Paul II

Paul II (Paul Alexander Michael; in Russian Pavel Alexandrovich; born 12 June 1986) is Emperor of All Russia. He was proclaimed at the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg shortly before midnight on 25 October 2028, hours after a referendum in which more than three in four Russians voted for a constitutional monarchy under the House of Romanov, and on the day the Russian Republic elected its first freely chosen President, Dmitri Gromov.

He was born at Richmond, in London, into the exiled house, which had lived there in a Crown house since 1923, and he was head of the house from 2019, styled Grand Duke. Before he became Emperor he had served nine years in the Coldstream Guards, leaving as a captain, and he was a director of a City merchant bank, Lowndes Fairlie, on whose emerging-markets debt desk he was working in the week of the restoration. His position as head, held without variation from 2019, was that the crown belonged to the Russian people in a referendum and that he would accept either answer.

He reigns without a constitution. The constituent assembly Gromov has promised is to write one on the British model, in which the sovereign reigns and does not govern and the presidency is abolished, and until it does he is head of state beside an elected President who governs. He has said that he will take no oath and no coronation until there is a constitution to give them meaning. This article describes his reign to the evening of 26 October 2028.

Early life

Paul was born on 12 June 1986 at Richmond, the elder child and only son of Alexander, then the heir of the house, and Princess Sophie of Schaumburg-Lippe, whom Alexander had married in 1984. His grandfather Paul, after whom he was named, was head of the house until his death in 2004. He was baptised Paul Alexander Michael in the Orthodox church in London; in Russian he is Pavel Alexandrovich. His sister, Grand Duchess Anna, was born in 1989 and is a doctor in the National Health Service.

The family lived at Richmond as a professional London family lived, in the house by the river that Ernest III granted in 1923, on the parliamentary grant and what the heads earned. He went to St Paul’s School in Barnes as a day boy from Richmond, the first head of the house not to have boarded, and was known at school, as he was afterwards in the Guards and at the bank, simply as Paul Romanov.

He learned Russian at home, from his father and from a tutor from the emigration, as every heir had since 1918. He speaks it fluently, in a form that stops at about 1917: his vocabulary is the emigration’s, his manners in the language are those of a drawing room that closed a century ago, and he has no idea of modern Russian slang. Russians find it old-fashioned, and some of them find it moving.

He had been to Russia once before he was its Emperor. In the 1990s, at nine, he went with his father on the private visit to St Petersburg that the Republic said afterwards it had known about. He did not go back as an adult.

The Coldstream Guards

He did not go to university before the army. He went to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst at nineteen and was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards in 2007, the third generation of the house to serve in the regiment; his grandfather had been commissioned into it at eighteen in 1944.

He served nine years. He did two tours. The first was six months on the League’s buffer line in Nicosia in 2010, the year he married, on the line that the League’s force has held in Cyprus since 1964; nothing happened, which he has said is the point of the line. The second was with the battalion on public duties in London, mounting the King’s Guard at Buckingham Palace, where he stood guard over the palace of his cousin Ernest V. He describes it as the harder of the two, and says that the bearskin in August was the hardest thing the army asked of him.

He left in 2016 as a captain. He had been offered a staff post and did not want to spend his thirties at a desk in uniform.

The City

He joined Lowndes Fairlie, an old and small merchant bank in the City of London, in 2016, and rose to director on its emerging-markets debt desk. Part of its business was Russian debt, which he said was a coincidence. When he became head of the house in 2019 he stood aside from Russian state debt, so that the head of the Romanovs should not be trading the Republic’s bonds, and he handled only Russian company debt from then until the week he became Emperor.

While at the bank he took a part-time degree in economic history at Birkbeck, University of London. His dissertation was on the imperial gold that Admiral Kolchak spent to buy the army with which he took the Republic, a subject the house had otherwise left alone since Nicholas II wrote to Kolchak about it once, in 1922. The dissertation is unpublished, at his request. Birkbeck holds it, and it may be read only with his permission, which three Russian historians asked for on 26 October 2028.

He went to work on the Monday of the week of the restoration, and again on the Tuesday morning, after President Yermolov’s decree. Lowndes Fairlie says that he is on leave. He has not resigned. The trading floor watched the proclamation on its screens, and somebody printed the words “On leave” on a card and put it on his desk, where it still is.

Head of the house, 2019 to 2028

His father died of cancer at Richmond in March 2019, after a year’s illness, and Paul became head of the house at thirty-two. He took no new title beyond the headship and the style of Grand Duke, kept working at the bank, and restated the house’s position in a short letter to The Times.

The position was his father’s and he did not alter it: that the question of the crown belonged to the Russian people, that it should be settled by a free vote in a referendum, as the Assembly of the Land had settled it in 1613, and that he would accept either answer. He held it for nine years, saying it whenever he was asked and very rarely when he was not.

He wrote seven letters to The Times in twenty years. They were on referendums, on the reserve powers of crowns and on the independence of courts, and none of them named Russia. From them he is known as a constitutional liberal, the only political opinion he has ever let be attributed to him. He has never voted in a British election. On the Republic and on Kolchak he has said nothing in public, ever. Asked once at a dinner, he said that the Republic was Russia’s business, as the crown was.

He kept the house’s distance from the Constitutional Crown Party, the monarchist party inside Russia, as his father had. He has never met its leader, Anna Rostova, and refused to.

His cousin Ernest V made him a Companion of the Royal Household Order of Ernest in 2019, on his father’s death. It is the order in the King’s personal gift, which belongs to no realm and needs no government’s advice.

The two days

24 October

On the night of 23 to 24 October 2028 President Pavel Yermolov confined the Russian army and the security troops to their barracks and decreed a free election within twenty-four hours, in which he would not stand. Paul wrote two sentences at the kitchen table at Richmond at six in the morning, and his private secretary issued them at eight, London time, before Paul left for the bank.

His office declined to add to it. He refused every call from Russia over the next two days, on the ground that a claimant who talks to a government before the vote is campaigning.

25 October

On 25 October Gromov won the election outright, was sworn in, and by his first decree put the question of the crown to the people that same evening: a constitutional monarchy under the House of Romanov, yes or no. Paul heard the result on the BBC, in the kitchen at Richmond, with Catherine and the children. More than three in four had voted yes.

He went out to the door, where the press had been waiting since the morning, and said three sentences.

I said I would accept either answer. I accept this one. I am going tonight.

He flew from Farnborough that evening in a small chartered aircraft, which he paid for himself, alone but for the crew. Catherine and the children stayed at Richmond, to follow him when a house at St Petersburg was ready. While he was in the air Gromov granted him Russian citizenship by decree, so that he was a citizen of the country when he became its Emperor; he flew on his British passport.

He landed at Pulkovo a little before eleven at night, Moscow time. By his own wish there was no crowd. Gromov, who had flown up from Moscow, met him at the foot of the aircraft steps, shook his hand and said a sentence that neither man has repeated, and did not go on with him, so that the President should not seem to be crowning the Emperor. Paul was driven into the city in a car with the windows down, and people walking home from the polling stations stopped on the pavements to watch it pass. He was wearing the dark suit he had worn to the bank on the Tuesday and the Coldstream tie, with no uniform and no orders.

The Tauride Palace

He was proclaimed at the Tauride Palace, where the old Duma sat from 1906 until the fall of the empire, before the presiding officers of the National Assembly, who had flown up from Moscow that evening. The result of the referendum was read, and then the act by which he accepted the crown, which he signed; it is the only document he has signed as Emperor. He was proclaimed Paul II, Emperor of All Russia, numbered after Paul I, whose succession law of 1797 had carried the house’s claim through the exile. There was no crown, no procession and no oath.

He spoke for less than a minute, in his old-fashioned Russian.

Several people in the hall were calling him the Tsar before he had finished. Anna Rostova was in the hall, and they did not speak. He was out of the palace by twelve minutes to midnight. The state became the Russian Empire at once.

He spent the rest of the night in a small hotel just off the Nevsky Prospect, chosen because nobody would think of it and paid for himself. There he answered by hand the personal message of congratulation that Ernest V had sent from his bed in New Westminster General, on advice. Neither letter has been published.

Emperor

This section describes his reign to the evening of 26 October 2028.

26 October

He went for a run along the Neva at six in the morning. He was recognised by the second person he passed and photographed by the tenth. That photograph, taken in the dark on the embankment opposite the Peter and Paul Fortress, is the one most of the world has seen of him.

At St Petersburg that morning he and Gromov had their first conversation, alone, for half an hour. Neither has said what was said. Afterwards he opened Russia’s talks with the European Concert on Russia attending its Council as the Concert’s second associate. He welcomed the Concert’s envoy, Tomasz Wierzbicki, in Russian and then in English, in under a minute, to a Russia that had decided to be its neighbours’ neighbour, and withdrew. It was his first public act as Emperor, and the talks were then conducted by Gromov’s Foreign Minister, Irina Volkova.

He wrote two more letters that day, on the hotel’s paper as his reply to the King had been, having as yet no cypher. One was to Yermolov, whom he has never met, and its contents are unknown. One was to the President of Finland, acknowledging the Russification of Finland from 1899 as his family’s failing and apologising for it, the first apology in particular that the house has ever made. The President’s office confirmed that evening that it had been received and said it would be answered. Finland had received the restoration coolly, as the one country that remembers the Romanovs as its own former rulers.

His private secretary, Major Edward Lisle, a retired Coldstream officer who had served with him and has run the Richmond office since 2019, arrived from London that morning. A Russian diplomatic passport was issued to him. The Coldstream Guards sent their congratulations, and a bottle of whisky from the sergeants’ mess reached the hotel in the afternoon.

In the evening he went, unannounced, to a small parish church near the hotel. The Patriarchate has said nothing since the proclamation, and nothing to him.

The constitutional position

He is a constitutional sovereign without a constitution. The constituent assembly Gromov has promised is to write one on the British model, in which the sovereign reigns and does not govern, a Prime Minister answers to an elected Duma and the presidency is abolished. Until then Gromov governs through the Republic’s institutions, and the Emperor is head of state beside him. Gromov’s public line, said once on the 26th and repeated in the same words since, is that the Emperor is the head of the state and he is the head of the government, until the constitution says how.

He has said that he will take no oath until there is a constitution to swear to, and that there will be no coronation before a constitution. He has not said that there will be one after. He has signed nothing since the act of acceptance, on the ground that there is nothing he yet has the authority to sign, and he has said that he will not act until there is.

The crown’s seat is St Petersburg; the government stays at Moscow.

Household, money and protection

His household is his private secretary. A Russian household is to be formed.

He has no fortune. He has a banker’s savings, and Russia pays him nothing until the constitution settles a civil list, so that for the present the Emperor of All Russia pays his own hotel bill. The British parliamentary grant that the house received every year from 1919 stops with the restoration.

He is protected by the protective service that guarded Yermolov, reassigned to him by Gromov’s decree. It is part of the apparatus of the old regime, and it is the part of his position that his critics most distrust.

The Anichkov Palace on the Nevsky, a government guest house that stood empty for most of the year, is being made ready for him and for his family.

The family

Catherine made a short statement from Richmond on the morning of the 26th, thanking Russia and asking that the children be left alone, and saying nothing about herself. The Tsarevich Alexander, seventeen, said nothing and went to school on the Thursday, where the other boys had agreed among themselves not to mention it. He is to finish his last year at St Paul’s before he goes to Russia. The family stays at Richmond until the Anichkov Palace is ready, and the house at Richmond is to be kept for their visits.

His mother stays at Richmond, saying that she is too old to learn a new country, which she is not. His sister stays at her hospital in London and has said that she will go on being a doctor, whatever her brother is.

He has not been to the Peter and Paul Cathedral, where his ancestors from Peter the Great to Alexander III are buried. His private secretary says he will go when his family has come. Nicholas II lies at Windsor, where he was buried in 1937. The family has made no request for him, and he stays there.

Personal life

He married Catherine Ashworth in 2010. She is a commercial barrister from a Yorkshire family of solicitors, a year older than he is, and they met at a friend’s wedding in 2008. They married in the Guards Chapel, Wellington Barracks, with an Orthodox priest. She remained in the Church of England. Whether a sovereign’s wife who is not Orthodox can be Empress is a question for the constituent assembly, and until it answers she is styled by her name. She practises at the Bar under her own name.

They have three children: the Tsarevich Alexander, born in 2011; Grand Duchess Maria, born in 2013; and Grand Duchess Elena, born in 2016, named after the Empress Helene. The daughters are kept out of the newspapers, which have mostly agreed to keep out of their way.

He is tall and spare, clean-shaven and prematurely grey, and still stands as the Guards taught him to. He is reserved and dry, punctual to a fault, better in a room of six than in a room of six hundred, and has a temper that he keeps under a long habit of saying nothing. He runs, along the Thames at Richmond before work, and has run the London Marathon twice. He is observant of his church at the house’s occasions and is otherwise not much of a churchgoer.

He and Prince Frederick have met at family occasions in London, the last a christening in 2026. Frederick has written to him since the proclamation, and the Household has not said about what.

Titles, styles and honours

• 12 June 1986 to March 2019: Grand Duke Paul of Russia, as a son of the heir of the house
• March 2019 to 25 October 2028: Grand Duke Paul, Head of the Imperial House of Russia
• Since 25 October 2028: Paul II, Emperor of All Russia

His style is Emperor of All Russia and nothing more. The imperial style before 1917 ran to a long list of the lands the Emperor ruled and began with the word Autocrat; he has dropped all of it. He is addressed as His Majesty, without the “Imperial”, at his own request. Russians say Gosudar to his face, call him the Tsar among themselves, and call him the Englishman, affectionately and not only affectionately.

He has no cypher. The double-headed eagle is the dynasty’s arms and not his, and the tricolour, not the eagle, is the flag of the empire.

He holds Russian nationality, granted by decree on 25 October 2028, and keeps his British nationality as a private matter. His one honour is the King’s own: he is a Companion of the Royal Household Order of Ernest (2019), the order in the King’s personal gift that belongs to no realm. He has issued no honours in the old imperial orders, as no head of the house did in exile.

Reception

Russia

Most Russians know him from photographs. The monarchist papers greeted him with rapture, the new liberal papers, founded since the decree, with politeness and watchfulness, and the old state papers with silence, as if waiting for an instruction that has not come.

Anna Rostova, whose party he had refused to meet, said that the Emperor was right to keep his distance from it, which her members called the most monarchist thing she had ever said. The security service’s director resigned on the night of the proclamation without a statement; the general staff had already said that the army serves the elected President.

Britain

Britain received the news with affection and some embarrassment. The tabloid newspapers call him “our Tsar”. The Labour member who had opposed the house’s grant every year wished him well in the House of Commons. His regiment congratulated him, and his bank put him on leave.

Elsewhere

The Realm’s Foreign Secretary, Margaret Renwick, recognised the Emperor on the night he was proclaimed. Beyond the King’s message and the Foreign Office’s recognition, the Realm’s interest has been curiosity and the coverage of the American Broadcasting Corporation, whose principal presenter called him Grand Duke Paul on the air until the moment he was proclaimed anything else. Finland received the restoration coolly, and its answer to his apology is awaited. The European Concert’s offer of association stands, and its envoy was the first foreign dignitary he received.

Criticism

He has done nothing yet to fail at, and his critics say as much. What they object to is the position he has been given and the way he came to it.

The comfort of exile. The house spent a century at Richmond on a British grant, with a sovereign’s honours and a sovereign’s graves, while Russia lived under Kolchak’s state, and it said nothing. Its critics in the emigration and inside Russia said that the claim it made, that the crown was Russia’s to give, was the most comfortable position a claimant could hold, and that a house which would neither lead nor speak could not expect to be called.

The bank. He worked on Russian debt for nine years while his family claimed Russia’s crown, and he stood aside from the Republic’s own bonds only in 2019. His critics say that the head of the Romanovs had no business near Russian debt of any kind, and that “a coincidence” was not an answer.

The photographs. The strongest line against him is that a British banker who never lived in Russia, never governed anything and never suffered for it was given a crown in a single day by people who know him from photographs.

The old apparatus. He is protected by the service that protected Yermolov, and the critics who distrust the restoration most say that a crown guarded by the old regime’s men may find itself serving the old regime’s purposes.

His defenders answer that he asked for nothing, said for nine years what he would do and did it, and that the comfort of the exile was the condition on which the house was allowed to stay alive long enough to be asked.

Assessment

He has reigned for a day. In that day he has accepted a crown he did not ask for, as he had always said he would; refused an oath and a coronation until there is a constitution; opened talks with Russia’s western neighbours; apologised to Finland for his family’s rule; and gone for a run. He has no constitution, no household, no money from the state and no record as a ruler, and what kind of Emperor he will be cannot yet be known.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The House of Romanov, his house and its exile
• The Russian Empire, the state proclaimed with him
• Russia’s Two Days, the ABC’s record of the decree, the election, the referendum and the proclamation
• The European Concert, whose talks with Russia he opened
• Ernest V, his cousin, who congratulated him from his sickbed
• George V, his cousin’s son, King since 31 October 2028
• The Republic of Finland, to which he apologised
• Stephen Alcott, who called him Grand Duke Paul until he was proclaimed

Categories

• World people
• Emperors of Russia
• House of Romanov
• Coldstream Guards officers
• People from Richmond