In the list of the tsars of Russia there are many Ivans, several Alexanders and Peters, but only one Paul. After the tragic life and vile death of Paul I, none of his successors wanted to give the name another chance and thus he remained alone in history: a tsar betrayed first by his mother and then by his son, and murdered in his own bedroom. night of March 23, 1801 (March 11 in the calendar followed by the Russian Empire at the time, the Julian calendar).
The family problems that were to mark Tsar Paul’s life began from the very cradle. He was the first son of the future Pedro III and his wife Catherine, who would later be called the Great. Or maybe it wasn’t, because his arrival into the world after eight years of marriage unleashed the rumor that Pablo was actually the illegitimate son of his mother and one of his first lovers, the officer Sergei Saltikov.
That gossip accompanied Pablo all his life, but the soap opera was going to get more complicated: Tsarina Elizabeth separated him from his mother during his childhood and showered him with attention, but everything changed with his father’s accession to the throne when he was eight years old. . Peter III’s crown lasted as long as it took his wife to convince everyone who was anyone in Russia that her husband was disturbed. That is, a few months, because it seems that she indeed was.
With the support of a new lover, also a soldier, Catherine the Great deposed her husband and arrested him. After a few months, he was found dead. At that time Paul was supposed to become tsar according to the laws, but his mother took the throne from him for more than thirty years. She also ended up sending him away from court, to a palace on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg that had previously been (of course) a gift for another of her lovers.
Resentful of the rudeness of his domineering mother and the memory of his murdered father, the future Paul I entertained himself for decades by organizing military parades in his palace in Gatchina. Catalina did not allow him to intervene in state affairs, although she did take care of finding him a wife and then a new one when the first died in childbirth.
It seems that, at the end of his days, his intention was to skip it and directly name Paul’s firstborn, Alexander, heir, but he ran out of time. When Catherine the Great died in 1796, the reign of Paul I arrived without great celebrations.
Paul was already over forty years old when he became tsar, but not a single one of his four years of reign passed peacefully. Keeping in mind the fate of his father, he always feared that a revolt would come that would remove him from the middle, despite which he dedicated himself to fighting with those who had the easiest time rebelling: the nobles. He undid several of his mother’s reforms and wanted to improve the lives of millions of serfs, which is always a very direct way to confront his masters.
After four years, the malcontents had had enough, although it does not seem that the final blow against Pablo was a carefully planned operation. On the night of March 23, 1801, the tsar had given a banquet and retired to his chambers. After a while, a group of high-ranking soldiers showed up at the palace, considerably drunk, and stood in front of his bedroom, overpowering two butlers and forcibly entering the royal chamber. At first they were surprised to see the empty bed, but it didn’t take them long to find the tsar hiding, some versions say, behind a curtain.
The soldiers brought a letter for Pablo, as his father had done, to “voluntarily” sign his abdication. Whether it was because he remembered how that had ended for Peter III or for another reason, the tsar must have objected something, and the conspirators began beating him to death. His son, who knew of the plan to overthrow him, inherited the throne with some remorse, but that did not prevent her from occupying it for more than twenty years.
Today we do not know for sure if many of those aristocrats who hated him, accused him of being an agent of Prussia and ended up killing him are not the same ones who gave rise to those official chronicles that present him as insane, angry, irresponsible. , a traitor…, although it is true that his lurches in foreign policy do not help to dispel those impressions. What is clear is that the reign of the one Tsar Paul came to an abrupt end that March night. As was tradition, through family.
