Peter the Great’s death in 1725 made Russia hold its breath. The greatest will to shape the world’s largest and wealthiest realm – a Tsar’s any decision was his entire Empire’s fate – had been extinguished, leaving an unimaginable vacuum of power. But the unthinkable had happened: the Tsar, who had spent every waking minute plotting the progress of his people, had omitted to designate his heir. Empress Elizabeth was his daugher.
Peter the Great
Peter had executed his sole male heir Alexey from a first marriage, suspecting him of treason. His second wife Catherine, an illiterate former serf, had tried and failed a dozen times to give him the desired son. Multiple boys had died in infancy or were still born, probably as a result of both Peter’s Syphilis and the Empresses’ lifestyle involving gallons of vodka and joining her husband on every battlefield. At Peter’s deathbed, only two surviving daughters joined his cronies and his wife.
Who was to continue his momentous struggle? Peter had wanted to twist his Empire’s head from looking East, and the semi-Asian Muscovy, to the West, as a half-European Russia, as if it was a doll’s head. Yet on the one hand, the Westernisation had taken root and the foreigners in Peter’s pay were present and powerful at court. On the other, many invisible forces were already at work, wishing to turn clocks back by a century at least. The still surface of the glittering silver lake that was the Court of the Winter Palace hid a malicious maelstrom of deadly currents.
Peter’s daughters Anna ‘Anoushka’ and Elizabeth ‘Lizenka’ felt safe as long as their astounding mother took the throne as the first ever Empress of Russia. Yet while Anoushka was married off to Germany, her sister Elizabeth suffered tremendously after her mother’s death. Masks fell and friends turned into foes. People who owed everything to her parents (above all the wily German priest’s son Heinrich Johann Ostermann, who shocked Russians and foreign envoys alike with his steady, unbribable character) became her mortal enemy, criticising her perceived ‘flightiness’. Driving the Westernisation forward was the respected statesman’s declared goal, calling in more and more experts from Germany, Saxony, and the Netherlands.
The reign of Elizabeth’s nephew Peter III (Peter the Great’s despised young grandson) offered Elizabeth scant respite, as he was instrumentalised to relegate her father’s achievements to oblivion. Suddenly, the Tsarina’s daughter lived in contrast to her mother: the ‘world’s loveliest princess’ as the painter Louis Caravaque described her, fell from riches to rags, living isolated, and impoverished. Yet she refused to consent to a loveless, second-rate match or to retreat to a convent, but survived more than a decade of latent terrorism. As her hereditary rights were obstructed three times, Russia itself jumped from the frying pan into the fire.
Anna Ivanovna
The Westerners whose mores, knowledge and discipline should have furthered Russia, instead set out to destroy the Empire. The reign of Elizabeth’s cousin, Anna Ivanovna, is known as one of the most cursed periods in Russian history. Utterly devoted to her lover Ernst Biren, a former horse-groom styled the Duke of Courland, Anna’s reign is known as ‘Bironyshkchina’, the ‘time of the German Yoke’. Russian regiments were chased from their barracks and replaced by Baltic soldiers with German commanders. At court, the Saxon count, Lynar and the Livonian baroness, Julie von Mengden, ruled and both led a scandalous ‘menage à trois’ with Tsarina Anna’s declared heir, Christina von Mecklenburg. Christina hereself was a Russo-German Princess engaged to a German duke, whom she scorned as ‘tadpole’.
Like Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, Russia was unable to muster the spirits summoned and was threatened by inner decline, ruled by Tsars of foreign blood. But in a gargantuan struggle, Elizabeth rose from rags to Romanov. Hers is the story of the birth of modern Russia; a young Empire in turmoil and change, the madness of war, and the reckless brutality of absolute monarchy when nothing is as abundant and worthless as human life. Elizabeth’s sheer survival bears testimony of her strength and the refusal to surrender as she styled herself as a first People’s Princess, putting Russia and the Russians first. Bankrolled by her father’s old adviser, she was godmother to hundreds of soldiers’ sons and daughters, loved Russian food and was seen to adore the traditional clothes, song, and dance.
When the time came, she was swept to power in a single wave, marching on the Winter Palace, her people calling her matushka Rossiya, the pet-name normally reserved for the country itself.
Ellen Alpsten is the author of The Tsarina’s Daughter, published by Bloomsbury.
Aspects of History Issue Four is out now.
