Terrible tsarinas

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Terrible Tsarinas during the coup d’etat just the day before, she had sworn she would end capital punishment in Russia; therefore, Her Majesty allowed herself the innocent pleasure of granting clemency at the last minute. She considered that such sadism tinged with leniency was part of her ancestral instinct, since Peter the Great had had a record of mixing cruelty and lucidity, entertainment and horror. However, each time the court chaired by Nikita Trubetskoy issued a death penalty, it had to specify the means of execution. Trubetskoy’s men were most often satisfied with decapitation by axe; but when it came to deciding Ostermann’s fate, voices in the crowd protested that such humanity would be out of place.

At the request of Vasily Dolgoruky, who had just been retrieved from exile and who was frothing with a desire for revenge, Ostermann was condemned to be tortured on the wheel before being beheaded; Munnich was to be drawn and quartered before the death-blow was delivered. Only the most humdrum criminals would be spared torture and arrive before the executioner intact.

Until the very day and hour that had been set for the execution, Elizabeth kept her compassionate intentions secret. The hour had arrived. The culprits were dragged to the scaffold before a crowd that was baying for the “traitors’” blood. Suddenly, a messenger from the palace brought word that, in her infinite kindness, Her Majesty had deigned to commute their sentences to exile in perpetuity. The spectators, at first disappointed at being deprived of such an amusing spectacle, wanted to attack the beneficiaries of this imperial favor; then, as though suddenly enlightened, they blessed their matushka who had showed herself to be a better Christian than they were by thus sparing the lives of the