Uneasy lies the Tsar
Robert Blake
Alexander I, Tsar of War, and Peace Alan Palmer (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £4.95)
The grandson of Catherine the Great has always appeared as an ambiguous and
mysterious figure. His very succession to the throne occurred in strangely sinister circumstances at the age of twenty-three in 1801. His grandmother, herself a German usurper thrust into power by a military coup at St Petersburg, had reigned for thirty-four years when she died suddenly in 1796. She had the right to determine the succession and, given time, she might well have chosen Alexander. She had no use for his father, Paul, a narrow-minded autocrat living in the sombre fortress of Gatchina some thirty miles from the capital, obsessed with parade ground exercises "varied," so Mr Palmer tells us, "by an occasional mock battle on the lake whenever the Grand Duke remembered that he was an honorary Admiral of the Russian Fleet."
In the event Paul became Tsar, and his son displayed — perhaps felt — dutiful loyalty. Throughout his life Alexander was drawn in opposite directions. The pampered favourite of Catherine, he was fascinated by the ideas of the Enlightenment which were the talk, though seldom the practice of her glittering court. She took the responsibility of his education out of his father's hands. He was largely taught by La Harpe, a Swiss republican intellectual of advanced views, and Andrei Samborsky, a priest who had been sent to England to learn the latest farming techniques, and having married an English girl was well placed to teach the young Grand Duke how to speak English and how to plough.
Yet Alexander never escaped the pull from the other part of his heredity. He was as a boy often at Gatchina. He was enough of his father's son to enjoy the elaborate military masquerades and obsequious respect which Paul's miniature court displayed — a substitute for its ruler's frustrated ambition to command, in place of Potemkin and Suvorov, the victorious armies of the south against Turkey during the 1780s. They would not have been victorious if he had.
Mr Alan Palmer, in this excellent and very readable biography based on wide reading and acute scholarship, has brought out with elegance and clarity the dual inheritance of Alexander I, which was to puzzle his contemporaries for the whole of his not very long life. The circumstances of his father's death enhanced this tortured dichotomy. Paul soon proved to be an insufferable ruler. Alexander saw that he was half-insane and, in Mr Palmer's words, could "perceive the terrors of a darkened mind often tangled in shadows but never enveloped in them." He also realised that his father could not last. Three times in sixty years the Guards Regiments had deposed an unpopular or incompetent Tsar, and the public disgrace of Suvorov, the grea test Russian commander of the day, was the last straw. The events which followed were worthy of a Shakespeare historical play. The Commandant of St Petersburg, Count von Pahlen, secured Alexander's consent to a plan to arrest his father and establish a regency. In the event, a group of half-drunken Guards officers broke into the Tsar's apartments and murdered him. Alexander was guilty of gross self-deception if he had really imagined that his father's life would be spared. Yet it was a part of his character to deceive himself, and to be shattered to the core when the reality was
Spectator May 4, I revealed. A deep sense of guilt over "a CO piracy of which he had known too mai' too little" never left him, but none of conspirators was punished. Alexander was open-hearted, generous, fable, handsome, charming, intelligent°. well-read. But he could never quite defee where he stood in relation to the g' problems facing Russia in the new cent,°, the two greatest being military survil` against Napoleon and the adaptation °Iv antique creaking political and administra.,,r, system. Alexander's military intervention", invariably disastrous, though he Nva,,,s , °) much of his father's son to refrain fici.A tempts to lead his armies. Austerlitz, wile:" actually took command, was the w°1.5„`O back of all; but his tendency to accomPa1, generals and plague them with half-Nlr theoretical advice was scarcely less dainago When, in 1813, he proposed himself as ccith mander-in-chief of all the allied forces, ral, than the Austrian Prince Schwarzenburg', hardly surprising that violent objections "A' raised, and Metternich even threaten break-up the coalition. However, Alvan was in the forefront when Napoleon's Ore were defeated in 1814 and had the Plea,stj eo,' 'liberating' Paris. If the Russians in proved too much for the French EmP,„er'' particular credit goes to the Russian isn'i
As for Russia's internal affairs, Aleate)
was a 'liberal' in contrast to his father, bal1! revolt which overthrew Paul was not libe'ro' all. It was the action of conservative ao officers outraged by the vagaries of a lailf it To be a liberal in any intelligible sense2 word was a virtual impossibility for ta`iii, tocrat of all the Russias then as todaY, 10 he was prepared to change the socia djiti political system from top to bottorn rti, revolutionary implications. In a Peirce:passage, Mr Palmer points out that AleX1°00 had no more than a superficial acquairl.pric. with the language of political ON "Popular sovereignty meant nothing td..,els and although he had heard of the doctriPli separation of powers he understoodo:in imply a mere functional division of ad. oce trative offices for the sake of conveni,e 0 As his patronage of the reforming Speransky shows, he wanted efficiencr like Bonaparte, with whom he got on Os at Tilsit and less well at Erfurt, it wa ficiency without liberty and within a xafill viol mind. There was also a conflict betWe Enlightenment of France and the1 Not only did the drill manual and
of Montesquieu jostle uneasily in Ale
the 0,4
hierarchical framework.
orthodoxy of Holy Russia — a c,,°„0 complicated by a private clash hetwel'o sonal libertinism and religious creedtriotic appeal of 1812 was an appeal to °fir most atavistic and illiberal sentiments red nation. The Holy Alliance insPifano Baroness von KrUdener, a religious under whose spell Alexander had fallen..0 a bout of debauchery in Vienna, soont170 into a charter of repression. Alexande,r ;till was torn by a sense of guilt at his la',111 ness to his wife and his long liaison Polish Countless Naryshkin. This 1nT'orle4 feverish restlessness. "At present,'' Saiu4 fr his ministers in 1918, "Russia is govern' ) the seat of a post chaise." 50? None of Russia's problems had beell,ircli when he died at Taganrog in 1826 in stances which, as Mr Palmer shoWsiy. ,I been invested with unnecessary nlY5tee,°' the man who symbolised Russian resista to he has fascinated historians ever sincol the conqueror of Europe is not likebitulali forgotten. The author must be conga a I) on a major biographical achievement;og table contribution to our understanw this still enigmatic monarch.
Lord Blake is Provost of Queen's Oxford.
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