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
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Elizabeth’s Triumph “infamous perpetrators.” Impressed by her clemency, some ventured to suggest that this exceptional restraint was due to the deeply feminine nature of Her Majesty and that a tsar, in her place, would have shown far greater rigor in expressing his wrath.
They even proposed that Russia would be better off in the future if it were always ruled by a woman. In their opinion the people, in their misery, were more in need of a mother than a father.
While everyone was celebrating the fact that these big political criminals had finally been brought down, and praising the tsarina for her heart of gold, Munnich was shipped off to end his days in Pelym, a Siberian village 3000 versts from St. Petersburg;
Loewenwolde died in Solikamsk, Ostermann in Berezov, in the Tobolsk region, and Golovkin - well, exactly where he was to be sent was not clearly indicated on the passenger waybill, so he was simply ditched in some Siberian village along the way. The members of the Brunswick family, with the ex-regent Anna Leopoldovna at their head, received better treatment because of their high birth; they were consigned to Riga, before being dispatched to Kholmogory, in the far north.
Having eliminated her adversaries, Elizabeth now had to hurry to replace those experienced men whose removal had left key positions vacant. Lestocq and Vorontsov were the chief recruiters. They invited Alexis Petrovich Bestuzhev to succeed Ostermann, and his brother, Mikhail Bestuzhev, replaced Loewenwolde as Master of the Royal Hunt. Among the military men, the most brilliant promotion was granted to Dolgoruky, newly returned from exile. Even subordinates (the most conscientious of them) did well during this period when reparations were being made for the injustices of the preceding reign. The new benefici«131»
Terrible Tsarinas aries of imperial largesse shared the spoils taken from those who had lost. Commenting on this waltz, Mardefeld wrote to Frederick II: “Count Loewenwolde’s clothing, underwear, hose and linens were distributed among the empress’s chamberlains, who were naked as a hand. Of the four most recently named gentlemen of the chamber, two had been lackeys and a third had served as stableman.”3 As for the leading protagonists, Elizabeth rewarded them far more than they could have hoped. Lestocq became a count, private counselor to Her Majesty, premier doctor to the court, and director of “the college of medicine” with a 7,000-ruble annual retainer for life. Mikhail Vorontsov, Alexander Shuvalov and Alexis Razumovsky awoke the next day (and a beautiful morning it was) as grand chamberlains and knights of St. Andrew. At the same time, the entire company of grenadiers of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, which had contributed to the tsarina’s success on November 25, 1741, was converted into a company of personal bodyguards for Her Majesty under the Germanic name of the LeibKompania. Every man and every officer of this elite unit was promoted one level; their uniforms were adorned with an escutcheon bearing the device “Fidelity and Zeal.” Some were even brought into the nobility, with hereditary titles, together with gifts of lands and up to 2,000 rubles. Alexis Razumovsky and Mikhail Vorontsov, who had no military knowledge whatsoever, were named Lieutenant Generals, with concomitant rewards of money and domains.
Despite all this repeated generosity, the leaders of the coup d’etat were always asking for more. Far from appeasing them, the tsarina’s prodigality turned their heads. They thought she “owed them everything” because they had “given their all.” Their worship for the matushka devolved into familiarity, even impertinence.
Within Elizabeth’s entourage, the men of the Leib-Kompania were
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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,
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Terrible Tsarinas too - such a thoughtful, disciplined, industrious nation, so rich in military and commercial professionals, so well-endowed with princes and princesses in need of marriage partners! Could Elizabeth fish, according to her needs, in both of these ponds? Should she really refrain from employing experienced men, simply in order to Russianize everything? Her dream would be to reconcile the local customs with new ideas from abroad, to enrich the ways of the Russophiles, so much in love with their past, by bringing in contributions from the West, to create a German or French Russia without betraying the traditions of the fatherland.
While pondering which way to turn, under pressure from the Marquis de La Chetardie (pleading in favor of France), Mardefeld (promoting Germany’s interests), and Bestuzhev (a resolute Russian traditionalist), she had to decide on domestic policies of every sort, questions that seemed to her to be of great importance as well. She therefore reorganized the old Senate so that it would wield the legislature and the judiciary powers from that point forward; she replaced the dysfunctional Cabinet with Her Majesty’s private Chancellery, and she increased various
