Terrible Tsarinas: Five Russian Women in Power (15 page)

To avoid any confusion, she dispatched Prince Nikita Trubetskoy to bring the various embassies the official news of Her Majesty Elizabeth I’s accession to the throne; most of the foreign ministers had already been apprised of this event. No doubt the most pleased was His Excellency Jacques-Joachim Trotti de La Chétardie, who had made this cause his personal mission. Elizabeth’s triumph was to some extent his triumph, and he hoped to be suitably rewarded both by the principal interested party and by the French government.

He went by barouche to the Winter Palace to greet the new tsarina; along the way, the grenadiers who had taken part in the heroic tumult of the day before, and who were still wandering about in the streets, recognized him as he went by and gave him a formal escort, calling him
batiushka frantsuz
(“our French papa”) and “Guardian of Peter the Great’s daughter.” La Chétardie was moved to tears by this touching warmth. Seeing that the Russians had more heart than the French, and not wishing to let them down, he invited all these brave military men to come and drink to the health of France and Russia on the embassy grounds. However, when he related this little anecdote to his minister, Amelot de Chailloux, the latter reproached him sharply: “These compliments from the grenadiers, which you unfortunately could not avoid, have exposed the role you played in the revolution,”1 he wrote to him on January 15, 1741.

In the meanwhile, Elizabeth had ordered a Te Deum and a special religious service to underscore the troops’ oath of loyalty. She also took care to publish a proclamation justifying her accession “under the terms of our legitimate right and because of our blood proximity to our dear father and our dear mother, the Emperor Peter the Great and the Empress Catherine Alexeyevna; and also in accordance with the unanimous and so humble request of those who have been faithful to us.”2 The reprisals announced in tandem with all this celebration were severe. The secondary players in the counter-conspiracy joined the principal “instigators” (Münnich, Loewenwolde, Ostermann and Golovkin) in the cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress.

Prince Nikita Trubetskoy, charged with judging the culprits, wasted no time with pointless formalities. Magistrates were named on the spur of the moment to assist him in his deliberations, and all their sentences were final. A large crowd of spectators, eager to applaud the misfortunes of others, followed the sessions hour by hour. There were many foreigners among the accused, which delighted “the good Russians.” Some of these vengeful spirits took particular pleasure in stating, with a laugh, that in this it was Russia suing Germany. Elizabeth is said to have sat behind a curtain, listening to every word of the proceedings. In any case, the verdicts were largely (or entirely) dictated by her.

Most of the defendants were sentenced to death. Of course, during the coup d’état just the day before, she had sworn she would end capital punishment in Russia; therefore, Her Majesty allowed herself the innocent pleasure of granting clemency at the last minute. She considered that such sadism tinged with leniency was part of her ancestral instinct, since Peter the Great had had a record of mixing cruelty and lucidity, entertainment and horror. However, each time the court chaired by Nikita Trubetskoy issued a death penalty, it had to specify the means of execution. Trubetskoy’s men were most often satisfied with decapitation by axe; but when it came to deciding Ostermann’s fate, voices in the crowd protested that such humanity would be out of place.

At the request of Vasily Dolgoruky, who had just been retrieved from exile and who was frothing with a desire for revenge, Ostermann was condemned to be tortured on the wheel before being beheaded; Münnich was to be drawn and quartered before the death-blow was delivered. Only the most humdrum criminals would be spared torture and arrive before the executioner intact.

Until the very day and hour that had been set for the execution, Elizabeth kept her compassionate intentions secret. The hour had arrived. The culprits were dragged to the scaffold before a crowd that was baying for the “traitors’” blood. Suddenly, a messenger from the palace brought word that, in her infinite kindness, Her Majesty had deigned to commute their sentences to exile in perpetuity. The spectators, at first disappointed at being deprived of such an amusing spectacle, wanted to attack the beneficiaries of this imperial favor; then, as though suddenly enlightened, they blessed their
matushka
who had showed herself to be a better Christian than they were by thus sparing the lives of the “infamous perpetrators.” Impressed by her clemency, some ventured to suggest that this exceptional restraint was due to the deeply feminine nature of Her Majesty and that a tsar, in her place, would have shown far greater rigor in expressing his wrath. They even proposed that Russia would be better off in the future if it were always ruled by a woman. In their opinion the people, in their misery, were more in need of a mother than a father.

While everyone was celebrating the fact that these big political criminals had finally been brought down, and praising the tsarina for her heart of gold, Münnich was shipped off to end his days in Pelym, a Siberian village 3000 versts from St. Petersburg; Loewenwolde died in Solikamsk, Ostermann in Berezov, in the Tobolsk region, and Golovkin - well, exactly where he was to be sent was not clearly indicated on the passenger waybill, so he was simply ditched in some Siberian village along the way. The members of the Brunswick family, with the ex-regent Anna Leopoldovna at their head, received better treatment because of their high birth; they were consigned to Riga, before being dispatched to Kholmogory, in the far north.

Having eliminated her adversaries, Elizabeth now had to hurry to replace those experienced men whose removal had left key positions vacant. Lestocq and Vorontsov were the chief recruiters. They invited Alexis Petrovich Bestuzhev to succeed Ostermann, and his brother, Mikhail Bestuzhev, replaced Loewenwolde as Master of the Royal Hunt. Among the military men, the most brilliant promotion was granted to Dolgoruky, newly returned from exile. Even subordinates (the most conscientious of them) did well during this period when reparations were being made for the injustices of the preceding reign. The new beneficiaries of imperial largesse shared the spoils taken from those who had lost. Commenting on this waltz, Mardefeld wrote to Frederick II: “Count Loewenwolde’s clothing, underwear, hose and linens were distributed among the empress’s chamberlains, who were naked as a hand. Of the four most recently named gentlemen of the chamber, two had been lackeys and a third had served as stableman.”3 As for the leading protagonists, Elizabeth rewarded them far more than they could have hoped. Lestocq became a count, private counselor to Her Majesty, premier doctor to the court, and director of “the college of medicine” with a 7,000-ruble annual retainer for life. Mikhail Vorontsov, Alexander Shuvalov and Alexis Razumovsky awoke the next day (and a beautiful morning it was) as grand chamberlains and knights of St. Andrew. At the same time, the entire company of grenadiers of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, which had contributed to the tsarina’s success on November 25, 1741, was converted into a company of personal bodyguards for Her Majesty under the Germanic name of the
Leib-Kompania
. Every man and every officer of this elite unit was promoted one level; their uniforms were adorned with an escutcheon bearing the device “Fidelity and Zeal.” Some were even brought into the nobility, with hereditary titles, together with gifts of lands and up to 2,000 rubles. Alexis Razumovsky and Mikhail Vorontsov, who had no military knowledge whatsoever, were named Lieutenant Generals, with concomitant rewards of money and domains.

Despite all this repeated generosity, the leaders of the coup d’état were always asking for more. Far from appeasing them, the tsarina’s prodigality turned their heads. They thought she “owed them everything” because they had “given their all.” Their worship for the
matushka
devolved into familiarity, even impertinence.

Within Elizabeth’s entourage, the men of the
Leib-Kompania
were called the “creative grenadiers,” since they had “created” the new sovereign, or “Her Majesty’s big kids,” since she treated them with an almost maternal indulgence. Aggravated by the insolence of these low class parvenus, Mardefeld complained in a dispatch to King Frederick II of Prussia, “They [the empress’s grenadiers] refuse to get out of the court, they are well-entrenched,… they walk in the galleries where Her Majesty holds her court, they mingle with people of the first quality,… they stuff their faces at the same table where the empress sits, and she is so nice to them that she has gone as far as to sign an order to print the image of a grenadier on the back of the new rubles.”4 In a report dating from the same month and year Edward Finch, the English ambassador, wrote that the bodyguards assigned to the palace had deserted their stations one fine day in order to protest the disciplinary action inflicted upon one of them by their superior officer, the Prince of Hesse-Homburg; Her Majesty was indignant that anyone should have dared to punish her “children” without asking her authorization and she embraced the victims of such iniquity.

She always tried to give preference to Russians when making appointments to sensitive positions, but she was often forced to call upon foreigners to fulfill functions requiring a minimum of competence, despite her good intentions. Thus, given the lack of qualified personnel, one after another of Münnich’s former victims reappeared in St. Petersburg to populate the ministries and chancelleries. Devier and Brevern, back in the saddle, brought in other Germans including Siewers and Flück.

To justify these inevitable offenses to Slavic nationalism, Elizabeth cited her model Peter the Great who, in his own words, had wanted to “open a window on Europe.” France was, certainly, at the center of this ideal Europe, with its light take on life, its fine culture and philosophical irony; but there was Germany, too - such a thoughtful, disciplined, industrious nation, so rich in military and commercial professionals, so well-endowed with princes and princesses in need of marriage partners! Could Elizabeth fish, according to her needs, in both of these ponds? Should she really refrain from employing experienced men, simply in order to Russianize everything? Her dream would be to reconcile the local customs with new ideas from abroad, to enrich the ways of the Russophiles, so much in love with their past, by bringing in contributions from the West, to create a German or French Russia without betraying the traditions of the fatherland.

While pondering which way to turn, under pressure from the Marquis de La Chétardie (pleading in favor of France), Mardefeld (promoting Germany’s interests), and Bestuzhev (a resolute Russian traditionalist), she had to decide on domestic policies of every sort, questions that seemed to her to be of great importance as well. She therefore reorganized the old Senate so that it would wield the legislature and the judiciary powers from that point forward; she replaced the dysfunctional Cabinet with Her Majesty’s private Chancellery, and she increased various fines; she raised the octroi taxes and encouraged settlement by foreign colonists to populate the uninhabited regions of southern Russia. But these strictly administrative measures did not ease her main worry. How could she ensure the future of the dynasty? What would become of the country if, for one reason or another, she had to “pass on the torch”?

Since she did not have a child of her own, she was deeply afraid that after she died - or as a result of some conspiracy - the young ex-tsar Ivan VI, now dethroned, would succeed her. For the moment, the baby and his parents were safely tucked away in Riga. But they were liable to come back into favor someday, through one of those political upheavals that had become so common in Russia. To preclude any such possibility, Elizabeth could only think of one possible course of action: she would have to name an heir now, and have him be accepted. However, the candidates were few and the choice seemed apparent: the only appropriate recipient of this supreme burden was the son of her deceased sister Anna Petrovna, the young prince Charles Peter Ulrich of Holstein-Gottorp.

The boy’s father, Charles Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp, had died in 1739; now the orphan, who was about 14 years old, had been placed under the guardianship of his uncle, Adolf Frederick of Holstein, Bishop of Lübeck. After making initial inquiries about the child’s fate, Elizabeth had never really dealt with him. She suddenly felt obliged to make a sacrifice to the family spirit and to make up for lost time. As for the uncle-bishop, there could be no problem. But what would she say to the Russians? Oh well, this would hardly be the first time that a sovereign who was three-fourths a foreigner would be offered for their veneration! As soon as Elizabeth set her mind to this plan, committing the entire country to support her, secret negotiations began between Russia and Germany.

Despite the usual precautions, rumors of these talks quickly spread through the foreign ministries all across Europe. La Chétardie panicked and hunted around desperately for a way to head off this new Germanic invasion. Surmising that certain portions of the public would be hostile to her plan, Elizabeth decided to burn her bridges: without informing Bestuzhev or the Senate, she dispatched Baron Nicholas Korf to Kiel in order to bring back the “heir to the crown.” She did not even bother to make inquiries beforehand to find out how the youth had turned out. As the son of her beloved sister, he would have to have inherited the most delightful personality and visual characteristics. She looked forward to this meeting with all the emotion of an expectant mother, impatient to lay eyes on the son that Heaven was about to present to her after a long gestation.

Baron Korf conducted his mission with such discretion that Peter Ulrich’s arrival in St. Petersburg on February 5, 1742, almost went unnoticed by the hangers-on at the imperial Court. Seeing her nephew for the first time, Elizabeth, who had been prepared to feel a lightning bolt of maternal admiration, froze in consternation. In place of the charming adolescent Adonis that she had expected, here stood a skinny, scowling, runty fool who only spoke German, could not put two thoughts together, had a habit of laughing in an insinuating way and walked about with the look of a cornered fox. Was this the gift that she was about to spring upon an unsuspecting Russia?