Elizabeth of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Elizabeth Petrovna seized the Russian throne on the night of the 25th of November 1741 wearing a warrior's metal breastplate over her dress and gripping a silver cross. She strode into the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Life Guards Regiment and posed a single question to the soldiers: whom did they want to serve, their natural sovereign, or those who had stolen her inheritance? By dawn, the infant emperor Ivan VI was under arrest, and the daughter of Peter the Great was Empress of Russia. What makes her reign remarkable is not the coup itself but the vow she made before it. If she became Empress, she promised, she would not sign a single death sentence. She kept that promise for more than twenty years. How did a woman who was barely educated in childhood, passed over for marriage by virtually every royal house in Europe, and pushed to the margins of court life during a decade of hostile rule come to preside over one of the most splendid courts on the continent? And how did she hold together a coalition that pushed Frederick the Great to the very brink of ruin, only to die before she could finish the job?

• 2. Born at the Margins

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  Elizabeth was born at Kolomenskoye Palace, near Moscow, on the 18th of December 1709. Her father was Peter the Great. Her mother, Catherine, had begun life as a washerwoman and housemaid, the daughter of a Lithuanian farmer named Samuel Skowronski. Peter and Catherine were said to have married secretly at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Saint Petersburg sometime between the 23rd of October and the 1st of December 1707, but their official wedding did not take place until the 9th of February 1712, at Saint Isaac's Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. On that same day, Elizabeth and her elder sister Anna were formally legitimised by their father, with the title of Tsarevna granted on the 6th of March 1711.

  Of the twelve children Peter and Catherine had together, only the two sisters survived to adulthood. Peter adored Elizabeth, who resembled him physically and in temperament, but he did not invest in her education. Having a son and a grandson by his first wife, a Russian noblewoman, he had not anticipated that a daughter born to a former housemaid might one day rule. The practical result was that Elizabeth's mother, herself illiterate until her early twenties, was left to raise the girls with considerable difficulty. Elizabeth did not receive any systematic schooling. A court writer named Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich Shcherbatov recorded that in adulthood she reportedly did not know that Great Britain was an island.

  What education she did absorb came largely through a French governess, who gave lessons in mathematics, arts, languages, and sports. The Jewish scholar Isaak Pavlovich Veselovsky guided her through French intensively, and from that foundation she became fluent in Italian and German as well. She grew interested in architecture, developed a beautiful handwriting, and became, by all accounts, an exceptional dancer and rider. A British ambassador's wife described her blue eyes as large and sprightly, her teeth fine, and her dancing the best she had ever witnessed. The motivation behind French instruction was largely dynastic: Peter had hoped to marry his daughter into the Bourbon house, a plan that would collapse entirely within a few years.

• 3. A Decade of Closed Doors

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  Peter the Great had wanted his children married into European royal families, a sharp departure from the practice of his predecessors. His son Alexei, born of his first noble wife, had no difficulty securing a bride from the house of Brunswick-Luneburg. His daughters, born of a Livonian commoner, were another matter entirely. When Peter offered Elizabeth to the future Louis XV or to the young Duke Louis of Orleans, the Bourbons declined. The grounds were the post-facto legitimisation of the girls and their mother's low birth.

  Candidates for Elizabeth's hand were proposed over several years: the illegitimate son of Augustus the Strong known as Count Maurice de Saxe, Prince George Augustus of England, Charles Friedrich Albrecht of Brandenburg-Schwedt, a Portuguese prince, and even Nader Shah of Persia. None came to anything. Her parents' late official marriage, the question of her illegitimate birth, religious differences, and her mother's origins each played a role in closing doors. In 1724, Peter settled on a different solution. He betrothed Elizabeth to Charles Augustus of Holstein-Gottorp, a prince-bishop who was the eldest son of Christian Augustus of Holstein-Gottorp. The betrothal made dynastic sense even if the match was modest.

  The plan collapsed in the cruelest possible way. In May 1727, Elizabeth's mother, who had ascended the throne as Catherine I, died on the 17th of the month. Two weeks later, on the 31st of May 1727, Elizabeth's fiancé died in Saint Petersburg at the age of twenty, in the midst of the wedding preparations. By the end of that month, the seventeen-year-old had lost her mother and her intended husband within a fortnight. Her half-nephew Peter II now sat on the throne, and when he died in 1730 he was succeeded by Elizabeth's first cousin Anna, daughter of Ivan V. There was no love between the cousins. Anna asked the Chinese minister at her court once to identify the most beautiful woman present; he pointed to Elizabeth, to Anna's open displeasure. A commoner marriage would have stripped Elizabeth of her rank and claim to the throne, so she turned instead to a sergeant of the Semyonovsky Life Guards named Alexander Shubin. When Empress Anna discovered the relationship, she had Shubin exiled to Siberia.

• 4. The Coup and Its Costs

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  French ambassador the Marquis de La Chetardie was deeply involved in planning Elizabeth's seizure of power. Anna Leopoldovna's regency for the infant Ivan VI was opposed to French interests, and the ambassador bribed officers in the Imperial Guard. The French adventurer Jean Armand de Lestocq worked alongside the marquis and the Swedish ambassador to accelerate the plot. On the night of the 25th of November 1741, the Preobrazhensky regiment marched to the Winter Palace and arrested Ivan VI, his parents, and their own lieutenant-colonel, Count Burkhard Christoph von Munnich. It was done without bloodshed.

  Elizabeth's vow against death sentences would define her reign's reputation, but the vow had its limits. She initially considered sending the young Ivan and his mother out of Russia, but imprisoned them instead in Schlusselburg Fortress, fearing they would cause trouble from abroad. She ordered that any papers, coins, or objects bearing Ivan's name or image be destroyed. She further commanded that if Ivan ever attempted to escape, he was to be killed. Catherine the Great upheld that standing order; when an escape attempt was eventually made, Ivan was killed and buried secretly within the fortress.

  A separate case showed the cruelty that could operate beneath the stated principle. When Ivan Lopukhin complained about Elizabeth in a tavern, his words were overheard. He was tortured, and the investigation implicated his mother, Countess Natalia Lopukhina, and others in an alleged plot to reinstate Ivan VI. All were sentenced to death. The women had their tongues removed and were publicly flogged; the men were broken on the wheel. Elizabeth had technically commuted the capital sentences to torture, but the distinction required careful interpretation. These episodes sat uneasily alongside the reputation she would later earn as the monarch who abolished capital punishment.

• 5. Patronage and Extravagance

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  Elizabeth crowned herself Empress in the Dormition Cathedral on the 25th of April 1742 in Moscow Kremlin, a ceremony that set a template followed by all Russian emperors until 1896. Her court became one of the most splendid in Europe. Historian Mikhail Shcherbatov wrote that it was arrayed in cloth of gold, with nobles settling for nothing but the most luxurious garments and the rarest drinks. It was routine for a single event to require over a thousand bottles of French champagne and wine, and pineapples were served at every reception despite the difficulty of obtaining them in such quantities.

  Elizabeth reportedly owned fifteen thousand dresses, several thousand pairs of shoes, and a seemingly unlimited number of stockings. Her vanity expressed itself through law: she issued an edict forbidding anyone at court from wearing the same hairstyle, dress, or accessory as the Empress. A woman who accidentally wore a matching item was lashed across the face. One famous story describes Elizabeth finding powder stuck in her hair. Unable to remove it without cutting, she trimmed a patch of her own hair and then required every court lady to cut a matching patch from theirs, which they did with tears in their eyes. As she aged, historian Tamara Talbot Rice recorded, her outbursts of anger turned increasingly toward women whose beauty might rival her own.

  Her entertainment habits were equally elaborate. She reportedly threw two balls each week: one large gathering attended by an average of 800 guests, including merchants and lower nobility, and a smaller private affair for her closest circle. The smaller balls evolved by 1744 into the famous metamorphoses balls, at which guests were required to dress as the opposite sex. Elizabeth often appeared as a Cossack or a carpenter in honour of her father. Count Grigory Potemkin, an advisor to Catherine the Great, observed that Elizabeth was the only woman present who looked truly fine in male attire. Pilgrims and harlequins were the two banned costume categories, which she considered profane and indecent respectively. She also provided dowries for each of her ladies-in-waiting and threw children's birthday parties and wedding receptions for members of the court.

  Her architectural patronage reached a different scale. Bartolomeo Rastrelli, her favourite architect, reconstructed Peterhof Palace between 1745 and 1755, adding several wings. The Winter Palace, which Elizabeth did not live to see completed, is said to contain 1,500 rooms, 1,786 doors, and 1,945 windows. For the Smolny Convent, historian Robert Nisbet Bain wrote that no other Russian sovereign had ever erected so many churches. The Winter Palace project was funded partly by a tax on state-owned taverns, with 859,555 rubles initially allocated; when that proved insufficient, taxes on salt and alcohol were raised to cover the remainder. The roads across Russia were modernised at her orders, a practical consequence of the need to ship building materials from across the country.

• 6. Enlightenment and Reform

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  Mikhail Lomonosov founded the University of Moscow with Elizabeth's active encouragement, and she helped finance the establishment of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. She made education freely available to all social classes with one significant exclusion: serfs remained outside the reach of that provision. Ivan Shuvalov, who was closely associated with the Academy of Arts, was among the figures whose initiatives she backed.

  Her domestic policies gave the nobility greater dominance in local government while shortening their obligatory terms of service to the state. She reversed several of her father's measures that had constrained church power, passing legislation that restored ground the institution had lost under Peter the Great. Her proclamation on taking the throne framed these changes as a liberation: she declared that the Russian people had been groaning under enemies of the Christian faith and that she had delivered them from foreign oppression.

  Elizabeth is also credited with expanding the practice of parishes that provided shelter, food, clothing, and care for orphans, elderly people, and those with disabilities from peasant families, funded through a special tax. Historian Robert Nisbet Bain credited her with putting a stop to the factionalism and rival ambitions at court that had allowed foreign powers to interfere in Russian domestic affairs during the reigns of Peter II, Anna, and Ivan VI. Despite what contemporaries sometimes read as irresolution or delay in signing documents, Bain and others noted that her judgement and diplomatic instinct frequently recalled Peter the Great.

• 7. Frederick and the Long War

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  Aleksey Bestuzhev-Ryumin took charge of Russian foreign affairs immediately after Elizabeth's accession. He represented the anti-Franco-Prussian faction and pushed for alliance with England and Austria. His diplomacy and the deployment of 30,000 Russian troops to the Rhine helped accelerate the peace negotiations that produced the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle on the 18th of October 1748, ending the War of Austrian Succession. He also extracted Russia from the Swedish conflict; the Treaty of Abo on the 7th of August 1743 saw Sweden cede to Russia all of southern Finland east of the Kymmene River, as well as the fortresses of Villmanstrand and Fredrikshamn.

  Both Frederick the Great and Louis XV attempted to have Bestuzhev removed. Both failed. He was finally stripped of his offices and decorations on the 14th of February 1758. Catherine, then still heir's consort, recorded that no specific crime was ever identified against him; it was only inferred that he had tried to sow discord between the Empress and the heir. His rivals, including the Shuvalov family and Vice-Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov, filled the vacuum.

  Elizabeth's personal hostility toward Frederick the Great shaped the Seven Years' War. She regarded the Convention of Westminster of the 16th of January 1756, in which Britain and Prussia agreed to oppose the passage of foreign troops through Germany, as a direct subversion of existing agreements with Britain. She entered the Second Treaty of Versailles and joined France and Austria against Prussia. On the 17th of May 1757, the Imperial Russian Army, 85,000 strong, advanced on Konigsberg. The crushing defeat at Kunersdorf on the 12th of August 1759 brought Frederick to the edge of collapse. "I'm at the end of my resources," he wrote at the start of 1760. "The continuance of this war means for me utter ruin."

  From the end of 1759 onward, Elizabeth's personal determination was the central force holding the anti-Prussian coalition together. In 1760, a Russian flying column briefly occupied Berlin. A secret clause in the convention signed between Russia and Austria on the 21st of May 1760 guaranteed East Prussia to Russia as an indemnity for war expenses. Frederick's forces held on through skill and the jealousies between Russian and Austrian commanders; the sole Russian success of 1761 was Field Marshal Pyotr Rumyantsev's capture of the Prussian fortress of Kolberg on Christmas Day that year. On the 6th of January 1762, Frederick wrote to Count Karl-Wilhelm Finck von Finckenstein that he was thinking only of preserving by negotiation whatever fragments of his territory he could save. A fortnight later he wrote that the sky had begun to clear. The Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, as it came to be called, was Elizabeth's death on the 5th of January 1762.

• 8. Death and Succession

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  Elizabeth's health began declining in the late 1750s. She suffered dizzy spells and refused to take prescribed medication, and she forbade the word "death" from being spoken in her presence. A stroke on the 24th of December 1761 made it clear she would not recover. She used her remaining strength to make her confession, to recite the prayer for the dying with her confessor, and to say farewell to those who had come to be with her: Peter and Catherine, and Counts Alexei and Kirill Razumovsky.

  She died on Orthodox Christmas Day, 1761, at the Winter Palace. For her lying in state, she was dressed in a shimmering silver gown. She was buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg on the 3rd of February 1762, six weeks after her death. The throne passed to her nephew Peter of Holstein-Gottorp, who became Peter III, and in doing so created a new dynastic line. Elizabeth had been the last person on the agnatic line of the Romanovs.

  Alexei Razumovsky, the Ukrainian Cossack whom she had purchased from a nobleman to sing in her choir and who had been her companion across decades, was made a count of the Holy Roman Empire in 1742 and a field marshal and prince by Elizabeth in 1756. His remarkable rise from a serf with a good bass voice to one of the highest-ranking figures in the Russian Empire was a direct consequence of a relationship that outlasted every political crisis of her reign. Whether the two were secretly married was never confirmed.