Peter’s daughter

Louis Caravaque painted Elizabeth Petrovna in 1750, nine years into a reign that had begun in the dark. Pearls, a pale gown, a crown behind the sitter: this is a mid-reign empress, not the woman who walked into the palace with Guards. Do not confuse the two pictures, even though they are the same person. The 1741 night made her. The 1750 canvas shows what she chose to look like once the night had become a government: splendid, Orthodox, her father’s child in jewellery rather than in a soldier’s coat.

She was born on 18 December 1709, 29 December New Style, at Kolomenskoye near Moscow, daughter of Peter I and Catherine I. She grew up beautiful, charming, intelligent and vivacious, popular especially among the Guards, and she played only a minor political role under Peter II and Anna. The last chapter closed when Anna Leopoldovna’s regency threatened her with a convent and she allowed herself to be used by a French ambassador and by courtiers who hoped to reduce German domination and reverse a pro-Austrian, anti-French line. On the night of 24–25 November 1741 she staged the coup, arrested the infant Ivan VI, his mother and their chief advisers, and was proclaimed empress. This page is the twenty years that followed, not another telling of that night.

Upon ascending the throne she abolished the cabinet-council system of her predecessors and formally reconstituted the Senate as her father had created it. The gesture has been characterised as a return to Peter’s principles. In fact the restoration of the Senate as chief governing body was only nominal. The country was really ruled by her private chancery. She also abolished some of her father’s major reforms. Rather than assume a dominant role in government as Peter had done, she occupied herself with splendid court and church activities and the purchase of stylish Western clothing. She left control of most state affairs to advisers and favourites. Under their leadership the effectiveness of government was handicapped by continual court intrigues; the country’s financial situation deteriorated; and the gentry acquired broad privileges at the expense of the peasantry. A daughter’s piety toward a father’s memory is not the same as a father’s working day.

She did, even so, encourage education and art. She founded Russia’s first university, in Moscow, in 1755, and the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, and she built the extravagant Winter Palace in the same city. Cultural policy was not a hobby beside the state. It was part of how the service class reproduced itself. Members of that class demanded institutions that would prepare the nobility for better careers and let them skip the lowest ranks. The Corps of Cadets, created in 1731 under Anna, had already begun to answer that demand; in the following decades the original corps was expanded and other special schools were added. Moscow University made general education accessible to a large stratum of rank-and-file nobility, though the lack of automatic preferment for its graduates kept it from being popular among the wealthier nobles until the end of the century. Cadet schools also acted as substitutes for local and family bonds. They were seedbeds of intellectual life. Their students spread Western literature and ideas in court circles and in the high society of the capitals.

Georg Christoph Grooth painted Elizabeth in masquerade dress in 1748: tricorn, pale silk, theatre as a way of being seen. Court costume was not a rest from politics. It was one of the jobs she preferred to chancery. Use the picture for that preference, honestly. Do not use it as a document of a particular ball, and do not use it as proof that the Senate was governing while she changed clothes.

Economics in her later years had a name: Pyotr Shuvalov, her chief adviser, had the government grant exclusive privileges and monopolies to some of the nobility, hoping to involve them in mining and manufacturing. He also began a gradual loosening of state controls over economic life. He started to dismantle internal tariffs so that local trade could develop; he strengthened the landlord’s control over all the resources on his estate; and he gave the nobles the right to distill alcohol. Those measures belong with the next article’s two Russias as much as with this reign’s court. They are recorded here because they were her government’s doing. Gentry privilege thickened in her time. Peasant cost thickened with it. The full social ledger waits one more page. The political fact is already visible: a daughter of Peter could restore a Senate on paper and still preside over a drift of wealth toward the service landlords who staffed her world.

Foreign policy was the field in which Russia’s prestige as a major European power grew. Guided by Aleksey Bestuzhev-Ryumin, who enjoyed Elizabeth’s complete confidence, the country adhered to a pro-Austrian, anti-Prussian line, annexed a portion of southern Finland after a war with Sweden in 1741–43, improved relations with Great Britain, and fought Prussia in the Seven Years’ War. She joined Austria, France, Sweden and Saxony against Frederick II, Great Britain and Hanover. Russian armies were successful in East Prussia and occupied Berlin briefly. At the end of her reign she also established a kind of permanent council for planning and coordination — the Special Conference at the Imperial Court. Victories did not make the finances honest, and they did not make the Senate more than nominal. They did make the empire a piece that other cabinets had to count.

The photograph of Smolny Cathedral is from July 1998, by James G. Howes, a later view of a famous church in the imperial capital. It is not a drawing from Elizabeth’s court, and it is not the Winter Palace she built. Use it as a reminder that church splendour was part of how she spent a reign, then return to the dated facts: a university, an academy of arts, a Winter Palace, a war.

She restored her father’s Senate on paper, built as if the capital were a theatre, and left the army in a war her nephew would abandon.

Elizabeth died on 25 December 1761, 5 January 1762 New Style, in St Petersburg, before Russia and its allies, France and Austria, could force Prussia’s collapse. She left the throne to her nephew Peter III, a great admirer of Frederick II, who withdrew Russia from the war. The empress’s death, in the successors’ account, saved the king of Prussia from total disaster. That sentence is the hinge into the next article, not a verdict on Frederick. This reign’s own shape is already complete. A daughter used the Guards and a father’s name to take the throne. She did not work as Peter had worked. She did found a university and an academy, and she did raise a Winter Palace. She did let gentry privilege run ahead of peasant relief. She did make Russia count in a European war, and then she died at the moment when dying could rewrite the map.

What she did not do is last into the six months that followed. Peter III is not a footnote to his aunt. He is a Holstein nephew with his own peace, his own manifesto for nobles, and his own talent for alienating the Church and the Guards. Elizabeth’s story stops at her deathbed and at the army she left in the field. The court that Grooth dressed for masquerade would have to decide, very quickly, whether a German-born emperor who loved Prussia was still her father’s heir in any sense that mattered. That decision took a summer. It was not her decision. She had already made the one that counted for twenty years: to be, publicly, Peter’s daughter, and to let that phrase do the work of a programme.

A private chancery is not a romantic secret. It is how an empress who preferred court and church still signed a state. Advisers quarrelled; finances deteriorated; gentry privilege ran ahead of peasant relief. None of that cancelled the university, the Academy of Arts, or the Winter Palace. None of it cancelled Bestuzhev’s line: Austria as partner, Prussia as enemy, a slice of southern Finland after 1741–43, better terms with Britain, then the Seven Years’ War. The Special Conference at the Imperial Court, late in the reign, was another try at planning and coordination — the second problem of 1725, still unsolved, still being housed in a new committee. Elizabeth did not finish that problem. She made it look Russian, and she made it look like her father’s, and she left an army in Germany for a nephew who did not want the war.

Shuvalov’s monopolies, tariff dismantling, estate rights and distilling privilege belong in the social ledger as much as in this political one. They are listed here because they were done in her name. A daughter of Peter could loosen internal customs and still not loosen serfdom. She could found a university and still let household serfs stock town houses with Western objects. The two facts do not cancel. They are the same reign seen from the chancery and from the village. The village has the next page but one. The nephew has the next.

Twenty years is long enough for a court to look stable while remaining structurally the same as 1725. The Guards still knew their trade. Favourites still stood in the way of ordinary promotion. The Senate still looked more like Peter’s than it acted. Education and art were real foundations, not decorations only, and still they served a service class that wanted to skip ranks. Sweden was beaten in the early 1740s; Prussia was fought in the 1750s; Berlin was occupied and then, after her death, given back by policy. That arc is a European power’s arc. It is also an aunt’s arc. The nephew would not continue it. She could not make him. She could only leave him the army, the palace, and a name.

Call her Peter’s daughter, then, as she wished to be called, and keep the inventory honest. The night of 1741, a nominal Senate, a private chancery, clothes and churches, a university, an academy and a Winter Palace all belong on that list. So do Shuvalov’s gifts to landlords, Bestuzhev’s map, and a Special Conference that still could not make succession dull. She died at the turn of 1761 and 1762 and left a Holstein nephew. Stop there. The six months are not her failure. They are his reign.