian reforms of the legal system were overturned: a number of legal bodies were completely liquidated while the civil and criminal courts were joined as one. In fact, the creation of a judiciary separate from the executive was one of Catherine’s most important achievements, so quite obviously Paul made a dramatic step backward.

The emperor also altered the country’s administrative-territorial divisions, as well as the administrative principles of some national regions of the empire. The number of gubernias created under Catherine was cut back, while  several national territories were allowed to recreate their traditional local bodies of power, which had previously been liquidated. Paul was trying to concentrate all of the levers of power in his hands. Yet he was also fearful of a possible disintegration of the empire, so he allowed himself such populism in hopes of keeping national regions from revolting.

The main goal of Paul’s social policy was to maximize the subordination of all classes of society to the power of the emperor. The nobility, for whom the reign of Catherine was a “golden era”, was the hardest hit by Paul’s reforms. The attack on the gentry’s “freedoms,” as fixed in Catherine’s Stature of Rights Extended to the Gentry (1785), began on the very first days of Paul’s rule. In 1797 Paul summoned all officers on the the regimental officers list for a military review and those who failed to report were mercilessly fired. Under Catherine, there was a custom of enrolling very young children in the army, so that, when they came of age, they would already have attained officer status by virtue of their “term of service.” In fact, the number of such officers was quite insignificant, but there were many more officers excused from duty for illness or on leave. As well, many highranking state officials combined positions in the state apparatus with the formal rank of general and were listed, as a rule, in various guards regiments.

On the surface, Paul’s action on this front was completely logical and just. Yet, it was followed by a number of limitations imposed by Paul on the non-serving gentry (the right not to serve was established in a 1762 manifesto signed by Peter III). First, the new emperor forbade non-serving gentry from running in elections to organs of local self-administration and from holding elective office. Second, under Paul,  transfer from military to civil service required special permission from the Senate, and in 1800 the emperor requested a list of all non-serving gentry and ordered the majority to enroll in military service. Even earlier, in 1799, Paul abolished the regional (i.e. in gubernias) Assembly of Nobles—the gentry’s basic organs of self-governance. District-level (uezd) Assemblies of Nobles were preserved, yet their rights were severely restricted.

There were other, “more specific” moves on the nobility as well. In 1797, members of the gentry, previously exempt from taxation, were required to pay a special tax whose proceeds went to fund the administration of the gubernia; in 1799 this tax was increased. Historians have also noted several cases in Paul’s reign of physical punishments being meted out on the gentry, whom Catherine the Great had exempted from corporal punishment (along with certain other categories of the population).

This is not to say the main goal of Paul’s policies was to attack a gentry which had had it “easy” under his mother. It is simply that, at that point in history, Russia’s emperor no longer believed a government should be based on the principles of the Enlightenment, as Panin had educated him. Instead, he advocated a medieval state, with its absolute monarchy and its gentry of knights. He sought to turn the nobility into a class of knights—disciplined, organized and an exceptional elite, for whom the greatest honor was to serve their ruler. Not surprisingly, Paul tried to limit entry into the gentry by persons of lower classes, forbidding the non-gentry from being promoted to the ranks of junior officers.

Much of this was motivated by some logical, if unfounded, assumptions. Paul was deeply convinced that non-serving gentry, who wasted their time reading books and at other intellectual activities, inevitably became infected with ideas about the rights of individuals based on freedom or property, which, in time, turned into the “poison” of revolutionary ideas. As the historian Nathan Eidelman wrote, Paul’s ideology was a “knightly conservative idea which contradicted ‘freedom, equality, brotherhood’ … [it was] knighthood versus Jacobism ... noble inequality versus ‘evil equality’.”

In order to destroy the very possibility of free thought, Paul strove for total control over the lives of his subjects, seeking to regiment even the most trifling matters. The emperor paid great attention to external appearances, clothing and conduct. The tsar banned whatever was associated with revolutionary France—dress coats, round hats and even certain words and expressions; the import of foreign books into Russia was forbidden. Severe punishment could be wrought on the subject who, in the theater, mistakenly clapped before his sovereign. And a sentry officer who forgot to take off his hat when having lunch in the palace could be exiled to Siberia.

Convinced of the divine provenance of tsarist power, and, guided by knightly ideals, Paul concentrated great effort on the outward appearance of the deified Russian monarchy. He was a great lover of ceremony and rituals, which had to be scrupulously followed to the minutest detail, distinguished by excruciating pomp and lasting several hours. All life at court was subject to strict regimentation, adhering to medieval European forms and not to homegrown Russian ceremonial traditions. Yet even in Europe such traditions were archaic. They only evoked scorn from Paul’s contemporaries, who saw them as in no way achieving his goals, discrediting him in the eyes of court society. In general, it should be recognized that most of his contemporaries regarded Paul I with a mixture of disdain (for his pettiness and his attachment to formal traditions) and fear (of his outbursts of unrestrained rage and demonstrative justice). If in his youth he had been compared with Hamlet, once he came to power, there was something of Don Quixote in him.

Paul’s policy toward the gentry defined his attitude towards the peasantry. Unlike his mother, Paul did not see in serfdom any inherent evil, even less a hindrance on the country’s development. On the contrary,  he believed that privately-owned serfs lived even better than those of the state. In his memoirs, the emperor’s adjutant, Nikolai Kotlubitsky, recalled how Paul I said to him: “It would be better if all state-owned peasants were given over to the gentry. Living in Gatchina, I saw well enough how they are managed, and the landowners take better care of their peasants.” This intention the emperor realized: in his four years he transferred several hundred thousand state-owned serfs into private hands.

Aside from this, all of Paul’s actions regarding the peasantry seemed designed to increase their subordination to the gentry and, consequently, himself. Paul refused to see serfs as the exclusive property of their owners. He considered the landowners themselves as stewards of the land and property granted them by the state, and serfs were just one of the types of property granted to them. For the first time in many years, with Paul’s ascent to the throne, peasants had to swear an oath of loyalty to their sovereign.

Through his decrees, Paul extended serfdom to a number of regions only recently added to Russian lands; in 1798 a prohibition introduced by Peter III was removed so that serfs could be sold to merchants for work in factories; the rights of serfs to make complaints about their masters was severely limited.

In 1797 one of the most famous Pauline documents appeared: the Manifesto on the Three Day Statute of Labor. According to this manifesto, landowners could not force serfs to work on the Sabbath, and the remaining six days worth of work were recommended to be divided evenly between the landowner and the serf. Historians differ on the significance of this document. Some feel that it was a step toward the liquidation of serfdom. But, in reality, the manifesto was simply not enforced, except in some areas of the country, for example in Ukraine, where landowners hastily took advantage of the manifesto to force peasants to work for them three days a week, instead of two, as was the previous norm.

Some historians are slightly more sympathetic about Paul’s military reforms. Not surprisingly, Tsar Paul became especially irritated by the smallest lapse in discipline, or by laxism, both of which the army certainly suffered from. However,the emperor pushed his demands to the point of absurdity, decreeing that all life, the entire existence of those in the military—from enlisted men to top officers—should be subjugated to the interests of service. Their lives should be ascetic, free of any expression of comfort, idleness or laziness. In short, Paul decided to bring Prussian military order to the army. The reform began with the introduction of new uniforms, completely incorporating the Prussian style: long coats, stockings and shiny black shoes, a powdered wig with a plait of defined length. Quite naturally, soldiers felt clumsy in such a ridiculous outfit. Officers were given clubs with ivory knobs with which to punish soldiers.

In December 1796 a new Military Charter was published, in which special attention was devoted to teaching soldiers useless marching techniques. Insofar as this was based on the Prussian Military Charter of 1760, none of the achievements of Russian military thought proven on the field of battle during the time of Catherine were incorporated. Other Charters were also published for other types of troops. They all shared the basic theory that an army was all about mechanical cohesiveness and execution of orders.

Initiative and independence were harmful and unacceptable. Soldiers and officers were required to spend many hours every day on the marching ground, training in the goose-step and the movement of arms. Reviewing an endless number of parades, the emperor carped on the smallest error and for the littlest infraction was ready to send even an entire regiment to Siberia. As one historian noted, “Paul threw the baby out with the bathwater—together with the laxity and abuses, tsarist decrees coarsely tossed out the diligent extraction by Suvorov and Rumyantsev of the best military qualities of the Russian army during the Catherinian era.”

Paul’s foreign policy also suffered from a lack of consistency and integrity. Upon ascending to the throne, he sought to build his foreign policy as if on a clean slate, playing the part of a peace-loving monarch. This was meant to be in sharp contrast to Catherine, who shortly before her death had decided to take part in the anti-French coalition. Yet, when, in 1798, it became clear that France intended to create an independent Poland up against the border of Russia, a clash with France became inevitable. And when, shortly thereafter, Napoleon seized the island of Malta, Paul took the Maltese Order under his protection and was proclaimed its Grossmeister. While this strange action was in keeping with the emperor’s ideas on resurrecting knighthood, giving plenty of pretexts for reinforcing the “knight element” during court ceremonies, it was at odds with Russian national traditions. An Orthodox emperor heading up a Catholic order was unseemly at the least. In this same unlikely vein, Paul, especially toward the end of his life, thought that the Orthodox and Catholic churches could be unified, with himself as its titular head.

In the fall of 1798 and the spring of 1799, a joint Russian-Turkish armada under the command of Admiral Ushakov freed the islands of Iona and Corfu from France’s grip. The famous Russian military leader Alexander Suvorov led a united Russian-Austrian force that, in a few months, freed all of northern Italy from French occupation (see Russian Life, May/June 2000). Suvorov’s famous march across the Alps followed, but in the spring of 1800 Paul’s foreign policy did a swift turnabout.

Relations with England soured when England took Malta back from France and did not make plans to leave. As a result, British ships and goods were embargoed from Russian ports. Then there was friction with Austria over the fate of Italy’s princedoms. In December 1800, Paul signed an alliance with Prussia, Sweden and Denmark against England, and soon France and Russian began negotiations on a mutual anti-British policy and a joint campaign to India. But these plans were thwarted by the coup on March 11, 1801.

During his short four years on the throne, notwithstanding the often noble rationale behind his actions, in essence Paul focused on countering the reforms of Catherine the Great. He sought to return Russia to the path down which Peter the Great sought to guide her, incarnating the ideal police state of his more famous great-grandfather. But the time was wrong for this. Russian society, having tasted the fruits of “enlightened despotism” under Catherine, did not want to part with that measure of freedom—albeit restricted—which it had attained in its difficult struggle with the state.

What is more, the frenzied, quick-tempered, inconsistent and unpredictable character of the emperor created a situation of great uncertainty. The fate of a Russian noble was dependent on the chance whims or mood changes of a sovereign who was all too much like his father. And, like under his father, many saw only despotism on the throne.

A not insignificant role in fomenting general dissent was Paul’s attitude toward the Russian army, whose soldiers were harassed by endless parades and drilling. Throw in his severity toward the officer corps, and it is easy to understand why no one stopped the plotters from carrying out their otherwise treacherous deed. As the Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin wrote, “What the Jacobites did for the Republic, Paul did for autocracy: he compelled them to hate it for its abuses … He wanted to be Ivan IV [the Terrible]; but Russians, who had already had Catherine II, knew that a ruler, just as his subjects, needed to fulfill his sacred duties.”

The general discontent even flowed beyond the capital, to the provinces. The March 1801 plot against Paul was spoken of almost openly, as if about a matter decided and unavoidable. Apparently, even his son and heir to the throne Alexander was in on the plot. Alexander had evidently been promised that the emperor’s life would be spared, that the goal was only Paul’s abdication. But cruel reality proved different—Paul refused to abdicate and, eager to recoup the privileges they had enjoyed under Paul’s mother, the plotters did not deliver on their promises to keep the tsar alive. Upon succeeding his slain father, Alexander promised his subjects that, with him on the throne, everything would be like it was under his grandmother Catherine. Not surprisingly, the Russian nobility sighed with relief.  RL

Alexander Kamensky is Doctor of History and Professor of the Russian History Department at the Russian State University for the Humanities.