PAUL I. (1754-1801), emperor of Russia, was born in the Summer Palace in St. Petersburg on Oct. 1 (N.s.), 1754. He was the son of the grand duchess, afterwards empress, Catherine. Scandal said that his father was not her husband the grand duke Peter, afterwards emperor, but one Colonel Soltykov. There is probably no foundation for this story except gossip, and the cynical malice of Catherine. During his infancy he was taken from the care of his mother by the empress Elizabeth, whose ill-judged fondness is believed to have injured his health. Catherine's dis solute court was a bad home for a boy, but Catherine took great trouble to arrange his first marriage with Wilhelmina of Darm stadt, who was renamed in Russia Nathalie Alexeevna, in 1773. She allowed him to attend the council to gain experience.
After his first marriage he began to engage in intrigues. He suspected his mother of intending to kill him, and once openly accused her of causing broken glass to be mingled with his food. Yet, though his mother removed him from the council and began to keep him at a distance, her actions were not unkind. The use made of his name by the rebel Pugachev in 1775 tended no doubt to render his position more difficult. When his wife died in child birth in that year his mother arranged another marriage with the beautiful Sophia Dorothea of Wurttemberg, renamed in Russia Maria Feodorovna. Paul and his wife were allowed to travel through western Europe in 1781-1782. In 1783 the empress gave him an estate at Gatchina, where he maintained a brigade of soldiers whom he drilled on the Prussian model. As Paul grew his character became steadily degraded. He fell under the in fluence of two of his wife's maids of honour in succession, Nelidov and Lapuknin, and of his barber, a Turkish slave named Kutaisov. For some years before Catherine died it was obvious that he was hovering on the border of insanity.
Catherine contemplated setting him aside in favour of his son Alexander, to whom she was attached. No definite step was taken to set him aside, probably because nothing would be effective short of putting him to death, and Catherine shrank from the extreme course. The four and a half years (1796-1801) of Paul's rule in Russia were unquestionably the reign of a madman. (See RUSSIA: History.) His conduct of the foreign affairs of Russia plunged the country first into the second coalition against France in 1798, and then into the armed neutrality against Great Britain in 1801. His political follies might have been condoned had he not treated the people about him like a shah, or one of the craziest of the Roman emperors. He began by repealing Catherine's law which exempted the free classes of the population of Russia from corporal punishment and mutilation. Nobody could feel himself safe from exile or brutal ill-treatment at any moment.
In Russia as in mediaeval Europe there was no safe prison for a deposed ruler. A conspiracy was organized by Counts Pahlen and Panin, and a half-Spanish, half-Neapolitan adventurer, Ad miral Ribas; the death of Ribas delayed its execution. On the night of March 11, 18o 1, Paul was murdered in his bedroom in the St. Michael Palace. He was succeeded by his son, the emperor Alexander I., who was actually in the palace, and to whom Nicholas Zubov, one of the assassins, announced his accession.
See, for Paul's early life, K. Waliszewski, Autour d'un trone (Paris, 1894), or the English translation, The Story of a Throne (London, 1895), and P. Morane, Paul I. de Russie avant l'avenement (Paris, 1907). For his reign, T. Schiemann, Geschichte Russlands enter Nikolaus I. (Berlin, 1904), vol. i. and Die Ermordung Pauls, by the same author (Berlin, 1902).