Terrible tsarinas

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Terrible Tsarinas honeymoon with France, but her insomnia and ill-health no longer left her any respite. The repeated bouts of illness made her fear that she might even lose her wits before winning a decisive victory in the war in which she had been involved, against her wishes, by the game of alliances. And here was Frederick II, taking his enemies by surprise and opening hostilities by invading Saxony without notice.1 The first engagements were to his advantage. Dresden was taken by storm, the Austrians were defeated in Prague, and the Saxons in Pirna. Forced to stand by her Austrian allies, Elizabeth was resigned to intervening. At her command, General Apraxin, appointed Field Marshal, left St. Petersburg and massed his troops in Riga. When Louis XV dispatched the Marquis de l’Hopital to exhort the tsarina to take action, she entrusted to Mikhail Bestuzhev (the chancellor’s conveniently Francophile brother) the task of signing Russia to the treaty of Versailles. This was done on December 31, 1756.

Secretly embarrassed by taking this ostentatious stand, Elizabeth still hoped that the spreading conflict would not set ablaze all of Europe. She was also afraid that Louis XV might be using her in order to secure a rapprochement, no longer provisional but permanent, with Austria. As if to prove her right, in May 1757 Louis XV proclaimed the need to confirm his commitment to Maria Theresa, in a new alliance intended to bar Prussia from possibly compromising the peace in Europe. Elizabeth surmised that, under this generous pretext, the king was dissimulating a more subtle intention. While declaring solidarity with Russia, he most particularly wanted to ensure that Russia would not seek to expand at the expense of its two neighbors, Poland and Sweden, who were traditional allies of France. As long as Louis XV was playing this double game, he could not play squarely with Elizabeth. She would have to keep stringing along the envoys from Versailles. She wondered whether Alexis Bestuzhev, hob«206»

Her Majesty and Their Imperial Highnesses bled by his British sympathies, was still qualified to defend the interests of the country. The chancellor, steadfastly proclaiming his patriotism and integrity, would prefer to see an AngloPrussian coalition triumph over an Austro-French coalition (thanks in particular to Russia’s inaction); but meanwhile, the empress’s lover Ivan Shuvalov had never disguised his penchant for France, its literature, its fashions and, far more important, its political interests. Elizabeth was caught as never before in the struggle between her favorite and her chancellor, the inclinations of her heart (which leaned toward Versailles) and the objections of her mind, which stumbled over her obligations to Berlin.

Critical decisions had to be made, but the daily worries and the recrudescence of her illness undermined her physical stamina a little more every day. She sometimes had hallucinations; she moved to a different bed-chamber because she felt threatened by a faceless enemy; she implored the icons to come to her aid; and once, when she blacked out, she had considerable difficulty pulling together her thoughts again after she regained consciousnes s.

Her fatigue was so profound that she would have liked to give up; but circumstances obliged her to go on.

She knew that behind her back they were already murmuring about the question of her successor. If she were suddenly to die the next day, who would receive the crown? According to tradition, her successor could be only her nephew, Peter. But she rankled at the idea that Russia should go to pieces in the hands of that half-mad, malicious maniac, who paraded around from morning to night in a Holstein uniform. It would be better to declare him incompetent, right now, and to designate the grand duke’s two-year-old son, Paul Petrovich, as sole heir. However, that would mean offering the role of regent to Catherine, whom Elizabeth hated as much for her good looks as for her youth, intelligence and many intrigues. Moreover, the grand duchess had lately