This article needs additional citations for verification. Yelisaveta or Elizaveta, was the Empress of Russia from 1741 until her russian brides st petersburg. Her domestic policies allowed the nobles to gain dominance in local government while shortening their terms of service to the state.
The portrait of Elizabeth as Venus, painted in the 1710s for the Grand Peterhof Palace. Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, by his second wife, Catherine I. As a child, Elizabeth was the particular favorite of her father. She resembled him both physically and temperamentally.
She was a bright girl, if not brilliant, but received only a desultory formal education. Even though he adored his daughter, Peter did not devote time or attention to her education. Peter was enamored of western Europe, and much of his fame rests on his efforts to westernize Russia. A corollary to this proclivity was his desire to see his children married into the royal houses of Europe, something which his predecessors had actually avoided. In 1724, Peter betrothed his daughters to two young princes, first cousins to each other, who hailed from the tiny north German principality of Holstein-Gottorp, and whose family was undergoing a period of political and economic stress. Peter II was on the throne.
Her marriage prospects immediately dried up. Elizabeth’s response to the lack of marriage prospects was to take Alexis Shubin, a handsome sergeant in the Semyonovsky Guards regiment, as her lover. Elizabeth was gathering support in the background. After the death of Empress Anna, the regency of Anna Leopoldovna for the infant Ivan VI was marked by high taxes and economic problems. Elizabeth often visited the elite Guards regiments, marking special events with the officers, and acting as godmother to their children. The guards repaid her kindness when, on the night of 25 November 1741, Elizabeth seized power with the help of the Preobrazhensky Regiment.
A conspiracy in the early days of her rule threatened her source of power. When Count Ivan Lopukhin complained of Empress Elizabeth in a tavern, he was overheard and tortured for information. He implicated his mother, Countess Natalia Lopukhina, as well as himself and others, in a plot to reinstate Ivan VI as tsar. They were all sentenced to death, but Elizabeth pardoned a few of the women. At her coronation, Elizabeth crowned herself, which would become standard for all emperors of Russia until 1896.
Although at first she had thought to allow the young tsar and his mother to leave Russia, she imprisoned them later in a Baltic fortress, clearly having changed her mind. She worried that they would stir up trouble for her in other parts of Europe, and she had no wish to risk that. At the age of thirty-three, with relatively little political experience, Elizabeth found herself at the head of a great empire at one of the most critical periods of its existence. Her proclamation as Empress Elizabeth I explained that the preceding reigns had led Russia to ruin: “The Russian people have been groaning under the enemies of the Christian faith, but she has delivered them from the degrading foreign oppression. Russia had been under the domination of German advisers, and Elizabeth exiled the most unpopular of them, including Heinrich Ostermann, Burkhard von Munnich and Carl Gustav Lowenwolde. Her usually keen judgment and her diplomatic tact again and again recalled Peter the Great.
The substantial changes made by Elizabeth’s father, Peter the Great, had not exercised a really formative influence on the intellectual attitudes of the ruling classes as a whole. Elizabeth made considerable impact and laid the groundwork for its completion by her eventual successor, Catherine II. Her first task after this was to address the war with Sweden. This triumphant result can be credited to the diplomatic ability of the new vice chancellor, Aleksey Bestuzhev-Ryumin. His policies would have been impossible without her support. Elizabeth had wisely placed Bestuzhev at the head of foreign affairs immediately after her accession.
Ultimately, the minister’s strong support from Elizabeth prevailed. However, on 14 February 1758, Bestuzhev was removed from office. The future Catherine II recorded, “He was relieved of all his decorations and rank, without a soul being able to reveal for what crimes or transgressions the first gentleman of the Empire was so despoiled, and sent back to his house as a prisoner. No specific crime was ever pinned on Bestuzhev. The great event of Elizabeth’s later years was the Seven Years’ War. Saint Petersburg did not interfere with the progress of the war. From the end of 1759 to the end of 1761, the firmness of the Russian Empress was the one constraining political force that held together the heterogeneous, incessantly jarring elements of the anti-Prussian combination.
From the Russian point of view, her greatness as a stateswoman consists in her steady appreciation of Russian interests, and her determination to promote them at all hazards. Frederick himself was quite aware of his danger. I’m at the end of my resources,” he wrote at the beginning of 1760. The continuance of this war means for me utter ruin.
