Terrible tsarinas

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Elizabeth’s Triumph called the “creative grenadiers,” since they had “created” the new sovereign, or “Her Majesty’s big kids,” since she treated them with an almost maternal indulgence. Aggravated by the insolence of these low class parvenus, Mardefeld complained in a dispatch to King Frederick II of Prussia, “They [the empress’s grenadiers] refuse to get out of the court, they are well-entrenched,… they walk in the galleries where Her Majesty holds her court, they mingle with people of the first quality,… they stuff their faces at the same table where the empress sits, and she is so nice to them that she has gone as far as to sign an order to print the image of a grenadier on the back of the new rubles.”4 In a report dating from the same month and year Edward Finch, the English ambassador, wrote that the bodyguards assigned to the palace had deserted their stations one fine day in order to protest the disciplinary action inflicted upon one of them by their superior officer, the Prince of Hesse-Homburg; Her Majesty was indignant that anyone should have dared to punish her “children” without asking her authorization and she embraced the victims of such iniquity.

She always tried to give preference to Russians when making appointments to sensitive positions, but she was often forced to call upon foreigners to fulfill functions requiring a minimum of competence, despite her good intentions. Thus, given the lack of qualified personnel, one after another of Munnich’s former victims reappeared in St. Petersburg to populate the ministries and chancelleries. Devier and Brevern, back in the saddle, brought in other Germans including Siewers and Fluck.

To justify these inevitable offenses to Slavic nationalism, Elizabeth cited her model Peter the Great who, in his own words, had wanted to “open a window on Europe.” France was, certainly, at the center of this ideal Europe, with its light take on life, its fine culture and philosophical irony; but there was Germany,