The Age of the Empresses, 1725–96

It was another of Peter’s reforms, a change in the law of succession, which permitted women to rule Russia for most of the eighteenth century. In 1722 Peter decreed that each emperor⁴ should choose his own heir. When he died three years later without doing so, his edict enabled court factions to promote the fortunes of two women. Catherine I, Peter’s wife, became his successor as a result of the machinations of Alexander Menshikov, Peter’s powerful minister and her former lover. She died in 1727, and a rival clique overthrew Menshikov and put Peter’s grandson on the throne. That young man ruled as Peter II for three years. After he succumbed to smallpox in 1730, he was succeeded by Anna, the daughter of Peter’s half‑brother, Ivan V.

Empress Anna was a lazy, frivolous woman who presided over a government noted for corruption, exorbitant taxation, and unsuccessful military adventures. A childless widow when she took the throne, Anna did not remarry thereafter, so when her health weakened in the later 1730s, her courtiers began casting around for an heir. The empress insisted on maintaining the succession through the descendants of her father Ivan, and settled on her niece, Anna, the daughter of her late sister, Catherine. Anna moved to St. Petersburg with her German husband and in August 1740 gave birth to a son, whom she named Ivan. Shortly thereafter Empress Anna died and the infant was proclaimed tsar. Anna’s former advisers settled in to govern for a good long time, their puppet king being still a babe in arms. They did not reckon on the opposition mounting against them, particularly within military regiments stationed in the capital. Nor did they reckon on Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter and Catherine.

During the reign of her cousin Anna, Elizabeth had passed herself off as a woman interested in hunting, dancing, expensive clothes, and nicely uniformed officers. The ruse worked; the clique surrounding the infant tsar Ivan underestimated her. Aided by subsidies from the French and Swedish governments, which saw Anna’s ministers as pro‑Prussian, Elizabeth gathered a faction of powerful supporters. In November 1741 she led a coup in which the little Ivan VI, his parents, and his supporters were arrested. Elizabeth then had herself proclaimed Russia’s new empress.

ELIZABETH I (born 1709, ruled 1741–61)

Elizabeth seized the throne intending to rule, and rule she did for twenty years. She was not a hard‑working monarch ablaze with new ideas, as her father had been. Rather, this tall, slim woman preferred hunting, travel, and parties to policy‑making. But Elizabeth was committed to many of her father’s innovations in government, foreign affairs, and cultural and social life. Like her counterparts elsewhere in Europe, she promoted higher education (the University of Moscow was established in 1755), subsidized academicians, supported the publication of scholarly journals, and patronized the national Academy of Sciences, founded by her father. She fostered the development of the arts as well, hiring French and Russian theater troupes to perform for her court and commissioning Italian architects to decorate St. Petersburg with the delicate pastels of rococo architecture.

It was as an exemplar of new fashions in social and cultural life that Elizabeth had her greatest impact on elite women. She spent vast amounts of money on herself and her palaces. Famous for changing her dress three or four times in the course of one ball, she ran up enormous bills with Paris dressmakers and jewelers. She also ordered ornate furniture by the wagonload. This conspicuous consumption furthered the popularization of imported luxuries and, perhaps more important, of the West as the source of all that was stylish. Elizabeth also promoted the Western custom of wealthy women patronizing the secular arts and education.

Her courtiers believed that the empress was secretly married to one of her favorites, an army officer named Aleksei Razumovskii. Officially, she remained single. Intending never to give birth to an heir, Elizabeth appointed her nephew Peter to that position shortly after she took the throne. The young man was the son of Elizabeth’s sister Anna and a minor German ruler, the duke of Holstein‑Gottorp. After bringing Peter to St. Petersburg to live with her, Elizabeth chose as his bride‑to‑be a fourteen‑year‑old princess named Sophia, from the little German principality of Anhalt‑Zerbst. Sophia moved to Russia in 1744. When she was baptized in the Russian Orthodox church, she took the name Ekaterina. We know her as Catherine the Great, one of the most remarkable rulers in European history.

CATHERINE II (born 1729, ruled 1762–96)

Sophia of Anhalt‑Zerbst would not have become Catherine the Great had she been the modest, unassuming princess that Elizabeth thought she was. She came from a large but not very loving family; in her memoirs, Catherine portrayed her mother Johanna as distant and abusive and said virtually nothing about her father.⁵ She had received the education customary for German princesses–tutoring in French, religion (hers was Lutheranism), literature, philosophy, music, and drawing. After her marriage to Peter in August 1745, Catherine settled down to the life preordained for her; within a few years she began to chafe at its limitations.

Chief among her discontents was her unhappy marriage. Catherine found her husband juvenile and crude; he found her haughty and prim. The intellectual differences between the two were profound as well, for Catherine was interested in books and the arts, Peter in military matters. In her memoirs, Catherine said the marriage had soured because Peter had never loved her. This rejection made her “more or less indifferent to him,” she wrote, “but not to the crown of Russia.”⁶

By the early 1750s the two were entertaining themselves with lovers. This was common practice in the courts of eighteenth‑century Europe; indeed it was expected that royalty and their courtiers, locked for life into marriages with spouses chosen for them, would have extramarital affairs. The relationship between Catherine and Peter was unusually hostile, even by the relaxed standards of the era, and by the end of the 1750s the two were rarely speaking to one another. “I let him do as he wished and went my way,” Catherine wrote.⁷ She had performed her prime obligation in 1754 when she gave birth to a son, Paul. (She later wrote in her memoirs that Paul was the son of courtier Sergei Saltykov.) The estrangement of the royal couple troubled Empress Elizabeth, who occasionally attempted to mediate between them. Mostly the empress avoided the pair and devoted herself to rearing Paul and his sister Anna, born in 1757 of an affair with Stanislaw Poniatowski, future king of Poland. Catherine rarely saw her children.

^{Catherine in youth and in maturity.}

^{Picture Collection of the New York Public Library.}