The Death of Alexander I

November 19, 1825

for russians, Alexander I is one of history’s best-known tsars. His reign provided the setting for Pushkin’s early years. It was a time of war against Napoleon, daring hussars, strapping cavalry officers, and lavish balls where high society danced the mazurka. Even the ardent efforts of the Decembrists to overthrow him lent Alexander’s era a certain romance. However hard Soviet schoolteachers and our dry textbooks strove to define the times in terms of the “crisis of serfdom” and “the struggle against autocracy,” they still seemed beautiful, thrilling, and poetic.

“Dusk. Nature. The nervous voice of a flute. Out for a late ride. On the lead horse sits the emperor in a sky-blue caftan.” Such was the beginning of Батальное полотно (Battle Canvas), a song by the popular bard Bulat Okudzhava. The captivating picture the song conjured of a pensive, melancholy emperor truly pulled at our heartstrings.

Вслед за императором едут генералы, генералы свиты,
Славою увиты, шрамами покрыты, только не убиты.
Следом – дуэлянты, флигель-адъютанты. Блещут эполеты.
Все они красавцы, все они таланты, все они поэты.

Riding behind the emperor are his generals, the generals of the retinue,
Covered in glory, riddled with scars, but still alive.
Next ride the duelists, the aides-de-camp. Their epaulets shimmer.
To a man they are charmers, talents, poets.

Alexander I was handsome, tall, popular, unsure of himself, hypocritical, and melancholic. The forces shaping him over the course of his life were so contradictory that they in turn gave rise to a personality fraught with contradictions. The little boy who was essentially taken from his parents by his grandmother, Empress Catherine the Great, learned at an early age to say one thing when at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, and quite another when visiting the royal residences in Gatchina or Pavlovsk, where his hotheaded and eternally dissatisfied father, Paul I, spent most of his time.

And Paul had plenty of cause for dissatisfaction. Kept at an arm’s length from power, he had to wait what seemed an eternity for his mother to die so that he could ascend to the throne. Not only that, but not long before her death Paul realized that Catherine wanted to hand the throne directly to her grandson, Alexander, and may even have composed a last will and testament to that effect. This did little to endear the openhearted Alexander to Paul. The four years of Paul’s reign were therefore not an easy time for his heir. In fact they were so trying that Alexander allowed those conspiring against his father to contact him and signaled, however subtly, that he did not oppose his father’s overthrow.

But even in his worst nightmares Alexander could not have imagined the brutality with which his father would be murdered during that March night in 1801, strangled in his bedroom by guardsmen. He believed, or at least convinced himself that he believed, that Paul would only be removed from power. Once the deed was done, however, the conspirators had little sympathy for any feelings of remorse Alexander might have had. “Enough childishness. It is time to rule!” Alexander was told by the plot’s chief orchestrator. What else could he do? Everyone around him brazenly rejoiced over Paul’s death. Alexander would now have to spend the rest of his life atoning for the sin of patricide.

How is it even possible to atone for such a sin? It is not, but perhaps the burden of guilt could be eased by doing good for Russia. Young Alexander had long had ideas of what this might entail: freeing the serfs, limiting autocracy, and, perhaps, turning Russia into a republic. He and his wife might even leave altogether and retire to Germany, where Alexander could live out his days on the banks of the Rhine, as private person.

But this was not to be. How can you liberate the serfs if they are crude, savage, and uneducated? Furthermore, what would they do with their freedom if they were not also given land? Such good intentions might pave a road to hell for all of Russia. And what would the nobility say? Would murderers once again come sneaking into the tsar’s bedchambers, as they had into the rooms of Alexander’s father and grandfather (Peter III)? Perhaps it would be better not to act hastily, to think things through thoroughly, to read proposals, and to promote education so that the country would be better prepared for reform in the future.

So Alexander spent his reign making promises and reading proposals, but precious little came of it. “There is no one to take them on,” the tsar lamented, “Nobody supports my initiatives.”

With each passing year, Alexander experienced a growing sense that his rule was not going as it should. He took his failures as a sign of divine retribution and waited with a sense of dread to see what other cruel punishments lay in store. When Napoleon invaded Russia and occupied Moscow, it might have seemed as if the country was being punished for the sins of its tsar. But the war was won and Alexander was celebrated all across Europe. This did little to lift his spirits. The tsar spent more and more time reading the Bible and suffering fits of melancholy.

It was around this same time that young officers who had fought in the War of 1812, and who were truly enamored of their tsar, founded their first society. Their initial intention was to help the sovereign implement his plans. But a grievous, tragic misunderstanding took place. The tsar and the future Decembrists wanted the same thing, but gradually and inexorably the gulf between them grew wider and harder to bridge. Before long, the members of these societies were no longer planning to help the tsar, but secretly planning to overthrow him. Some even spoke of regicide.

The tsar, meanwhile, had his own secret activities: he had commissioned one of his friends to draft a constitution, a fact that became known only many years later. Ironically, the very things being “plotted” by those secret societies – liberating the serfs and abolishing the autocracy – were things the tsar would have liked to do himself. When he was shown police reports about the conspirators, he could resolve neither to extend a conciliatory hand nor to arrest them. “It is not for me to judge them,” he said. After all, he was keenly aware of the hypocrisy of condemning conspirators when he himself had once cast his lot with such schemers. He also knew that his own promises of reform were partially to blame for the impatience of the young idealists.

In November 1825, when word came that the 47-year-old tsar had breathed his last in Taganrog, rumors immediately surfaced that he was in fact still alive but had simply “left.” Rumors were spread by peasants who had never laid eyes on the tsar and by courtiers who had been present at the royal funeral. They were penned by diplomats and mentioned in the reports of police informants. One courtier wrote that, when the tsar’s body arrived in Moscow, his mother exclaimed, “That is not my son!” while another claimed she confirmed, “Yes, that is my son.” Which account is to be believed?

Adult discussions of Alexander I’s fate were a significant part of my childhood. My father was a historian and he compiled a huge body of material tied to the events of 1825 as well as to some that occurred much later. He himself said that he was 99 percent certain that Alexander’s tomb in St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Cathedral was empty. There are accounts claiming that, during the reign of Nicholas I – Alexander’s brother and successor – the body that had been ceremoniously laid to rest in Alexander’s tomb was removed from the royal vault. Nicholas could not allow the soldier who had supposedly been placed in the tsar’s tomb to remain among his illustrious ancestors.

Numerous tales have also circulated alleging that, during the first years of Soviet rule, Chekists opened the royal tombs in search of valuables and found the perfectly preserved body of Peter the Great, but no body whatsoever in Alexander’s tomb. It remained only to verify these stories.

But this was the 1970s. Investigating the NKVD-KGB archives was out of the question. No eyewitnesses to the opening of the tomb remained. Attempts to obtain permission to investigate its contents were unsuccessful. All letters submitted to various authorities came back with similar replies: “This subject is of no relevance to Soviet historians” or “Opening the tomb will cause an unhealthy stir among émigrés.”

Nearly 40 years have passed since that time and 21 since my father departed this life. The results of his long quest have been embodied in a marvelous article he produced entitled It Was Not For Him to Judge Them, and, in his lifetime, in countless lectures that always left his audience eager to rush to Leningrad and open the tsar’s tomb themselves. Inspired by tales of this quest for the truth, the marvelous poet David Samoilov penned the poem Strufian, which artfully sets to verse the story of how Alexander I was captured by aliens from outer space.

Today, any tourist can visit Alexander’s tomb in St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Cathedral, but so far, no one has been allowed to peek inside.