I'm travelling through Russia
to learn about the most powerful European royal family
since medieval times.
The Romanovs.
I've seen how the victories of Peter the Great won him control
of the Baltic Sea, placing Russia firmly on the world stage.
At home, Peter built the magnificent city of St Petersburg.
And he dragged his country, kicking and screaming,
into the 18th century.
Peter the Great was a hard act to follow.
But in the century following his death,
two of his successors would bring Russia glory
that Peter could only have dreamt of.
The era was dominated by Catherine the Great,
possibly the most powerful woman in history.
She was super-bright and super-ambitious
and Russia would enjoy a golden age during her reign.
Famed for her collections, both of art and of lovers...
..Catherine's military success transformed Russia
into a major European power.
Not bad for a ruler without a single drop of Russian blood.
Catherine's grandson, Alexander I, was forced to defend her legacy
when Europe collapsed into turmoil.
But Alexander would save the continent
from the mightiest military leader of the age - Napoleon.
And he'd even lead Russian forces onto the streets of Paris.
But these extraordinary achievements took place
against a turbulent backdrop.
There were rebellions and murders and military disasters.
This is the story of the second great age of the Romanovs -
an age of extremes.
This is the 18th-century palace of Peterhof,
overlooking the Gulf of Finland.
It was founded by Peter the Great -
one of only two Romanov monarchs to have been given that title.
The other was Catherine the Great.
She inherited the palace when she seized the throne in 1762,
nearly 40 years after Peter's death.
But I bet Catherine never did what I'm about to do.
Let's go. Thank you. Are we going to hold hands all the way?
Just this place.
Very gallant. I like it. Be careful. Uh-huh.
'I'm going not just behind the scenes, but beneath them.
'And I'm not sure that I've dressed appropriately.'
Down that hole? Yes. That's really quite small and wet? Yes.
OK. Be careful. Be careful.
Watch your head. This is good.
Hey, hey, hey!
'Peterhof has one of the biggest sets of fountains in the world.
'Remarkably, all of them powered by natural springs and gravity.
'Not by pump, as I'd expected.'
BOTH: Five, four, three, two, one.
Go! GO!
There are 100 fountains here, just in the cascade area,
and I think my favourite is this golden frog.
Catherine first saw Peterhof and its fountains in 1744.
At the time, Peter the Great's daughter Elizabeth was on the throne.
Russia was enjoying an economic boom...
..partly due to the lucrative Baltic trade routes
that Peter had opened up.
So Elizabeth had lots of money to indulge her taste for splendour.
She had a tame architect, an Italian called Bartolomeo Rastrelli.
And here, at the Palace of Peterhof,
she set him off on a major rebuilding project.
The Romanovs wanted palaces that rivalled
the finest French royal buildings, like Versailles.
The French were seen by Russia's elite
as the standard setters for taste and art.
But this strikes me as being slightly too lavish.
Almost gaudy?
You can't help sensing the chip on the Romanovs' shoulder,
their need to convince foreign diplomats that Russia was
a sophisticated European country, not some backward Eastern despotism.
Rastrelli created a series of grand palaces for the Romanovs.
There was the magnificent Winter Palace in St Petersburg -
now home of the Hermitage Museum.
The Catherine Palace was named after Elizabeth's mother,
who'd succeeded Peter the Great to the throne.
But who was going to inherit all this Baroque bling
when Elizabeth was gone?
Elizabeth never married.
There were rumours of illegitimate children, given away to be
brought up by servants but she never had an acknowledged son or daughter.
So she exercised her Russian sovereign's right
to choose her own successor.
She alighted upon her nephew - the only trouble was,
he was a 14-year-old German boy who'd never set foot in Russia.
His name was Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp.
He was a grandson of Peter the Great through his mother.
Elizabeth now needed to find young Peter a bride.
She settled on a minor, but well-connected, German princess
called Sophie Friederike Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst.
So in 1744, Sophie came to Russia
and adopted a Russian name, Yekaterina -
or Catherine.
But this teenage union quickly became an unhappy one.
Peter was disfigured by smallpox,
yet still managed to embarrass his wife by having a mistress.
Catherine claimed that he was a twisted voyeur
who even tortured animals.
When she came to write her memoirs, Catherine said how long and dismal
the summers had been at the palace of Peterhof.
She didn't get on with her aunt-in-law, the Empress Elizabeth,
nor her husband, who was only interested in practising
military drills with his very long-suffering entourage.
So Catherine instead turned to reading,
particularly the philosophers of the French Enlightenment,
Diderot and Voltaire.
This was heady stuff for a member of an autocratic ruling family.
One of the most significant factors of Catherine's personality
that came out when she was very young and throughout her life
was she really believed in the self-improvement.
She had this great urge to be educated
and that, for a woman of her time, was unusual
and the determination to find out for herself,
for learning as much as she could.
She enjoyed the sense of being at the forefront of European thought
and bringing it to this rather... place she perceived rather backward.
By her early 30s, Catherine had given birth to a son
and to a short-lived daughter.
And she'd started taking lovers of our own.
He was just a warm-up. We'll pass over him.
But this is Stanislaw Poniatowski, the future king of Poland.
He was witty and charming and everything that her husband wasn't.
By 1761, though, she'd moved on to Grigori Orlov.
He was a dashing young artillery officer.
It was said that he would dance gigantic dances
and make gigantic love.
His relationship with Catherine got very serious.
It started to go beyond just a romantic intrigue.
Catherine and Orlov agreed that Peter just wasn't up to the job
of ruling the country.
But in 1761, Peter succeeded to the throne, following Elizabeth's death.
He was now the emperor.
What he didn't know, though, was that his empress was plotting against him.
When Peter actually did succeed,
um, it quickly became clear he wasn't going to survive.
He annoyed people - the military, the church -
and he was a disaster from the start.
What one is aware of with Catherine
is that she had an enormous self belief.
Having educated herself,
she was quite sure that she could run this enormous country
and she could improve it.
The intrigue came to a head on the morning of 28 June, 1762.
Catherine was woken in her bed at Peterhof with the news
that a coup was already under way.
Now events began to move at headlong speed.
Catherine came racing through these palace grounds
to get to her carriage, to be taken to St Petersburg.
She didn't even pause to get ready.
She had to have her hair done in the coach on the way.
When she got to St Petersburg, she was declared sovereign
and her husband Peter - well, he was caught napping.
When he got to hear about what was going on, it was too late.
He'd lost his crown.
In tears, Peter stepped down.
He'd reigned for just six months.
Within a few days, he was rather conveniently dead.
Officially the reason was haemorrhoidal colic
but it was more likely murder.
The nature, if any, of Catherine's involvement remains a mystery.
Catherine was now the most powerful woman in the world.
She was the sole ruler of Russia.
And despite all of her intellectual interest,
she had shown utter ruthlessness in grabbing the throne.
But don't forget that she wasn't a real Russian.
She'd only married into the Romanov family.
It was going to be a considerable challenge
for her to hold on to her power.
Catherine ensured that she had a formal coronation
as soon as possible, to seal her legitimacy.
In the magnificent Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg,
once home to Catherine's personal art collection,
there's a portrait by the Danish artist, Vigilius Eriksen,
that captures the new empress in all her coronation finery.
Catherine had a new crown and orb designed for the coronation.
And she's sporting these rather wonderful robes
embroidered with the emblem of Imperial Russia -
the double-headed eagle.
What do you think can have been going through her mind at her coronation?
On the one hand, she was an impostor. She was German, after all.
It was only through sleight of hand that she had that crown on her head.
On the other hand, there's something very attractively modern
about this 18th-century woman
so relentlessly pursuing power and success.
And this meant relentlessly managing every single aspect of her brand.
Catherine was brilliant at using her clothes to create her personal image.
She managed to convey all the different things that people expected
of a modern female Russian sovereign,
as you can see in her surviving dresses at the Hermitage Museum.
Nina, when did Catherine the Great wear this dress?
Catherine the Great wore it during the festivals of the Guard regiments
because she was a Chief of Guards regiment.
It is uniform because of colour, because of numbers of buttons.
Ah, the officers have the same number of buttons? The same number, yes.
The shape of collar is also... Ah, it has the collar of a man's uniform?
Yes, like in men's uniform.
Um...
And in the back, you can see very interesting details.
Ah, so this shape... The shape of the back...
That's like a man's coat. Yes.
And two details decorated with the braids. Yes.
Also like a man's uniform.
It's also the dress of a woman who looks to Europe, isn't it?
Yes, of course.
The French influence
is in the shape of the sleeves.
Yes. You can see.
And, of course, panniers. Oh, the panniers.
They're shaped like that? Yes, yes, I see that.
And is the silk French? No, the silk is Russian.
Catherine the Great ordered to use only Russian silk
in the costumes of the Russian Imperial Court.
So, Nina, this is a fantastic dress.
It's the dress of an empress, also of a male army officer,
also of somebody who's very elegant, who loves Europe,
but also the dress of a true Russian.
Yes. All in one! All in one!
Back in the Peterhof Palace, Catherine can be seen
wearing the Royal trousers in another portrait by Vigilius Eriksen.
But although Catherine's military uniforms were purely ceremonial,
she knew that her reputation, both in Russia and abroad,
would be earned by military success.
Her first great test came just six years into her reign.
In 1768, Turkey declared war, threatening Russia from the south.
On land, Russian troops could match the Turks,
but Russia lacked naval power
in the crucial Mediterranean and Black Sea regions.
Russia's only fleet was the one Peter the Great had built
in the Baltic more than 1,000 miles away from where it was now needed.
Catherine's lover and closest adviser, Grigory Orlov,
now made a bold but risky proposal.
Catherine gave it the go-ahead.
The Russian fleet was to be cut in two
and one part of it was to go south, down through the Baltic,
then all around western France and Spain
and in through the Strait of Gibraltar.
Then it would become, by very definition,
Russia's Mediterranean fleet.
In August 1769,
the breakaway fleet left Russia on its epic journey.
Finally, nearly a year later, in June 1770,
the Russian ships, under the command of Grigory Orlov's brother, Alexis,
took the Turkish fleet by surprise off the coast of Anatolia.
The Battle of Chesma Bay became
one of the most famous military engagements in Russian history.
The Russians wiped out the Turkish fleet.
9,000 Turkish sailors were killed, but the Russians lost only 30.
EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIRE
Russia's staggering victory
was the public relations coup of a lifetime for Catherine.
Now, in paintings like this one by Heinrich Buchholz,
she could present herself as the true heir
to the man who had built Imperial Russia.
This picture celebrates a triumph by her fleet over the Turks.
Here are the boats in the boat yards
and here are some very unhappy Turks
being marched through Saint Petersburg.
And over here in the corner is Peter the Great himself
being asked to admire this image
of Catherine being carried through the skies by Fame.
And he certainly is admiring her. Look what he's doing with his hands.
He's saying, "Wow, Catherine! Haven't you done well?"
And while Catherine never led armies into battle,
she found other ways to lead from the front.
Because the Russian people faced an even deadlier threat than Turkey.
This enemy was ravaging Europe and it spared neither peasant nor monarch.
It was smallpox.
Catherine was rightly terrified that she or her son, Paul,
might catch the disease.
But word reached her that an English physician, Thomas Dimsdale,
was achieving unprecedented success with a controversial method
of smallpox inoculation.
The method is called variolation
and it involves scratching the skin, opening up the skin, and inserting
some part of the disease.
So effectively, you are infecting the patient with smallpox.
And that, of course, makes it very risky.
It's one of the reasons why it divided the enlightened world.
Many mathematicians, for example,
objected to on the grounds of probability theory.
They thought that, sooner or later,
people are going to die from this operation.
Catherine decided that the risk was worth taking.
Dimsdale was invited to St Petersburg.
There, he found a suitable sample of smallpox
with which to inoculate the empress.
But it was all very hush-hush.
Late one night, Dimsdale was brought into the palace
through a secret door, and in Catherine's rooms, he inoculated her.
Now, a lot of her contemporaries would have thought
that she was mad to do this.
She could have been infected, she could have died.
But she'd looked at the scientific evidence
and she was happy to run the risk.
She even had Orlov and her son Paul inoculated too.
And when it became clear that everything had gone well,
the news was proclaimed. Other people started doing it.
Inoculation caught on and countless lives were saved.
Her smallpox inoculation shows Catherine behaving
like a true enlightened monarch, embracing science,
banishing superstition, improving the lot of her people.
And this room in the Russian Museum in St Petersburg
is almost a shrine to Catherine, the great progressive.
These well-turned-out young ladies on the walls were pupils
at the rather wonderfully named Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens,
which Catherine founded in 1764.
Its stated purpose was to raise "educated women, good mothers,
"and useful members of family and society".
It was the first proper educational establishment for women in Russia.
Catherine was so proud of her girls that she had these portraits
by Dmitry Levitzky commissioned to show them off.
This statue presents Catherine in the guise of Minerva,
the Roman goddess of wisdom and icon of the Enlightenment.
A horn of plenty overflows.
Her hand rests on an open book of legislation,
and the sculptor, Fedot Shubin, has tucked Catherine's crown,
the conventional symbol of royal power,
discreetly away round the back.
But none of this disguises the fact
that for all of her enlightened leanings,
Catherine still had the absolute power of a despot.
And she was in no hurry to give it up.
I don't think Catherine would have seen
a contradiction between Enlightenment values and her powers.
For a start, she would dispute that she was a despot.
She considered that her absolute power was tempered
by laws within Russia, by institutions within Russia,
which prevented Russia from succumbing to arbitrary rule.
And as an absolute ruler, I think
she thought that she was in the best position to implement laws
which would be in the spirit of the Enlightenment.
In 1767, just five years into her reign,
Catherine embarked on an ambitious nationwide attempt
to turn Enlightenment principles into actual laws.
She convened a special legislative commission
with representatives ranging from nobles to peasants,
drawn from all across the country.
Catherine herself wrote the commission
a lengthy set of instructions, known in Russian as the Nakaz.
She declared that all citizens should be equal before the law,
that torture should be banned,
liberty was her central theme.
For a while, Catherine looked more forward thinking than
any of her European counterparts
and she made sure that they knew it.
The Nakaz was translated into French and German.
But actually, Catherine had already watered down
her original plans for the Nakaz.
In particular, the reform of serfdom.
In her first draft of the Nakaz,
her great instruction to the legislative commission,
in 1767, there was a chapter which implied
that serfs ought to be freed,
or at least, some of them ought to be freed, gradually.
And this, when it was read by her advisers, was just thought
far too revolutionary, and Catherine was, I think,
genuinely surprised that even some of her closest friends,
some of the most enlightened people in the empire,
were so reluctant to do anything about serfdom. It took her aback.
But it made her realise the extent to which serfdom
just underpins everything in the Russian Empire.
Catherine's failure to address the continuing existence of serfdom
meant that millions of people remained
little better than the slaves of landowners.
Their plight now helped fuel the greatest domestic threat
to Catherine's reign.
In 1773, a Cossack called Emelian Pugachev
sparked a provincial revolt.
It spread...quickly.
Pugachev's idea was to pretend to be the deposed tsar,
Peter III, Catherine's late husband.
His line was that he'd just been away, he'd been in Egypt,
but now, he was back.
He very quickly gathered around him
a massive movement of Russia's disenfranchised.
Pugachev said that as the true tsar,
he would grant the serfs all kinds of new rights
and that they should rise up against their evil landlords.
They did this.
And in the resulting bloodbath, more than 1,500 nobles were killed,
half of them, women and children.
Panic now gripped St Petersburg.
Catherine was forced to find a military solution
to a civilian problem.
Soldiers and top commanders were switched from fighting Turks
to fighting their fellow Russians in rebellious areas.
It was nearly two years before the revolt was finally quashed.
Pugachev was taken to Moscow in a cage.
Then he was hanged and his body quartered,
which in Russia means that the limbs were lopped off.
The immediate threat was over.
But how was Catherine going to respond to this rebellion?
With reform or with repression?
The Pugachev revolt was a great shock to Catherine
and particularly the sense that this could happen in this country,
that so much of it was out of her control.
And her response was to try to spread her control
and so she brought in various local government reforms and wanted...
Again, it's this great desire to educate.
The fact that people could believe that this man was the Tsar
that had come back to life...
She was horrified and so her urge was to spread her control,
to improve education,
to make sure that local government was properly reformed.
It certainly wasn't to abolish serfdom.
Catherine had sacrificed the rights of the serfs
to keep the nobility on her side,
in spite of her professed Enlightenment values.
And nowhere were the contradictions of her reign more evident
than at the summer palaces of the wealthiest nobles.
The Kuskovo Palace and estate, near Moscow,
belonged to the Sheremetev family.
By the late 18th century,
they were the most important patrons of the arts outside St Petersburg.
Taking their lead from Catherine herself,
the Sheremetevs filled their palace with European treasures,
like these Flemish tapestries.
But it was the concerts and operas staged here that made Kuskovo famous,
bringing the arts to a wider audience than just the elite.
Ludmila, what was it like in the 1770s,
when Count Sheremetev had his big concerts?
SHE ANSWERS IN RUSSIAN
But the performers, they weren't
the sort of professional actors and musicians that we think of today.
So the serf children were taken at seven or eight from their families?
The Sheremetevs' star performer was Praskovia Kovalyova.
Despite her serf origins,
she became one of the most celebrated opera singers in Russia.
Catherine the Great herself heard Praskovia perform at Kuskovo.
Praskovia also won the heart of Count Sheremetev's son, Nikolai.
After a long affair, they secretly married.
These mounds are all that remain of the open-air theatre,
where Praskovia and her fellow serfs performed.
Now, you might think this sounds awfully romantic.
The beautiful Praskovia standing here on the stage,
singing a heartfelt aria to the Count, her secret lover,
in the audience over there.
But it isn't romantic, it's creepy,
when you consider where the balance of power between them lay.
Count Sheremetev owned Praskovia and her entire family,
along with the rest of his 200,000 other serfs.
In a world where serfdom existed,
there were so many opportunities for exploitation,
particularly sexual exploitation of the female serfs.
It hardly bears thinking about.
Of course, performers, artists and musicians made up
just a tiny fraction of Russia's serf population.
Most of them continued to work in the fields, driving the Russian economy.
And they made up the bulk of the Russian army,
fuelling the expansion of Catherine's empire,
an expansion that was extraordinary in both its speed and scale.
Catherine annexed large stretches of Belarus and Lithuania.
Poland became a Russian dependency.
And crucially, she seized the Crimea.
Just as Peter the Great founded St Petersburg
to secure access to the Baltic,
Catherine now founded the major ports
of Sevastopol and Odessa to guarantee Russia access to the Black Sea.
Countless Russian and foreign lives were lost in the process,
but Catherine doesn't seem to have been much troubled by this.
But the other great powers of Europe WERE troubled.
They knew that Russia had now become a key player in world affairs.
Catherine had to be courted.
She had to be feared.
Here's a British satirical print from 1791 called
An Imperial Stride!
And it shows Catherine the Great of Russia striding from Russia
right over to Constantinople.
Look, she's got her toe on the tip of a crescent moon.
Meanwhile, all the European great powers are understandably
worried about Russia's expansion.
But they're also taking the opportunity
to look up Catherine's skirt.
Here's King George III of Great Britain, for example,
and he's saying, "What?! What?! What a prodigious expansion!"
"Never saw anything like it,"
says Louis XVI of France.
While the Sultan of Turkey declares,
"The whole Turkish army wouldn't satisfy her."
I think it's inevitable that Catherine, as a powerful woman,
was targeted with sexual slanders.
And it is true that she had quite a lot of lovers.
Although he shouldn't be here,
there isn't any truth to the rumours of her and the horse.
Though they are quite persistent. But she had no time for horses.
She was just too busy with all these men.
In 1774, she began an affair with a Guards officer, Grigori Potemkin.
Catherine called him "My colossus, my golden cockerel, my tiger".
He rose to be the commander in chief of the Russian army
and effectively, her co-ruler.
Potemkin was the love of Catherine's life.
It's even possible that they had a secret marriage.
And his influence endured even as she took other lovers.
As she got older, they tended to be Guards officers,
much younger than she was.
When she was 60, she took a last lover, Platon Zubov.
He was 21.
Go, Catherine!
It's amazing that she still began each relationship
with massive hope that this was the one
and there was that romantic,
not necessarily sexual sense, as she got old,
but very romantic - this person, I can love, he's going to love me.
There's also increasingly the sense
that they're largely for companionship.
She used to love walking through her art collection,
going through her collection of cameos, poring over them,
cataloguing them together.
And so, you get a sense of platonic enjoyment,
that brief time in her day
when she could relax and feel that she could be herself.
But constantly, that need to be loved.
Catherine's other great passion was her palaces.
But unlike the grand statements of the Winter Palace and Peterhof,
her own commissions have a more tranquil atmosphere.
The Catherine Palace, south of St Petersburg,
was originally built by the Empress Elizabeth in a Baroque style.
But Catherine employed a Scottish architect, Charles Cameron,
to add on a beautiful, classically inspired annexe,
more in tune with her own tastes.
Although the rooms are inspired by classical architecture,
they're constructed with a whole rainbow of Russian materials,
like the marble...
..the jasper...
..and the porphyry.
Although they're small in scale, they are incredibly rich.
When they were complete,
Catherine walked through with her architect, Mr Cameron,
admiring them, but she was also heard to sigh,
"Oh, but the cost! The cost!"
The gallery also offered Catherine the perfect vantage point
to look out over her English-style landscape gardens,
a fashion that swept Europe in the late-18th century.
English garden design had become another of her passions.
She tried to seduce the British royal gardener, Mr Capability Brown,
to come over to Russia to work for her.
She even shelled out a small fortune for a set of drawings
of the gardens at Hampton Court Palace,
under what was actually the mistaken impression
that Capability Brown had designed them himself.
But this was one of her failures.
Capability Brown said, "Niet!" to Catherine the Great.
He wasn't going to come to Russia.
Catherine gave her young lover Platon Zubov apartments adjacent to her own.
Her grandsons came here to play.
Their father, the Grand Duke Paul, was a less frequent visitor.
Like Peter the Great, Catherine had a troubled relationship
with her own son.
Paul's obsession with military ritual
and his lack of interest in culture and ideas
meant that he took after his father,
whom Catherine had of course usurped.
She found her eldest grandson Alexander
much more of a kindred spirit.
The classical annexe and its gardens
offered a consoling ideal of order and rationality.
But in Europe,
the Enlightenment dream was turning into a darker reality.
Catherine was horrified by the execution of Louis XVI in 1793...
..following the French Revolution.
To begin with, there's a sense
that the seriousness of the French Revolution didn't dawn on Catherine.
It seems she had never imagined that this could be the outcome
of what she'd read in her youth.
In a way, it was that split in her
between what she liked intellectually
and what she saw as possible for a ruler,
and the idea that Voltaire and his free thinking had led to this,
to the collapse of a monarchy, was utterly horrifying.
Even in her old age, Catherine worked indefatigably.
She rose at seven in the morning, she drank strong coffee,
and then she wrote in her office till nine.
She spent the morning listening to reports,
the afternoon reading and going through her correspondence.
For all her palace building and patronage of the arts,
for all the diplomatic and military successes of her reign,
it was in her commitment to the quiet, steady,
backroom work of government
that Catherine was perhaps at her greatest.
A portrait of the empress with one of her beloved greyhounds,
painted towards the end of her life, shows them out for a stroll.
As she walked her dog in this park,
Catherine could have looked back on a life of extraordinary achievements
and there were tangible reminders of them in the monuments all about her.
But poignantly, she had little faith in the future.
Particularly under her son and successor, Paul.
"My labour and care and warm concern for the good of the empire
"will be in vain," she once wrote,
"because my son hasn't inherited my frame of mind."
On the 5th of November 1796, Catherine suffered a stroke.
Hours later, she'd died.
She was 67.
That very morning, she'd risen early as usual and gone through her papers,
working for the Russian Empire to the very end.
But now, the throne went to her embittered son, Paul.
The day he was crowned, he changed the law,
so that no woman would ever sit on the Russian throne again.
Catherine's suspicion of Paul
and preference for his son Alexander looked to be well founded.
Catherine could have disinherited Paul,
but there were two problems with that.
One is that any suggestion of doing that
could have given rise to some sort of conspiracy,
even a coup against herself.
She of course had come to the throne by virtue of a coup.
She was very sensitive to the fact that monarchs could be replaced
by this method. That was one danger, I think, that she faced.
The other one was, that if you're going to have a conspiracy,
you've got to have a conspirator.
And Alexander didn't show any willingness whatsoever,
as far as one can tell, to take on that mantle
and to take his father's place as Catherine's heir.
As well as undermining his mother's legacy,
Paul soon alienated the court
by his fixation with religious and military ritual.
Concerns also grew among the powerful Guards regiments
about Paul's erratic foreign policy.
While Catherine had commanded widespread affection,
Emperor Paul knew full well that he was loathed,
just as his father, Peter III, had been.
And he knew how that had turned out.
In the centre of St Petersburg,
the increasingly paranoid Paul built the forbidding St Michael's Castle.
It was surrounded by a moat and armed with cannons.
Here, Paul could lock himself in every night,
with his sons, Alexander and Constantine.
But when the end came,
all his attempts at security counted for nothing.
One night in March 1801,
conspirators forced their way into the royal bed chamber
and a grim farce followed.
Emperor Paul tried to hide behind a fire screen,
but he left his feet sticking out and they got spotted.
The conspirators tried to arrest him and then a fight broke out.
The emperor got bashed over the head with a lethal weapon.
It was a snuff box.
A few moments later, he was dead.
So the conspirators went to wake up Paul's son, Alexander,
a few bedrooms away.
Alexander was horrified about what had happened,
so the conspirators said to him,
"Man up, Alexander! Stop whimpering!
"It's time for you to rule!"
Catherine had seen her grandson as her true heir,
a future Russian Alexander the Great.
Alexander had the typical male Romanov love
of uniforms and military etiquette.
But he shared Catherine's reforming instincts,
although he did lack her independence of mind.
Alexander came to the throne
at a time when Napoleon Bonaparte was upending Europe.
Russia joined Austria and Britain in a coalition against Napoleon
and Alexander soon faced him on the battlefield.
Napoleon was a military man who fancied himself as an emperor,
but Alexander was an emperor who fancied himself as a military man.
But it all went wrong for Alexander in 1805 at the Battle of Austerlitz.
he'd taken command of the army himself,
but he'd asked them to attack prematurely.
It was disastrous.
Many of the Russians and their allies, the Austrians, were killed.
Alexander realised that this had been his own fault.
He was so upset about it that he burst into tears
and he had to be sedated with opium.
He also had to make peace with Napoleon.
Alexander was summoned to Tilsit in Prussia.
Napoleon had two major demands.
Russia was to join the economic blockade of Britain,
the so-called Continental System.
And France was to get control of Russia's neighbour, Poland.
The two emperors signed their peace treaty
on a barge in the middle of a river.
A wobbly setting for a wobbly deal.
On the surface, the Treaty of Tilsit was the meeting of two equals.
The reality was, though, that these were not equals.
Napoleon was the boss.
Why did Tilsit break down?
Well, it broke down because that sort of imbalance
always has to be an unstable treaty.
In economic terms, it proved almost impossible for Russia
to continue to be a member of the Continental System,
but much more important than that, it was quite intolerable
for Alexander and for Russia for Napoleon to control Poland.
That was never going to be acceptable.
Behind Napoleon's back,
Alexander resumed trade with France's great enemy, Britain.
By 1812, Napoleon had had enough.
He decided that he could bend Alexander to his will
by invading Russia.
Or so he thought.
Napoleon was now facing an Alexander who was older and wiser.
Alexander wasn't going to make the same mistake
as at Austerlitz in 1805.
This time, he left the command of his army to the professionals.
Rather than meet Napoleon's mighty army head on,
the Russian commanders drew the French deeper and deeper
inside the country, stretching their supply lines.
Meanwhile, from the safety of St Petersburg,
Alexander tried to govern his empire and rally his people.
On September 7th, 1812, the Russians, under General Kutuzov,
finally confronted Napoleon at Borodino, near Moscow.
For Napoleon, it was now or never.
His forces and resources were at their limit.
Borodino was a huge battle, involving a quarter of a million troops.
And it was commemorated in this huge panoramic painting
by the artist Franz Roubaud.
115 metres long, it's housed in a purpose-built museum in Moscow.
And what tricks has it used to bring it alive, as a painter?
Well, for example, do you see
the Russian cavalry, which are attacking the French positions? Yes.
The troopers' heads are much more numerous than the heads of horses.
So he's made it look like a mass,
by doing lots and lots of heads and not so many bodies.
Well, it was most important for the painter
to give the impression of cavalry in attack. Yes.
Which was furious and very quick and very exciting.
So are we right at the front line here?
These are the Russians coming up to meet the French?
Yes, and they are starting
a counter-attack against the French troops.
Also a column of French infantry is attacking the Russian position.
Also, French cannons are firing at the Russian position.
Hang on, haven't we missed out Napoleon?
Well, Napoleon... Where is he? Well, you've missed Napoleon already.
Is that Napoleon on the white horse?
Yes, this is Napoleon and these are some of his bodyguards.
Now, this is said to have been
the most deadly single day of fighting in history.
It probably was.
In what league of casualties are we talking?
Both sides lost about 20,000 troops.
Many more were wounded and many more died after the battle.
Did anybody on the day actually know who had won?
Well, Napoleon claimed that he won the battle
and Kutuzov also said that he defeated Napoleon himself.
Leo Tolstoy said that the Russian side scored a moral victory
because the Russian army are many soldiers which were inexperienced,
fought on equal terms with a very strong army,
which was made up of best European troops.
Before the battle, Russian troops were preparing for death.
They didn't want to give up Moscow.
So it was a victory for the French, really? Not exactly.
If you were French, would you still tell me
that this wasn't a victory for Napoleon? Perhaps not.
What mattered was that Napoleon had failed to destroy
the Russian forces at Borodino.
He realised that this was an unwinnable campaign.
But he found a consolation prize near to hand.
The Russians were too weakened to defend Moscow.
The city was left wide open for Napoleon to take.
This should have been a terrific moment for Napoleon.
After all, St Petersburg may have been the country's official capital,
but Moscow was still its spiritual heart.
Tsars were still crowned in the Kremlin just there.
But the Russians weren't going to give Napoleon
the satisfaction of officially surrendering their city to him.
Instead, the just abandoned it, leaving it barely governable.
Looting quickly broke out,
and far more deadly - fire.
Whether they were caused by accident or arson,
the flames devastated a city still largely built of wood.
More than three-quarters of Moscow was destroyed.
For Alexander, the struggle against Napoleon
now took on divine proportions.
He declared that the salvation of his own soul rested on
whether he could save Europe from ruin.
At ten o'clock on the morning of March 31st, 1814,
nearly a year and a half after the burning of Moscow,
Paris resounded to the arrival of a victorious army.
But it wasn't the French returning home in triumph.
It was the forces allied against them,
and at their head was Alexander.
No foreign conqueror had reached Paris
since Henry V of England 400 years before.
But Alexander was magnanimous.
He presented himself more as a liberator than a conqueror.
He even rode on a horse that the French themselves had given him
five years before.
And he promised them that they needn't worry about Paris.
Unlike Moscow, their city would be safe.
And on the very same day, he made a public declaration
that the allies would recognise and guarantee a new French constitution.
And while Parisians witnessed the exotic sight
of Cossacks setting up camp on the Champs-Elysees,
Alexander's great adversary, Napoleon, was packed off into exile.
So, how had it all gone so wrong so quickly for Napoleon
and so right for Alexander?
Well, after the destruction of Moscow,
Napoleon had ordered his grand army to withdraw from Russia,
but on the way back, they got caught in a ferocious winter
that devastated their ranks.
Then, for more than a year, Russia and its allies
had pursued Napoleon's weakened forces across Europe.
Now, Paris was theirs.
How Alexander must have savoured this moment.
It was as glorious a moment as any Romanov had achieved
in the history of the dynasty.
Earlier Russian monarchs, like his grandmother,
Catherine the Great, had aspired to French sophistication.
But now, Alexander had the chance to show the French
how things were done properly,
how a truly civilised nation behaved in victory.
Russian troops remained in Paris for several months.
There's even a story that the very Parisian idea of a bistro
dates back to 1814.
The word in Russian means "quickly".
And this cafe claims to be the first to take its name
from hungry Russians shouting, "Food! Bistro!"
But there was the whiff of something dangerous among the Russian troops.
Especially some of the officers.
The campaign in Europe had exposed the Russian officers to countries
that didn't have the pernicious practice of serfdom,
countries where the ruler didn't have unlimited powers.
This was very exciting.
You can imagine them sitting in Parisian cafes
and saying to each other, "How come Tsar Alexander is going to let
"the French have a new constitution, but he won't let us have one at all?"
This meant that when they got home,
some of them would be ready to call for unprecedented change.
And quickly. Bistro! Bistro!
Next time, the story of the Romanovs reaches its tragic endgame.
As the tsars struggle to hold on to power,
during the final century of the dynasty,
they embrace reform, repression,
and...
Rasputin.
And face their deadliest challenge -
revolution.