For eleven years, from the age of twenty to the age of thirty-one, Elizabeth lived under the rule of Empress Anne. At first, she was expected to attend court on formal occasions and sit demurely near the empress. Elizabeth did her best, but nothing could prevent her outshining her cousin. Not only was she the only living child of Peter the Great, she was also the undisputed belle of the imperial court. Eventually, she wearied of the strain of living at court and retreated to a country estate, where she resumed her independent life, and her behavior and morals were free of court surveillance. A magnificent horsewoman, she often rode dressed as a man; her purpose was to display her legs, which were shapely and could best be admired in male breeches. Elizabeth loved the Russian countryside, with its primeval forests and wide meadowlands. She joined in the lives of the peasants and shared their amusements: dancing and singing, mushrooming in summer, tobogganing and skating in winter, sitting before a fire, eating roasted nuts and butter cakes.
Because she was an unmarried young woman, her private life subject to no rules or authority, she became a subject of court gossip—and, inevitably, of the empress’s attention. Anne was offended by Elizabeth’s frivolity, jealous of her appeal to men, nervous about her popularity, and uncertain of her loyalty. At one point, Anne was so incensed by tales of Elizabeth’s behavior that she threatened to shut her up in a convent. For her part, Elizabeth understood that her status was changing when her yearly income was cut, then cut again. Anne’s hostility, veiled at first, turned to personal meanness. When Elizabeth was infatuated with a young sergeant named Alexis Shubin, the empress banished the young man to Kamchatka, on the Pacific, five thousand miles away. Elizabeth herself was commanded to return immediately to St. Petersburg.
Elizabeth obeyed, taking a house in the capital, where she made a point of getting to know the soldiers in the Guards regiments. The officers who had served under her father and who had known Elizabeth since childhood were delighted to see the last surviving child of their hero. She visited and spent time in their barracks, became familiar with the speech and habits of soldiers as well as officers, flattered them, reminisced with them, lost money to them at cards, stood godmother to many of their children, and soon had dazzled and conquered them. As much as her beauty and generosity, they admired and trusted the fact that she was Russian. No one knew whether, at this stage, she had an ulterior motive, a plan. Empress Anne was on the throne; the idea of dislodging her must have been remote, if it existed at all. Probably the obvious was true: Elizabeth was spontaneous, generous, and hospitable; she loved people and wanted to be surrounded by people who admired her. In any case, she was constantly about in the streets of the capital. And the more she was seen, the more popular she became.
Ironically, this handsome, much-admired young woman now found herself unable to marry. That she was the daughter and a potential heir of Peter the Great should have given her a glittering marital allure. But with Anne of Courland on the throne, Elizabeth faced insurmountable obstacles to any gilded marriage. No royal house in Europe could allow a son to pay her court lest this be interpreted as an unfriendly act toward Empress Anne. A different handicap affected the possibility of marriage to a son of the Russian nobility. The danger here was that by marrying a countryman of lesser rank, a woman who was a potential sovereign could undermine any potential future claim to the throne.
Elizabeth’s reaction was to reject any thought of marriage and choose freedom instead. If she could not have a royal or a noble husband, she would have a soldier of the Guards, a coachman, a handsome lackey. Indeed, a man appeared whom she was to love devotedly and to whom her attachment was to be lifelong. As her father had found happiness with a peasant wife, Elizabeth discovered her own companion of humble origin. One morning she heard a powerful new voice, a deep, rich bass, singing in the choir of the court chapel. The voice, she discovered, belonged to a tall young man with black eyes, black hair, and an appealing smile. He was a son of Ukrainian peasants, born the same year as Elizabeth; his name was Alexis Razumovsky. Elizabeth immediately made him a member of the choir in her private chapel. Soon, he had a room near her apartment.
As a favorite, Razumovsky was ideal for Elizabeth, not only because of his extraordinary good looks but because he was a genuinely decent and simple man, universally liked for his kindliness, good nature, and tact. Untroubled by education, he was wholly lacking in ambition and never interfered in politics. Later, Catherine the Great wrote of Alexis Razumovsky and his younger brother Kyril that she “knew of no other family enjoying the sovereign’s favor to a like degree, who were so much loved, by so many people, as the two brothers.” Elizabeth loved his handsome face, his gentle manner, his magnificent voice. He became her lover, and possibly, after a secret marriage, her morganatic husband; between themselves, courtiers called him “the Emperor of the Night.” Once she was on the throne, Elizabeth made him a count, a prince, and a field marshal. But while his sovereign loaded him with titles, Razumovsky said to her, “Your Majesty may create me a field marshal, but I defy you or anyone to make even a tolerable captain out of me.”
In her mid-twenties, Elizabeth still seemed all froth and exuberance in comparison to the austere, forbidding Empress Anne. In a different sphere, the contrast was more striking: Anne was surrounded by Germans; Elizabeth was heart and soul a Russian, a lover of the language, the people, the customs. Although there remained no external sign that she was eager to assert her claim to the throne, beneath her outer calm, some thought they saw something else. “In public, she has an unaffected gaiety, and a certain air of giddiness that seems to possess her whole mind,” said the wife of the British ambassador. “But in private I have heard her talk with such a strain of good sense and steady reasoning that I am persuaded the other behavior is a feint.”
Another shadow fell across Elizabeth’s future when Empress Anne, a childless widow, brought to St. Petersburg her German niece, the daughter of her sister, Catherine of Mecklenburg, and converted her to Orthodoxy under the name Anna Leopoldovna. Next, the empress proposed that Anna Leopoldovna marry the German prince Anthony Ulrich of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel. Anna Leopoldovna, who was in love with someone else, refused, but Empress Anne insisted, and in the spring of 1738 the engagement was announced. The months before her marriage saw Anna Leopoldovna transformed from a lively, pleasant girl into a plain, silent, unhappy bride-to-be, bitterly resentful of her aunt’s decision. Elizabeth, in contrast, continued to appear confident and charming, and her beauty, if not quite as fresh as a decade before, remained sufficiently striking to irritate the empress.
In July 1739, Anna Leopoldovna married Anthony Ulrich, and on August 24, 1740, she gave birth to a son. Overjoyed, Empress Anne insisted that the boy be named Ivan after her own father. Scarcely a month later, the empress suffered a stroke. She recovered temporarily and, in feverish haste, declared her infant grandnephew to be her heir; the baby’s mother, Anna Leopoldovna, would be named regent if the boy came to the throne while still a minor. On October 16, Empress Anna suffered a second stroke. This time her doctors pronounced her condition hopeless, and, at the age of forty-seven, she died. The following day, the empress’s will was read publicly. The two-month-old baby was proclaimed Emperor Ivan VI. Elizabeth, then thirty, and the baby’s parents dutifully swore allegiance to their new sovereign.
Turmoil followed. The infant’s mother, Anna Leopoldovna, swallowed her chagrin at not being awarded the crown herself and assumed the office of regent. She appointed her German husband, Anthony Ulrich of Brunswick, commander in chief of the Russian army and then resumed her relationship with her lover, the Saxon ambassador, Count Lynar. Her husband’s humiliation was public; soldiers, visible to all, were posted to bar him from his wife’s apartments whenever her lover was with her.
Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s closest descendant by blood, had now been passed over three times, and still she seemed not to care. She did not challenge the new regent’s authority. Nor, on the other hand, did she alter her own way of life. She was often seen in the streets of St. Petersburg; she walked every day on the parade ground of the Preobrazhensky Guards barracks, close to her palace. Diplomats and foreign capitals hummed with speculation. The British ambassador reported to London that Elizabeth was “extremely obliging and affable, and in consequence much personally beloved and extremely popular. She has also the additional advantage of being the daughter of Peter the Great who, though he was more feared than any former prince of this century, was at the same time
