Terrible tsarinas

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An Autocrat at Work and Play having the temerity to wear a rose in her hair. Moreover, her rival had been the mistress of Loewenwolde, recently exiled to Siberia.

But there were other members of the conspiracy who were even more despicable. At the top of the list Elizabeth put Mrs. Mikhail Bestuzhev, nee Golovkin, sister of a former vice-chancellor and sister-in-law of the current chancellor Alexis Bestuzhev, and widow, by her first marriage, of one of Peter the Great’s closest associates, Yaguzhinsky.

While waiting for the Russian culprits to be arrested and tried, she hoped that Austria would punish its ambassador severely. But, while King Frederick II expelled Botta as soon as he arrived in Berlin, the empress Maria Theresa, having welcomed the diplomat in Vienna, merely scolded him. Disappointed by the feeble reactions of two foreign sovereigns whom she had believed were more solid in their monarchical convictions, Elizabeth took revenge by locking up the princely couple of Brunswick and their son, young Ivan VI, in the maritime fortress of Dunamunde, on the Duna, where she could keep a clos er eye on them than in Riga.

She also considered dismissing Alexis Bestuzhev, whose family was so compromised. Then, no doubt under Razumovsky’s influence in favor of moderation, she allowed the chancellor to retain his post.

However, she needed victims on whom to vent her fury, and she chose to make Mrs. Lopukhin, her Ivan son and some of their close relatives take the brunt of it. For Natalya Lopukhin, a slap in the face was no longer punishment enough; this time, she was in for horrible torture - and her accomplices as well. Under the knout, the clippers and the branding iron, Lopukhin, her son Ivan, and Mrs. Bestuzhev, writhing in pain, repeated the calumnies that they had heard from the mouth of Botta. In spite of the lack of material evidence, a hastily convened emergency court (made up of several members of the Senate and three representatives of the