Secret Lives of the Tsars (11 page)

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
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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 than 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.

*
1
Anna Leopoldovna was the daughter of Empress Anna’s older sister, Catherine of Mecklenburg (see
family tree
). To help differentiate between the late empress and her niece, Ivan VI’s mother is referred to in this chapter with her patronymic, Leopoldovna.

*
2
At the time of Peter II’s death and the accession of Empress Anna, Elizabeth appeared unready to seek power for herself. “She was having a good time in the country at the time,” a French observer reported, “and even those who were making an effort on her behalf were unable, in view of the circumstances, to get her to come to Moscow.”

*
3
See
Chapter 1
.

^*4
There had been rumors that Anna Leopoldovna planned to consign Elizabeth to a convent. In urging her to act, the future empress’s friend and doctor, Jean Armand de L’Estocq, drew a picture for her on a card. On one side was a monarch seated on her throne; on the other was a nun in full habit.

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5
The ex-emperor and his family were sent to a series of increasingly isolated prisons until 1744, when four-year-old Ivan was cruelly snatched away. He was never to see his parents or siblings again, although, for a period, he was kept in a gloomy cell right next to them—entirely unaware that they were on the other side of the thick wall that separated them. The extreme isolation to which Ivan was subjected over the years, being deprived of every childhood joy and mercilessly tormented by his guards, gradually made itself manifest in the boy, who began to show signs of mental damage—particularly after he was moved at age fifteen to the notorious island prison of Shlisselburg. As one guard reported, “his articulation was confused to such a degree that even those who constantly saw and heard him could understand him [only] with difficulty.… His mental abilities were disrupted, he had not the slightest memory, no ideas of any kind, neither of joy nor of sorrow, and no special inclinations.” Through three reigns Ivan lived in this dank prison. Peter III even came to visit him shortly before he was deposed. But it was under Catherine the Great that he finally perished. The empress had ordered that if any attempt were ever made to free the royal prisoner—referred to as “the nameless one”—he should be killed immediately. And when one misguided officer tried to do just that in 1764, Ivan VI met his end.

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6
The empress took particular pleasure in occasionally ordering men to dress as women and women as men. Unlike her, though, few could carry off these gender-bending directives without looking absolutely ridiculous.

^*7
This report of the empress’s vast wardrobe is attributed to Jacob von Staehlin, tutor to Elizabeth’s successor, Peter III.

*
8
No definitive evidence of this supposed marriage has ever been produced. Elizabeth was earlier engaged to Prince Karl Augustus of Holstein-Gottorp, who happened to be Catherine the Great’s maternal uncle, but he died soon after.

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9
And this spirit was not always a benevolent one. As biographer Evgenii V. Anisimov noted, “This charming beauty, who had always demonstrated in her decrees a natural maternal magnanimity, unwaveringly sent a pregnant woman to the torture chamber and wrote a directive in this regard to the head of the Secret Chancery in the same curt, severe, and cruelly businesslike tones that her father had once used when writing to his chief of political investigations.”