ELIZABETH [PETROVNA] (1709-1762), EMPRESS OF RUSSIA, the daughter of Peter the Great and Martha Skavron skaya, born at Kolomenskoye, near Moscow, on Dec. 18, 1709. From her earliest years she delighted every one by her extra ordinary beauty and vivacity, and she developed a keen political and diplomatic sense in spite of the deficiencies of her early edu cation. Various proposals for her marriage failed, so that on the death of her mother (May 1727) and the departure to Holstein of her sister Anne, her only remaining near relation, the princess found herself at the age of 18 practically her own mistress. So long as Menshikov remained in power, she was treated with liber ality and distinction by the Government of Peter II., but the Dolgorukis, who supplanted Menshikov and hated the memory of Peter the Great, practically banished Peter's daughter from court. While still in her teens Elizabeth made a lover of Alexius Shubin, a sergeant in the Semenovsky Guards, and after his banish ment to Siberia, minus his tongue, by order of the empress Anne, consoled herself with a young Cossack, Alexius Razumovski, whom she is said actually to have married. During the reign of her cousin Anne (173o-4o), Elizabeth effaced herself as much as possible ; but under the regency of Anna Leopoldovna the course of events drove her to overthrow the existing government. The French ambassador, La Chetardie, who was plotting to destroy the Austrian influence then dominant at the Russian court, seems to have urged her on, and lent her a small sum of money, but he took no part in the coup when it came. Elizabeth acted because she had reason to fear imprisonment in a convent for life. On the night of Dec. 6-7, 1741, she assembled her personal friends and members of her household, drove to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Guards, enlisted their sympathies by a stirring speech, and led them to the Winter Palace. She seized the regent and her children in their beds, and summoned all the notables, civil and ecclesiastical, to her presence. Elizabeth had secured the ministers on her way to the Winter Palace, and the revolution was accomplished without further ado. Fortunately, Elizabeth Pe trovna, with all her shortcomings, had inherited some of her father's genius for government. Her usually keen judgment and her diplomatic tact again and again recall Peter the Great. What in her sometimes seemed irresolution and procrastination, was, most often, a wise suspense of judgment.
After abolishing the cabinet council system in favour during the rule of the two Annes, and reconstituting the senate as it had been under Peter the Great,—with the chiefs of the departments of State, all of them now Russians again, as ex-officio members under the presidency of the sovereign—the first care of the new empress was to compose her quarrel with Sweden. On Jan. 23, direct negotiations between the two powers were opened at Abo, and on Aug. 7, 1743, Sweden ceded to Russia all the southern part of Finland east of the river Kymmene, including the f or tresses of Villmanstrand and Fredrikshamn. Much of this success in foreign policy was due to the new vice chancellor, Alexius Bestuzhev-Ryumin (q.v.). He represented the anti-Franco-Prus sian portion of the council, and his object was to bring about an Anglo-Austro-Russian alliance which, at that time, was undoubt edly Russia's proper system. Hence the reiterated attempts of Frederick the Great and Louis XV. to get rid of Bestuzhev, which made the Russian court during the earlier years of Elizabeth's reign the centre of a tangle of intrigue (see BESTUZHEV-RYUMIN, ALExins.) By the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (Oct. 18, 1748) Bestuzhev had extricated his country from the Swedish imbroglio; he had reconciled his imperial mistress with the courts of Vienna and London, her natural allies ; enabled Russia to assert herself effectually in Poland, Turkey and Sweden, and isolated the king of Prussia by environing him with hostile alliances. All this would have been impossible but for the steady support of Eliza beth, who trusted him implicitly, despite the insinuations of the chancellor's innumerable enemies, most of whom were her personal friends.
The great event of Elizabeth's later years was the Seven Years' War. Elizabeth rightly regarded the treaty of Westminster (Jan. 16, 1756, whereby Great Britain and Prussia agreed to unite their forces to oppose the entry into, or the passage through, Germany of the troops of every foreign power) as utterly subversive of the previous conventions between Great Britain and Russia. Fear of the king of Prussia, who was "to be reduced within proper limits," so that "he might be no longer a danger to the empire," induced Elizabeth to accede to the treaty of Versailles, in other words the Franco-Austrian league against Prussia, and on May the Russian army, 85,000 strong, advanced against Konigsberg. Neither the serious illness of the empress, which began with a fainting-fit at Tsarskoe Selo (Sept. 19, 1757), nor the fall of Bes tuzhev (Feb. 21, 1758), nor the cabals and intrigues of the various foreign powers at St. Petersburg, interfered with the progress of the war, and the crushing defeat of Kunersdorf (Aug. 12, 1759) at last brought Frederick to the verge of ruin. From the end of to the end of 1761, the unshakable firmness of the Russian empress was the one constraining political force which held to gether the heterogeneous, incessantly jarring elements of the anti Prussian combination.
On May 21, 176o, a fresh convention was signed between Russia and Austria, a secret clause of which, never communicated to the court of Versailles, guaranteed East Prussia to Russia, as an indemnity for war expenses. The failure of the campaign of 176o, so far as Russia and France were concerned, induced the court of Versailles to present (Jan. 22, 1761) to the court of St. Peters burg a despatch to the effect that the king of France desired peace. The Austrian ambassador, Esterhazy, presented a similar despatch. The Russian empress's reply was delivered on Feb. 12. Elizabeth declined any pacific overtures until the original object of the league had been accomplished. Simultaneously, Elizabeth proposed in a secret letter to Louis XV. a new treaty of closer alliance with out the knowledge of Austria. Elizabeth's object seems to have been to reconcile France and Great Britain, in return for which service France was to throw all her forces into the German war. This project, which lacked neither ability nor audacity, foundered upon Louis XV.'s jealousy of Russian influence in eastern Europe and his fear of offending the Porte. It was finally arranged by the allies that their envoys at Paris should fix the date for a peace congress, and that, in the meantime, the war against Prussia should be vigorously prosecuted. Frederick acted on the defensive with consummate skill, but his situation had become desperate, when his difficulties were dispersed by the death of the Russian empress ( Jan. 5, 1762), which he described in a letter to Prince Frederick of Brunswick as a great event.
See Robert Nisbet Bain, The Daughter of Peter the Great (1899) Sergyei Solovev, History of Russia (Rus.), vols. xx.—xxii. (St. Peters burg, 1857-77) ; Politische Correspondenz Friedrichs des Grossen, vols. i.—xxi. (1879, etc.) ; Colonel Masslowski, Der siebenjdhrige Krieg each russischer Darstellung (1888-93) ; Kazinsierz Waliszewski, La Derniere des Romanov (1902).