 When told that Arakcheyev was "the nearest person to His Majesty", Labzin proposed to elect the Tsar's coachman instead "not only as being the nearest to the emperor, but having a seat before his majesty".He died in exile.Labzin's young protégés included Alexander Witberg, an architect who won the commission to construct in Moscow the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour but tsar Nicholas I abandoned the "Masonic" plan for a less "Roman Catholic" neo-Byzantine construction.