Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
mother's complicity in Peter's removal and his
belief that she had ordered his assassination were
powerful forces in shaping his antagonistic rela-
tionship with Catherine. These negative feelings
were later augmented by Catherine's long reign
and her apparent attempts to bypass Paul as her
heir, in favor of Paul's eldest son, Alexander. Paul
married twice. His first wife died in 1776 during
childbirth. Later that year he married Sophia Dor-
otea of Württemberg, a German princess who
adopted the Russian name Maria Feodorovna.
The couple had four sons, two of whom reigned
as emperors, and six daughters. In 1783 Paul
retired to Gatchina Palace near St. Petersburg,
where he gave free reign to his love of military
parades and discipline, creating a court of marked
contrast to that of Catherine's. As ruler, Paul was
frequently driven by the desire to reverse many
of his mother's policies, with often unpredictable
results. Early measures such as the creation of
Russia's first two ministries and prohibitions on
serf labor on Sundays as well as the breaking up
of serf families hinted at a reformist streak, but
the latter were also driven by his hatred of the
nobility. Of longer-lasting impact for the stability
of the monarchy and the country was his 1797
decree imposing the system of male primogeni-
ture. His foreign policy was dominated by the
wars surrounding France but was inconsistent
toward revolutionary and Napoleonic France.
Driven by antirevolutionary sentiment, in 1798
he joined the second coalition against France, but
with Napoleon in power after 1799, Paul began a
more pro-French policy. Ironically, he was a vic-
tim of the last of the palace revolutions he had
sought to abolish, when in March 1801 he was
assassinated in a conspiracy led by Guards offi-
cers, who placed the future
ALEXANDER I
on the
throne.
Questions about his sanity have accompanied
evaluations of Paul's reign since his own time,
with historians generally presenting his reign as a
temporary aberration between the relatively
enlightened reigns of Catherine the Great and
Alexander I (at least his first decade). More
recent research has emphasized a more enduring
legacy of Paul's short reign for subsequent rulers:
a militaristic style, increasing censorship, a gov-
ernment of ministries, and a paternalism tinged
with early features of a 19th-century police state.
Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich
(1849-1936)
physiologist
One of Russia's best-known scientists and the
winner of the 1904 Nobel Prize in physiology,
Pavlov was a pioneer in the study of the heart,
the nervous system, the digestive tract, as well
as reflex behavior. Pavlov was born in the
provincial capital of Ryazan, to the southeast of
Moscow, the son of a village priest. First educated
at a theological academy, he pursued medical
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
(Library of Congress)
Search WWH ::
Custom Search