Secret Lives of the Tsars

by Michael Farquhar

  Elizabeth (1741–1762): The Empress of Pretense

  The secret corners of her heart remain inaccessible even for the oldest and most experienced courtiers, with whom she is never more cordial than when she is stripping them of rank and favor.

  –JEAN-LOUIS FAVIER, FRENCH DIPLOMAT

  Empress Anna had intended that the Russian throne would remain with the descendants of her father, Ivan V—certainly not with those of her uncle Peter the Great. To that end, she left the crown to her infant great-nephew, Ivan VI. But by then, Peter’s only surviving daughter, his adored “Lizetka,” had waited in the wings long enough. Disregarded as a silly pleasure seeker, Elizabeth had been bypassed in the succession four times after the death of her father—first in favor of her mother, Catherine I, then by her nephew Peter II, followed by Anna, the cousin who despised her, and finally by Ivan VI. Unfortunately for that infant emperor, after reigning for just over a year, Elizabeth was ready to take his place.

  Reports of a coup were mounting and Anna Leopoldovna,*1 Ivan VI’s mother and regent of Russia, could no longer afford to ignore them. She needed reassurance that the throne of her baby son was secure, and, accordingly, decided to confront the person at the center of the rumored uprising: her cousin Elizabeth. Drawing aside the daughter of Peter the Great during a court function, Anna Leopoldovna asked her directly if she was involved in any plot to seize the crown. Given the consequences, it was a question that would have left one less assured flustered and stammering denials, but Elizabeth never flinched.

  “[She] was not at all disconcerted,” reported General Christoph von Manstein. “She protested to the grand duchess that she had never had the thought of undertaking the least thing either against her or against her son; that she was too religious to break the oath that she had sworn; that all these reports came only from her enemies, who wanted to make her unhappy.”

  Happily assuaged of her concerns, Anna Leopoldovna joined her cousin in a tearful reconciliation, after which Elizabeth left the palace. Less than a day and a half later she would return, accompanied by armed supporters, to arrest the imperial family and proclaim herself empress.

  It was easy to underestimate Elizabeth, as Anna Leopoldovna discovered too late. As a young woman, she was often dismissed as an inconsequential coquette—opinions for which Elizabeth certainly provided plenty of fodder. Her life seemed to consist of little more than perpetual rounds of parties, hunts, and sweaty interludes with a succession of well-formed lovers. “The behavior of the Princess Elizabeth gets worse and worse each day,” reported the Duke de Liria, ambassador from Spain. “She does things without shame, things that would make even the humble blush.”

  These impressions of Elizabeth as a lightweight were at least part of the reason why she was so consistently bypassed in the succession to the throne. No one took her seriously. But there was far more to this young woman than people seemed to recognize. While she may have led her nephew Peter II from one mindless diversion to the next (with just a whiff of incest in the mix), she also encouraged his rebellion against the tyranny of Menshikov (see footnote on this page). Some sensed in Elizabeth this more complex character.

  “She has an affability and sweetness of behavior that insensibly inspires love and respect,” Lady Rondeau, wife of a British diplomat, wrote in 1735. “In public she has an unaffected gaiety and a certain air of giddiness, that seem entirely to possess her whole mind; but in private, I have heard her talk in such a strain of good sense and steady reasoning, that I am persuaded the other behavior is a feint.”

  Rather than a disguise, what Lady Rondeau actually saw was two sides of Elizabeth. And there were many more. Indeed, she was an amalgamation of many characteristics, often conflicting and more pronounced after she ascended the throne—a vivacious flirt with a mean streak; a voluptuary with a stout heart when it mattered most; a pious churchgoer prone to promiscuity; a proud Russian with a passion for everything French. All this made her so utterly inscrutable that the soothing assurances of love and loyalty she offered to Anna Leopoldovna before stealing her son’s crown were delivered convincingly by a woman who had only to draw the role of devoted cousin from her arsenal of personality traits.

  “She resembled her father in a good many ways,” wrote biographer Robert Coughlan, “not the least in her ability to meld complex, sometimes opposite, sometimes grotesque character traits into a personage both viable and forceful, and which, bewildering as it often was to others, she was able to carry off with what seemed to be perfect inner assurance.”

  Such personal resources served Elizabeth well as she navigated her way through four reigns relatively unscathed after the death of her father. Not that matters didn’t get a bit harrowing at times, particularly under the rule of her spiteful cousin, Anna. The burly, ill-visaged empress loathed Elizabeth—not the least for her beauty, which was indeed remarkable.

  “I have seldom met a woman as beautiful as Princess Elizabeth,” the Duke de Liria reported in 1728. “She has a marvelous complexion, beautiful eyes, excellent neck, and an incomparable figure. She is tall and very lively; she is a good dancer and rides a horse without any fear. She is quite intelligent, graceful, and extremely coquettish.” In short, everything Empress Anna was not.

  The jealous empress went out of her way to make her cousin’s life as miserable as possible—slashing her allowance and encouraging malicious gossip—but through tact and abject humility Elizabeth survived. And as Anna’s reign gave way to that of the infant Ivan VI, so began a shift in Elizabeth’s fortunes. It is unclear what degree of ambition Elizabeth harbored all along. “I am very glad that I did not assert my right to the throne earlier,” she later said; “I was too young and my people would never have borne with me.”*2 But as the child tsar lay nestled in his cradle, Elizabeth sensed opportunity. Resentment was running high over the pro-German policies of Anna Leopoldovna’s government, and in the midst of widespread discontent, a path to power was opening. In order to clear it entirely, though, Elizabeth needed the Imperial Guard.

  She set about the seduction with all her considerable charms. She flattered the men, stood as godmother to their children, reminisced with them about the feats of her mighty father, and, soon enough, had them in her hands. But as Elizabeth’s cause gathered momentum, she hesitated. What if her planned coup failed? Then it would be off to the nunnery with her—just like her aunt Sophia*3—and as the British envoy wryly noted, there was “not an ounce of nun’s flesh about her.” As it turned out, the unexpected confrontation by Anna Leopoldovna left her with little choice but to act, immediately.*4 Donning an armor breastplate over her dress and steeling her strength, Elizabeth made her way to her loyal Guards.

  “My friends!” she exclaimed. “Just as you served my father faithfully, in the present situation likewise show your loyalty to me!”

  “We will be glad to die for Your Majesty and for our Motherland!” the men shouted in response.

  Thus, under cover of darkness in the early morning hours of December 6, 1741, the conquering party boarded sleighs with the Winter Palace as their destination. Arriving at Admiralty Square, Elizabeth got out of her sleigh and started to march on foot the rest of the distance to the palace. But in the rush, she got tangled in her skirts and mired in the snow. Without hesitating, the grenadiers lifted her up on their shoulders and carried her along the rest of the way.

  The palace sentries were asleep in their barracks when Elizabeth came. “Wake up, my children, and listen to me!” she announced. “You know who I am, and that the crown belongs to me by right. Will you follow me?” With the sentries behind her, Elizabeth ordered the palace secured and then went to Anna Leopoldovna’s chambers, where she found the regent asleep in bed with her friend Julie Mengden. “Awake, my sister,” Elizabeth said, gently shaking her rival. Anna Leopoldovna had only to look around at the guards filling her room to know it was all over. It was a bloodless coup, but in an instant Ivan VI went from emperor to prisoner. Taking the baby up to her brea
st, Elizabeth said to him, “You are not guilty of anything, little one!” She then handed him off to a horrible fate.*5

  As baby Ivan VI and his family were escorted away, the Age of Elizabeth began. The jesters and malformed unfortunates so favored by Empress Anna gave way to gilded palaces filled with sumptuous French furniture and fine arts to reflect the glory (and good taste) of the new empress. And in these great palaces there were plenty of mirrors so she could admire herself from every angle—for if ever vanity had a name, it was Elizabeth.

  The empress loved to showcase herself at masquerades and other frequently held diversions. Sometimes she dressed as a man, which, with her figure and bearing, she carried off to great effect.*6 But when she was feeling feminine, she adorned herself with flashing diamonds and rich French gowns—never worn twice and often changed several times a day. In fact, after her death in 1762, an astonishing fifteen thousand dresses were reportedly found in her wardrobe, along with “two chests filled with silk stockings, several thousand pairs of footwear, and more than one hundred untouched lengths of splendid French fabric.”*7

  “She danced with perfection and had a particular grace in all that she did, whether dressed as a man or a woman,” recalled Elizabeth’s eventual successor, Catherine the Great. “One would have liked to be always looking at her, and only regretfully turned the gaze away, because no object could be found to replace her.”

  Elizabeth was at the center of her own universe, and she insisted those who orbited around her to reflect her magnificence. Accordingly, there were strict standards of dress and decorum. Gentlemen had to be dashing, and ladies were expected to emulate their sovereign and never wear the same dress twice. To ensure this, gowns were marked or tagged during a ball to ensure they would not be seen again. Yet while guests at the empress’s affairs had to look good, they had better not look too good. If one did inadvertently outshine the empress, the penalty often proved dear—for Elizabeth could wield a pair of scissors as ferociously as her father. The future Catherine II, who was fortunate enough on one occasion merely to be ordered to change an offending dress, recorded the plight of several other women who perilously tipped the beauty scale:

  My dear aunt was very prone to petty jealousies, not only in relation to me, but to all the other ladies as well. She had an eye particularly on those younger than herself, who were continually exposed to her outbursts. She carried this jealousy so far once she called up Anna Naryshkina … who, because of her beauty, her glorious figure, superb carriage, and exquisite taste in dress, had become the empress’s pet aversion. In the presence of the whole court, the empress took a pair of scissors and cut off the trimming of lovely ribbons under Madame Naryshkina’s neck. Another time, she cut off half the front curls of two of her ladies-in-waiting on the pretext that she did not like their style of hair dressing. Afterwards, these young ladies said privately that, perhaps in her haste, or perhaps in her fierce determination to display the depth of her feelings, Her Imperial Majesty had cut off, along with their curls, some of their skin.

  On one occasion Empress Elizabeth was having a hellishly bad hair day—so bad, in fact, that after a botched dye job, she had to have her head shaved. “Under these conditions, how could she tolerate in her wake all those women with their arrogant heads of hair?” wrote Henri Troyat. “No, the duty of good subjects was to imitate their sovereign in everything.” That came as an order: All the other women of the court had to have their locks shorn as well, replaced by ill-fitting black wigs.

  With or without hair, an endless cycle of balls, soirees, theatrical performances, and masquerades were scheduled for nearly every night of the year. And while the elite were expected to indulge in all of these entertainments with enthusiasm equal to the empress’s, most lacked her unlimited resources. Indeed, the costs to the nobility to maintain what Catherine the Great termed the “contrived coquetry” demanded by Elizabeth were so staggering that some were driven to bankruptcy.

  For most, though, it was far better to be broke than banished from the imperial presence. It was ironic, then, that the most favored of Empress Elizabeth’s subjects—the ones who shared her bed—started off as the poorest, or at least the most humble. First and foremost among them was Alexis Razumovsky, a rough, handsome Ukrainian with a marvelous singing voice. Elizabeth became smitten with this peasant shepherd when she first met him in 1731, and took him from the court choir to the highest echelons of power when she came to the throne a decade later. Unlike other royal bedmates—like Empress Anna’s Biron, or Catherine the Great’s fleet of young paramours (see Chapter 7)—Razumovsky eschewed the privileges and lofty positions Elizabeth lovingly bestowed on him. “Your Majesty may create me a field marshal if you so desire,” Razumovsky once told her, “but I defy you or anybody else to make even a tolerable captain out of me.”

  Because of his influence on the empress, and, of course, his place in her boudoir, people took to calling Razumovsky the “Night Emperor,” and it was even rumored that the couple secretly wed.*8 But, like that of her eventual successor, Catherine II, Elizabeth’s sexual appetite was voracious. So when she decided to replace Razumovsky with a new, younger lover—her page Ivan Shuvalov—the good-hearted “Night Emperor” graciously stepped aside.

  Busy as she was with her multiple amusements, in and out of the bedroom, Empress Elizabeth did manage to squeeze in a little time for statecraft when she woke up in the afternoon. Her cultural contributions vastly improved a nation that had so sorely lacked them. It was she who funded many of Russia’s most enduring architectural treasures, while the arts flourished under her patronage. The empress also took some interest in foreign policy, always keeping Russia’s best interests at heart, and she did her best to rule in the progressive spirit of her father*9—even if lacking entirely Peter the Great’s vigor. Elizabeth was, in fact, essentially a loafer.

  Important papers sat on her desk for weeks without being read or signed, which sent her ministers into fits of frustration. “If the empress would give to government affairs only one one-hundredth of the time [Austrian empress] Maria Theresa devotes to them, I should be the happiest man on earth,” remarked Alexis Bestuzhev-Ryumin, vice chancellor of foreign affairs.

  The future empress Catherine II, herself a model of industry, observed that “laziness had prevented [Elizabeth] from applying herself to the cultivation of her mind.” Instead, Catherine continued, “flatterers and gossip-mongers succeeded in surrounding this princess with such an atmosphere of pettiness that her daily occupations consisted of a tissue of caprices, religious observances, indulgence; lacking all discipline, never occupying her mind intelligently with any serious or constructive matters, she became bored during the last years of her life and the only escape open to her from depression consisted in spending as much time as possible in sleeping.”

  Ultimately, Empress Elizabeth’s only real interest in governance was sustaining her own power. Foolish or inattentive as she may have sometimes seemed, all her actions—or, often, inaction—had at their core one defining principle: she was the autocrat and nothing would be allowed to diminish that. Whether she appeared rigid or wavering, capricious or kind, Elizabeth was always weighing the effect on her sovereignty—“that was her principle of government,” wrote Anisimov, “and simple as it was, it proved sound in practice.”

  Elizabeth liked to present herself as Mother Russia, lovingly tending to her people as she would her own children. It was an image somewhat supported by her displays of mercy and the promise she made never to execute any of her subjects (though torture was another matter entirely). Still, there was another aspect to the ever enigmatic empress.

  “Through her kindness and humanness one can frequently see her pride, arrogance, sometimes even cruelty, but most of all her suspiciousness,” the French diplomat Jean-Louis Favier reported later in Elizabeth’s reign. “Being highly jealous of her great status and supreme power, she is easily frightened by all that might threaten to lessen or divide that power. On more tha
n one occasion she proved to be extremely ticklish concerning this point. To make up for it Empress Elizabeth has mastered perfectly the art of pretension. The secret corners of her heart remain inaccessible even for the oldest and most experienced courtiers, with whom she is never more cordial than when she is stripping them of rank and favor.”

  There was one thing Elizabeth feared losing almost as much as her power, and that was her looks. She did not age well—or gracefully—and every new wrinkle or sign of bloating drove her to the depths of despair. She “is still fond of wearing fancy clothes, and with each passing day she becomes even more particular and fastidious in this respect,” Favier reported. “No woman has had a more difficult time reconciling herself to the loss of youth and beauty. It often happens that, having spent a good deal of time at the dressing-table, she becomes angry with the mirror, and gives orders to remove the headpiece and other articles of clothing which she had put on, cancels the theatrical performance or dinner she had planned on attending, and locks herself in her room refusing to see anyone whoever it might be.”

  The increasingly reclusive Elizabeth lived in terror because the march of time had one inevitable conclusion, and the multiple illnesses she suffered in her later years only served to magnify her dreaded mortality. “Her health is becoming worse and worse with each passing day,” the French diplomat Lafermière wrote in May 1761, “there is little hope that she will live long. But no one more meticulously conceals this from her than she conceals it from herself. Nobody has ever feared death as much as she does. The word is never spoken in her presence. She cannot stand the very thought of death. Anything which might remind her of death has been removed.”

  Loath as she was to even think of the world without her, Elizabeth did at least provide for the succession. Two decades earlier, she imported from Germany her nephew Peter Ulrich, son of her late sister Anne of Holstein. It was an unfortunate choice of heir, and when in 1762 the fifty-three-year-old empress finally met the end she couldn’t face, an imbecile stood ready to take her place.