In the Shadow of the Great

Catherine the Great's son, Paul I, idolized his deceased father Peter III and resented his powerful mother. Unfortunately for him, when he finally became Tsar, he would learn that wielding power isn't as easy as it looks.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
One quick note before we begin. If you're enjoying Noble Blood,
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which is and will always be completely free. Welcome to

(00:32):
Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Minky. Listener discretion is advised. On
July sixty two, the woman who would go on to
be known as Catherine the Great got word that the

(00:53):
moment had come for the coup she had been planning
with her closest advisors and generals. Next morning, while her husband,
the ineffectual Emperor Peter the Third, lingered with a mistress
at a palace outside of the city, Catherine rode in
military uniform through the barracks, solidifying her support and her

(01:14):
loyalty amongst the troops of Russia. Her husband had been
the czar for fewer than six months when he was
captured by guardsman loyal to Catherine and forced to abdicate.
Just eight days after that, the imprisoned Peter died, likely
of strangulation, although the official autopsy would declare it to

(01:36):
be apoplexy. Such began in earnest the long and illustrious
reign of Catherine the Great, the minor princess turned consort
turned empress who ushered in a new era of Enlightenment
philosophy in an attempt to bring westernized political theory to
the country. The coup itself, it's machinations, and the many

(01:59):
place as it almost went wrong, is fascinating, and I
urge you, if you haven't already, to listen to the
episode that we did about it on this very podcast,
because today we're not talking about Catherine the Great, we're
discussing instead her son, Paul the First. Imagine the scene

(02:20):
during the coup, Catherine and her lover riding gallantly on
magnificent stallions through the city to where Catherine would take
her oath of office. Now turn the camera a little
to the side to a distant palace window where a small,
not terribly attractive child of seven years old might have
been looking out. Little Paul the First saw his ambitious

(02:44):
mother sees power from his father. If she wasn't responsible
for his father's death directly, then, at least indirectly, the
boy ultimately grew up into a resentful, bitter man, with
both enemies and allies would politely question his sanity. He's
an edible case that Freud himself would have salivated over.

(03:07):
Paul the First might have been a smart man, but
he was a man who let his insecurities and idiosyncrasies
control him to the point where his own nobles turned
against him. Being an emperor is a precarious position at
the best of times. Unfortunately for Paul the First, his
mother made politics look easy. For Paul the Crown would

(03:31):
cost him his life. I'm Danis Schwartz, and this is
noble blood. One quick historical quirk that we're going to
have to talk about before we start the changing of
the calendar from the Julian to the Gregorian. Pope Gregory

(03:54):
sanctioned a small change to the calendar to prevent drift.
The actual solar year is slightly shorter than having one
leap day every four years accounts for, and so under
the Julian calendar we were getting an extra day every
one d twenty eight years. The Gregorian calendar fixed that
and basically fast forward it a few days to catch

(04:16):
up to where the sun was the days that we
had lost during the Julian calendar. But the tricky thing
is that different countries adopted the Gregorian calendar at different times.
Catholic countries like France took to it almost right away,
right when Pope Gregory thirteenth did in the sixteenth century,
but England, for example, didn't adopt it until seventeen fifty two.

(04:41):
The year one September two was followed by September four.
Russia didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until the twentieth century,
which means that some of the dates in this story
occurred eleven days earlier in Russia than people would have
recorded them as happening in her up. For example, Catherine

(05:02):
the Great would say that she led her coup in St.
Petersburg on June, while someone in France would think that
it happened on July nine. Some historians deal with this
discrepancy by marking certain dates as OS or n s
for Old Style or New Style. So back in os Russia,

(05:25):
Paul the First would say that his birthday was September
seventeen fifty four. He was the first child born to
Peter and Catherine back when they were just the Grand
Duke and Duchess of Russia. The future Katherine the Great
was far too ambitious on her own behalf to concern
herself too much with an hair. Thanks to her husband's

(05:47):
impotence and their general distaste for each other, it had
taken the two of them a decade to conceive The
rumors fanned by Katherine herself said that the child was
actually her lover, Seragei Seltokov's. Later in life, Catherine would
say that those rumors were just to make her husband jealous,
that of course they were his children. But there are

(06:10):
strong arguments to be made on either side. On one hand,
Peter did struggle with impotence, and he never impregnated any
of his mistresses, and it would be in Catherine's best
interest to lie later on after the coup to link
her child back to the Romanov dynasty because she wasn't
a Russian royal by blood. On the other hand, Paul

(06:32):
does bear a resemblance to Peter the Third, and Peter
never disavowed the child or denounced Katherine as an adultress.
He disliked his wife so much that one imagined given
her precarious situation at court, back when she was just
a grand duchess, that if she did Bearrison by someone else,
Peter could have used that to get rid of her.

(06:54):
Assuming Paul was Peters son, the circumstances of his birth
would be just as hold and loveless as those of
his conception. The Empress, Elizabeth, Peter's aunt, was eager for
Catherine and Peter to have a male heir in there
that she could mold to her satisfaction. Catherine was made

(07:18):
to give birth in a room right next to the
Empress's chambers. Just moments after the umbilical cord was cut,
baby Paul was swept into a blanket and out of
the room to be presented to the Empress. The new mother,
Catherine was all but forgotten in the room where she
had just given birth. For hours, no one cleaned the

(07:41):
room or gave Catherine any warmth or comfort or food.
It seemed to her that they had just forgotten that
she was there. She bled and sweat and shivered against
the chill of an open window, all alone and too
weak to call for help, and two to get up
to go to her own comfortable bed chambers. Catherine never

(08:05):
held her infant to her own breast. Eager as Empress,
Elizabeth was for a baby to care for in theory,
in practice, she was wildly neglectful. On the rare occasions
that she did give baby Paul attention, she doated on him,
but then she quickly lost interest. Paul was brought up

(08:26):
by tutors and a governor. His diet was nutritionally deficient,
and he was lonely with very little interaction from either parent.
And then, when he was seven years old and Brisce
Elizabeth died six months later, Paul's father, the Emperor, was
overthrown by his mother and his father was killed. Catherine

(08:52):
was the Empress then, but it turns out she had
abowed as much interest in the stranger that they said
was her son as his eight great aunts. During her
neglectful periods, Katherine and Paul never bonded and never would bond.
She resented him for being sickly and a not very
attractive child, and for being an implicit threat to her

(09:15):
power because he was a Romanov by blood. He resented
her because well, he blamed the death of his father
on her. Neither trusted the other, probably for good reason,
and Catherine had no interest in training him to be
her heir, lest he tried to force her to share
some of her power. The best thing to do with

(09:37):
her son, then was just marry him off. When Paul
was nineteen, Katherine chose a princess for him, Wilhelmina, from
one of the many non United German kingdoms. Just three
years into that marriage, the woman died in childbirth, which,
at least in Paul's mind, was probably for the best.

(09:58):
Wilhelmina had already taken a ever in their brief marriage,
and given her strong willed ways and open ambition, she
had reminded Paul of his mother. Now a young single
man in his early twenties, Paul started openly talking about
co ruling with Katherine. That wouldn't do for Katherine, and so,

(10:22):
just six months after he became a widower, Katherine married
her son to another Germanic princess, a woman named Sophia Dorothea,
who which would become Russianized to Maria Federovna. This marriage
proved to be a little longer lasting. The pair had
a son within a year, a little charubic thing they
named Alexander, just as it had been done to her

(10:46):
newborn infant. Katherine swept the baby away immediately after he
was born to raise him herself as her heir. To
keep her son occupied and placid, Katherine granted Paul a
nice estate out in the suburbs Garcina, where Paul kept
a brigade of soldiers. Over the years, the little that

(11:08):
Paul knew about his own father became embellished in his mind.
Like his father, Paul became fascinated by the Prussian model
of military dress and discipline, and so like his father,
he forced his soldiers to drill and parade around for
his amusement. Paul and his wife had what was by

(11:29):
eighteenth century standards a successful marriage, even though Paul had
two mistresses over twenty two years. He and his wife
would go on to have ten children. One of those children,
of course, was Alexander, the firstborn son that Catherine had
been grooming for the throne since his infancy. In seventeen seven,

(11:52):
rumors began to spread that Catherine was going to name Alexander,
not Paul, her heir, sipping over Paul completely. Word is
that Katherine even met secretly with Alexander's tutors and with
Alexander's mother Maria, but ultimately those plans would never come

(12:12):
to fruition. In seventy six, when Catherine died of a stroke,
Paul instantly sprung into action to seize power. He destroyed
Catherine's will, which was probably unnecessary given there was no
indication that his son Alexander would have been willing to
honor her wishes over his own father's. Now, at forty

(12:38):
two years old, Paul was finally in charge, and the
first thing he did was repeal the practice of rulers
being allowed to choose their successors willy nilly. Instead, he
declared that should always be the oldest, most eligible son
who was next in line for the throne, and that
women would only inherit the throne if there were no

(13:00):
legitimately born male heirs in the family. The years of
repressed bitterness towards his mother emerged in policy. All meant
to undo everything that Catherine had done and to defend
the memory of his long dead father, Paul had the
bones of Gregory Potemkin, Catherine's lover, dug up and scattered.

(13:22):
He immediately recalled all troops located outside Russia, because, unlike
his mother, Paul had no expansionist ideals. Paul was incredibly vindictive,
willing to hurt himself and hurt Russia just despite his
dead mother, Catherine, had loved French culture and philosophy. She

(13:42):
regularly read French philosophers and famously corresponded with Voltaire. Paul
saw French culture as a threat After the French Revolution,
Paul did everything in his power to prevent that ideology
from reaching Russia. He banned foreign books, banned for newspapers,
and forbid anyone in court from wearing French fashions. Some

(14:07):
of that seems logical. If you're an absolutist ruler, you
don't want your people to get any bright revolutionary ideas.
But Paul wasn't a rational ruler. He was prone to
fit a violent rage that terrified his friends and servants.
Sometimes he made decisions for the country that seemed so

(14:27):
arbitrary and self defeating, like randomly becoming wild with rage
that Napoleon had conquered Malta that his friend privately wondered
if maybe Paul wasn't all there, I mean, what did
Russia have to do with Malta anyway? Why did he care?
As Emperor Paul put his troops in Prussian style uniforms

(14:48):
and forced them to parade outside his palace at eleven
am every single day. If you can imagine, the elite
soldiers who served Bazar did not enjoy being treated like
chopin these But Paul's real troubles would come from offending
the nobles. Some of Paul's political ideals weren't bad. He

(15:09):
banned corporal punishment for the lower classes and tried, not
quite successfully, to make things a little bit better for
the serfs. But those efforts were part of a larger
campaign for Paul to weaken the entrenched aristocracy that had
been the center of his mother's world. But as Paul
would learn, even tsars can overestimate their power too deadly consequences.

(15:39):
Part of Paul's strangeness was an obsession with medieval chivalry
and knights of old. He forced all of his advisers
to adopt a code of chivalry with random rules of
bowing and kneeling. If any of them weren't dressed to
Paul's exact specifications, even something as little as a missing button,

(16:01):
he went wild. Frankly, all of his advisers thought it
was a little much Paul knew that he had enemies,
and so his paranoia was probably justified when he declared
that he wanted a new grand palace built in St.
Petersburg because he no longer felt safe in the Winter Palace,

(16:21):
and so the Palace of St. Michael was built according
to his exact specifications, an architectural camera that was half
Russian classical style and half Medieval English castle, complete with
full moat and drawbridge. It was completed in eighteen o one,
but Paul would sleep there for only forty nights before

(16:43):
his murder. On a cold Monday night, Sir Paul the
first hosted dinner at the Palace of St. Michael. His
son Alexander was present, sitting on the far side of
the table and struggling to make icon intact with his father.
With some food and drink still on the table, Paul stood,

(17:05):
shoving his chair away and declared that he was off
to bed to retire in his own apartments. The eating,
but more importantly, the drinking, didn't stop for some of
the other high ranking officers present. They drank and continued
to drink, and then they made their move. A group

(17:25):
of disgruntled officers made their way to Paul's bed chambers,
where they physically overpowered two valets and knocked down Paul's door.
The bedroom was empty. There was a single burning candle
and a bed with rumpled cheats, but no Emperor Paul.
The bird has flown, one of the men said. Another

(17:49):
felt the sheets of the bed, perhaps, but not far,
you responded, The nest is still warm. They found the
emperor cow we're in behind a curtain. Though the Tsar
tried to beat them away, he was battered and strangled
with a scarf and ultimately stabbed with a sword by

(18:09):
General Nicolay Zubov. The rest of the group forced him
to the ground and trampled him to death. It's possible
that the group hadn't initially planned on murdering the Emperor,
that they drunk on adrenaline and liquor simply got carried away.
They had brought with them abdication papers that presumably they

(18:32):
were planning on forcing Paul to sign. But then again,
one of the conspirators had asked another what they would
do if Paul wasn't willing to sign away his power.
Making an omelet requires the breaking of eggs. The other
man replied ominously Immediately after the tsar was killed, Nicolay

(18:53):
went to find the young Alexander, twenty three years old
and the new emperor time to grow up. Niko I said,
go and rule. Alexander knew that the men were planning
on overthrowing his father, but no one had told him
that his father's blood would be on his hands. He
would have a guilty conscience for the rest of his life,

(19:14):
but he wouldn't punish the assassins. Alexander went on ruling,
and the official court physician declared that Emperor Paul the
First had died of apoplexy. Coincidentally, that's the exact same
thing that the official reports had said Paul's own father, Peter,
had died of That's the sad short reign of Paul

(19:45):
the First. But keep listening after this brief sponsor break
to hear a little bit more about his legacy. In
terms of popular Russian monarchs, Paul is pretty much overshadowed
by his much more famous mother, But he did get

(20:06):
the big screen treatment a film called The Patriot, directed
by Ernest Lubitch. The film was mostly silent, but it
won the second ever Oscar for Best Writing. It was
also nominated for Best Picture, and so I assume it
had to have been a great movie. I used the
past tense there, because the movie is lost. Only pieces

(20:31):
of it are left to date. No complete copy of
the film The Patriot has ever been found. It's the
only Best Picture nominee in history for which that's true.
But some pieces of Paul's legacy are still around, at
least his genetic legacy. Out of the ten children that

(20:51):
he and his wife had, several went on to marry
into prominent European monarchies. Through his grandchildren, Paul the First
is an ancestor of the current royal families of Denmark,
Netherlands and Sweden, and he's related through the late Prince
Philip to Charles, Prince of Wales. M Noble Blood is

(21:21):
a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild
from Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by
Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams,
and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at
Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the
show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more
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(21:44):
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