Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: How did Paul I of Russia die?
Paul I (; "Pavel Petrovich") ( – ) reigned as Emperor of Russia between 1796 and 1801. Officially, he was the only son of Peter III and Catherine the Great, though Catherine hinted that he was fathered by her lover Sergei Saltykov, who also had Romanov blood, being a descendant of the first Romanov tsar's sister, Tatiana Feodorovna Romanova.
Sophie Dorothea arrived in St Petersburg that September, converted to the Russian Orthodox Church, and took the name Maria Feodorovna. She married Paul on 26 September 1776. In spite of her husband's difficult character, Maria Feodorovna made a success of her marriage. During the long reign of her mother-in-law, the Russian Empress, Catherine II, Maria and Paul were completely excluded from any political influence, as mother and son mistrusted each other. Maria Feodorovna sided with her husband and lost the initial affection Catherine II had for her. Paul and Maria were forced to live in isolation at Gatchina, but they were devoted to each other and had ten children including: Tsar Alexander I, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, Grand Duchess Maria of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Queen Catherine of Wurttemberg and Queen Anna Pavlovna of the Netherlands.
Nicholas died on 2 March 1855, during the Crimean War, at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. He caught a chill, refused medical treatment and died of pneumonia, although there were rumors he had committed suicide. He was buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg.
There is a tale in the Hasidic Chabad movement that supposedly Joseph Stalin died as a result of some metaphysical intervention of the seventh Chabad leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, during the recitation of a discourse at a public Purim Farbrengen. Stalin was suddenly paralyzed on 1 March 1953, which corresponds to Purim 1953, and died 4 days later. Due to Stalin's death, nationwide pogroms against Jews throughout the Soviet Union were averted, as Stalin's infamous doctors' plot was halted.
Catherine Chislova died in 1889, and Grand Duke Nicholas survived his lover by only two years. When he died in the Crimea in 1891, Alexandra Petrovna did not attend the funeral. She also refused to pay homage to her dead husband when the funeral catafalque, taking his body for burial in the St Peter and St Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg, came by train via Kiev on its route from the south.
Maria Feodorovna (; née Duchess Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg; 25 October 1759 – 5 November 1828 [OS 24 October]) was Empress consort of Russia as the second wife of Tsar Paul I.
A group of men led by Prince Felix Yusupov decide to murder Rasputin and invite him to the Yusupov palace in December, 1916. Felix feeds Rasputin cakes and wine laced with lethal amounts of cyanide, but is horrified when it seems to have no effect. Felix then shoots Rasputin, who still does not die. Rasputin stumbles through the courtyard to the palace gates before being shot four more times, finally collapsing and dying. His body is thrown from a bridge into the icy Malaya Nevka River.
Alexandra reads a note left behind by Rasputin, revealing his prior knowledge that he would be murdered, and that should the murderers be nobles, the Imperial Family would die within two years.
Tsar Alexander II died on 13 March 1881, when after visiting his cousin Grand Duchess Catherine Mikhailovna he was assassinated on the road leading back to the Winter Palace. His death stopped all plans for Catherine's coronation, which some considered fortunate, as they feared it would have caused lasting damage to the monarchy. In his Will, Alexander II left his widow the same amount he bequeathed to each of his sons from his first marriage. Despite his earlier opposition, the tsar's son, now Alexander III, made an official visit of condolence to Catherine and gave her an additional allowance as well as a small palace for her to live in after she left the Winter Palace. George and his family attended the tsar's funeral, but they were ignored as much as possible by the Imperial family, until Alexander III himself approached his father's widow and spoke to her. His wife, Tsarina Maria Feodorovna was nearby, but as she had been greatly opposed to the princess, she hesitated to acknowledge her. After being embraced by Catherine however, they both broke down crying, and George and his sisters kissed Maria's hand. The couple left, and the widow and children went to another private chapel for a separate mass, as she was not to be allowed to mingle with the Imperial family in the more public funeral planned for later.
Lenin died in January 1924. Stalin took charge of the funeral and was one of its pallbearers; against the wishes of Lenin's widow, the Politburo embalmed his corpse and placed it within a mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square. It was incorporated into a growing personality cult devoted to Lenin, with Petrograd being renamed "Leningrad" that year. To bolster his image as a devoted Leninist, Stalin gave nine lectures at Sverdlov University on the "Foundations of Leninism", later published in book form. At the following 13th Party Congress, "Lenin's Testament" was read to senior figures. Embarrassed by its contents, Stalin offered his resignation as General Secretary; this act of humility saved him and he was retained in the position.
Pavel Kridener was born on January 31, 1784, in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was the son of the famous Barbara von Krüdener, a Baltic German mystic and author. His father was Baron Bourkhardt-Alexis-Constantine Krüdener, with whom Barbara did not have a good relationship. Pavel was baptized Paul in honor of Grand Duke (later Emperor) Paul I of Russia (Russian: Па́вел I Петро́вич), his godfather. His father was appointed by Catherine the Great as Ambassador to the Republic of Venice in 1785, and Pavel spent the first two years of his life there. He subsequently followed his father's assignments in Munich until 1787, Copenhagen until 1794 and finally Madrid until 1800. His father was then appointed by Paul I as Ambassador to Prussia, under Frederick William III of Prussia. Friedrich Ancillon, a prominent Prussian historian, became his tutor.
The first Winter Palace was a modest building of two main floors under a slate roof. It seems that Peter soon tired of the first palace, for in 1721, the second version of the Winter Palace was built under the direction of architect Georg Mattarnovy. Mattarnovy's palace, though still very modest compared to royal palaces in other European capitals, was on two floors above a rusticated ground floor, with a central projection underneath a pediment supported by columns. It was here that Peter the Great died in 1725.
On 24 January 1816, in Saint Petersburg, he married his first cousin, Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna of Russia (1788–1819), daughter of Emperor Paul I of Russia (1754–1801) and Princess Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg (1759–1828). The couple had two children:
The Winter Palace () was the official residence of the Russian Emperors from 1732 to 1917. Today, the palace and its precincts form the Hermitage Museum. Situated between Palace Embankment and Palace Square, in Saint Petersburg, adjacent to the site of Peter the Great's original Winter Palace, the present and fourth Winter Palace was built and altered almost continuously between the late 1730s and 1837, when it was severely damaged by fire and immediately rebuilt. The storming of the palace in 1917, as depicted in Soviet paintings and Eisenstein's 1927 film "October", became an iconic symbol of the Russian Revolution.
Born Duchess Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg, she was a daughter of Friedrich II Eugen, Duke of Württemberg and his wife, Friederike Dorothea of Brandenburg-Schwedt. She belonged to a junior branch of the House of Württemberg and grew up in Montbéliard receiving an excellent education for her time and station. In 1776, when Grand Duke Paul (the future Paul I of Russia), became a widower, Sophie Dorothea was chosen by Frederick II of Prussia, her maternal great uncle, and by Empress Catherine II of Russia, as the ideal candidate to be Paul’s second wife. They met in a state dinner in Berlin and their engagement was quickly arranged.
Following the repeated violations of the Polish constitution by the Russians (especially after the Alexander I's death, when the reactionary Nicholas I assumed power), the 1830 November Uprising broke out. It started with the assault on Belvedere - the residence of Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich, the commander-in-chief of Polish army and "de facto" viceroy of the Congress Poland, as well as at the Arsenal. The 1830 uprising led to the Polish-Russian war (1831), the greatest battle of which took place on 25 February 1831 in Grochów—a village in the modern northern part of the district, Praga Południe. Because the Polish commanders were stalled, the war ended in defeat, and curtailment of the Kingdom's autonomy. The Emperor established a military administration in Warsaw. An estate of pretty manors on the north of New Town was eradicated and on this place the Citadel was built, where was a fortress and prison. The Sejm was suspended, the Polish army dissolved, and the University closed.
The Russians wanted to ensure that despite losing the war, they still left the Congress of Paris with some strength left in their empire and with some of their wartime possessions left under their rule. When Alexander II took the crown of Russia in 1855, he inherited a potential crisis that threatened to collapse the Russian Empire. Problems all throughout the Empire stretching from parts of Finland to Poland, as well as Crimea and many tribal conflicts stretched the Russian economy to the brink of collapse. Russia knew that within a few months, a total defeat in the Crimean War was imminent, which would mean the complete humiliation of Russia on a global scale. Peace talks were pursued by Alexander II with Britain and France in Paris in 1856 as not just a means of attempting to keep some imperial possession but also a means of stopping the deaths of thousands of its barely-trained army reserves as well as an economic crisis. A main aim of the Russians was ending war with the appearance of some strength left in the Russian bear, which had once terrified the Western allies. It contrived "to turn defeat into victory... through... peacetime [internal] reforms and diplomatic initiatives." Like the Ottoman Empire, the Russians desired to turn their attention inward to fix many internal problems, such as the economy and growing unrest in the society that Russia had not done enough in the war effort to crush the weak Turks.
On Thursday, 26 August 2010, a Russian court ordered prosecutors to reopen an investigation into the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, although the Bolsheviks believed to have shot them in 1918 had died long before. The Russian Prosecutor General's main investigative unit said it had formally closed a criminal investigation into the killing of Nicholas because too much time had elapsed since the crime and because those responsible had died. However, Moscow's Basmanny Court ordered the re-opening of the case, saying that a Supreme Court ruling blaming the state for the killings made the deaths of the actual gunmen irrelevant, according to a lawyer for the Tsar's relatives and local news agencies.
Empress Elizabeth arranged for Peter to marry his second cousin, Sophia Augusta Frederica (later Catherine the Great), daughter of Christian August, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst and Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp. The young princess formally converted to Russian Orthodoxy and took the name Ekaterina Alexeievna (i.e., Catherine). They married on 21 August 1745. The marriage was not a happy one but produced one son, the future Emperor Paul, and one daughter, Anna Petrovna (20 December 1757 – 19 March 1759). Catherine later claimed that Paul was not fathered by Peter: that, in fact, they had never consummated the marriage. During the sixteen years of their residence in Oranienbaum, Catherine took numerous lovers, while her husband did the same in the beginning.
At the time of Peter III's overthrow, other potential rival claimants to the throne existed: Ivan VI (1740–1764), in close confinement at Schlüsselburg, in Lake Ladoga, from the age of six months; and Yelizaveta Alekseyevna Tarakanova (1753–1775). Ivan VI was assassinated during an attempt to free him as part of a failed "coup" against Catherine: Catherine, like Empress Elizabeth before her, had given strict instructions that he was to be killed in the event of any such attempt. Ivan was thought to be insane because of his years of solitary confinement, so he might have made a poor emperor, even as a figurehead.
In the late 1750s Elizabeth's health started to decline. She began to suffer a series of dizzy spells and refused to take the prescribed medicines. She forbade the word "death" in her presence. Elizabeth suffered a stroke on Christmas Eve 1761. Knowing that she was dying, Elizabeth used her last remaining strength to make her confession, to recite with her confessor the prayer for the dying and to say farewell to those few people who wished to be with her, including Peter and Catherine and Counts Alexei and Kirill Razumovsky. The Empress died the next day, 25 December 1761. For her lying in state she was dressed in a shimmering silver dress; she was beautiful in death as she had been in life. She was buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg on 3 February 1762 after six weeks lying in state.
On 1 March 1881, following the assassination of his grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, Nicholas became heir apparent upon his father's ascension as Alexander III. Nicholas and his other family members bore witness to Alexander II's death, having been present at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, where he was brought after the attack. For security reasons, the new tsar and his family relocated their primary residence to the Gatchina Palace outside the city, only entering the capital for various ceremonial functions. On such occasions, Alexander III and his family occupied the nearby Anichkov Palace.
Catherine the Great and her son and heir, the future Paul I, maintained a distant relationship throughout Catherine's reign. The aunt of Catherine's husband, Empress Elizabeth, took up the child as a passing fancy. Elizabeth proved an obsessive but incapable caretaker, as she had raised no children of her own. Paul was supervised by a variety of caregivers. Roderick McGrew briefly relates the neglect to which the infant heir was sometimes subject: "On one occasion he fell out of his crib and slept the night away unnoticed on the floor." Even after Elizabeth's death, relations with Catherine hardly improved. Paul was often jealous of the favours she would shower upon her lovers. In one instance the empress gave to one of her court favourites 50,000 rubles on her birthday, while Paul received a cheap watch. Paul's early isolation from his mother created a distance between them which later events would reinforce. She never considered inviting him to share her power in governing Russia. And once Paul's son Alexander was born, it appeared that she had found a more suitable heir. The use made of his name by the rebel Yemelyan Pugachev, who impersonated his father Peter, tended no doubt to render Paul's position more difficult.
There is considerable speculation as to the actual paternity of Paul I. It is suggested that he was not Peter's son at all but that his mother had engaged in an affair, to which Elizabeth had consented, with a young officer, Sergei Vasilievich Saltykov who would have been Paul's real father. In any case, Peter never gave any indication that he believed Paul to have been fathered by anyone but himself. He also did not take any interest in parenthood. Elizabeth most certainly took an active interest. She removed the young Paul and acted as if she were his mother instead of Catherine. The Empress had ordered the midwife to take the baby and to follow her. Catherine was not to see her child for another month and then only briefly for the churching ceremony. Six months later, Elizabeth let Catherine see the child again. The child had in effect become a ward of the state and, in a larger sense, the property of the state, to be brought up by Elizabeth as she believed he should be: as a true heir and great-grandson of her father, Peter the Great.
Catherine II died in 1796, and her son Emperor Paul I (r. 1796-1801) succeeded her. Painfully aware that Catherine had considered bypassing him to name his son, Alexander, as tsar, Paul instituted primogeniture in the male line as the basis for succession. It was one of the lasting reforms of Paul's brief reign. He also chartered a Russian-American Company, which eventually led to Russia's acquisition of Alaska. Paul limited landowner's right to serf labour to three days in a week, alleviating the condition of the serfs.
In spite of Russia's failure to honour the terms of the Treaty of Georgievsk, Qajar Iran reinvaded Georgia and captured and sacked Tbilisi. Georgian rulers felt they had nowhere else to turn now as Georgia was again re-subjugated by Iran. Tbilisi was captured and burnt to the ground, and eastern Georgia reconquered. However, Agha Mohammad Khan, Persia's ruler, was assassinated in 1797 in Shusha, after which the Persian grip on Georgia softened again. Erekle, King of Kartli-Kakheti, still dreaming of a united Georgia, died a year later. After his death, a civil war broke out over the succession to the throne of Kartli-Kakheti, and one of the rival candidates called on Russia to intervene and decide matters. On 8 January 1801, Tsar Paul I signed a decree on the incorporation of Georgia (Kartli-Kakheti) within the Russian Empire, which was confirmed by Tsar Alexander I on 12 September 1801. The Georgian envoy in Saint Petersburg, Garsevan Chavchavadze, reacted with a note of protest that was presented to the Russian vice-chancellor Alexander Kurakin. In May 1801, Russian General Carl Heinrich von Knorring removed the Georgian heir to the throne, David Batonishvili, from power and deployed a provisional government headed by General Ivan Petrovich Lazarev.