History Spotlight, 3/23

Tsar Paul I of Russia gets whacked in a manner out of a Martin Scorsese picture on this day in history, 1801. Paul always had the reputation of being a dunderhead and nut, but modern history revisionism has attempted to paint him in a more sympathetic light. It doesn't work, he still comes off as a dunderhead and a nut.

Paul was born in 1754, the son of Catherine "The Great" and, maybe, the future Emperor Peter III. That whole horse thing about Catherine may or may not be true (I'd rather not think about it) but Cathy sure did love the kind of stallions that went on two legs. From almost the moment of Paul's birth Catherine allowed the rumor to be spread that Peter wasn't his father but that it was really Sergei Saltykov, a big side of beef who was Catherine's first and favorite lover. Nobody really knows for sure, as Paul did look a lot like Peter and Cathy was kind of a manipulative bitch who liked to screw with her husband's head. But she did get around.

He was mostly raised by his grandmother, the Empress Elizabeth. That's good because the only thing keeping Cathy from putting him to death was that she had already used up her quota of murders that month. After he grew up and got married (to a woman his mother chose), he still occasionally found ground up chunks of glass in his food. There's a scene I'd like to see: "Aw, Mom, are you still trying to kill me?" "Just for old time's sake, son!" Man, what a weird family.

At some point, either Cathy sent him away or he decided to stop tempting fate and took the opportunity to leave court and set up an estate. When she died in November of 1796 and he ascended to the throne of Russia, he probably breathed a sigh of relief. But he turned out to be about as stable as any other randomly selected Romanov and immediately started to tick people off. He recalled the expedition sent to conquer Persia right when everybody was getting psyched up for it and he made a point of talking about how he wasn't really illegitimate which only made people think about it all the more. Remember how Peter the Great dragged Russia into the modern age, kicking and screaming in the early part of the 18th century? Well, right when they had gotten used to it, Paul starts dragging them back to the middle ages. Finally, he got Russia involved in foreign wars that nobody could quite see the point of. Invade Persia? Sure, Russia had always felt that Persia was theirs anyway, but why pick fights with France in the Mediterranean or the British in India?

The ineptly executed foreign adventures drained the treasury and annoyed the military establishment. The nobility was irked about having to live by some outdated chivalric code. The middle class was bent about the reforms Paul enacted for the peasants, which made it easier to serfs to become middle class. And nobody cared what the serfs thought. Anybody who was in a position to warn Paul or otherwise assist him was thinking, "Geez, I wish somebody would kill that bastard."

'Round about the end of 1800, a conspiracy was hatched among the nobility to settle the Paul question permanently. On the night of March 23, 1801, a group of military officers headed by two generals got good and wasted and charged into the royal bedroom where they found Paul cowering behind some curtains. They dragged him out and attempted to force him to sign a letter of abdication. He resisted, feebly, and they stabbed him a bunch of times, strangled him and finally jumped up and down on him. He was immediately succeeded by his son, 23-year old Alexander I, who was actually in the palace at the time of the murder. General Nicholas Zubov, one of the assassins, clapped him on the back and said, "Time to grow up! Go and rule!"