The Russian empress who seized power in a coup, then executed nobody
Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, grabbed the throne in 1741 with the army behind her and ruled for two decades without sending a single person to execution. She built the Winter Palace, backed Moscow's first university, and died just as a beaten Frederick the Great was weighing surrender.
She was born in 1709 at Kolomenskoye Palace near Moscow, before her parents' official wedding in 1712. Her mother, the future Catherine I, had been a washerwoman and housemaid, the daughter of a Lithuanian-subject farmer. Of twelve children the couple had, only Elizabeth and her sister Anna reached adulthood. Peter doted on the lively girl, who looked and behaved much like him, but never expected a daughter to rule, so her schooling was patchy. A critic later claimed she never learned that Britain was an island, yet she spoke French, Italian and German and loved riding, hunting and dancing.
Marriage kept slipping away. The French Bourbons rebuffed Peter's offers because of the girls' late legitimisation and humble mother. A betrothal to Charles Augustus of Holstein-Gottorp ended when he died in 1727 during wedding preparations, two weeks after her mother's death, leaving her an orphan without a fiancé at 17. Under her cousin Empress Anna she was sidelined and resented; her lover, a guards sergeant named Alexander Shubin, was exiled to Siberia. Her lasting partner became Alexei Razumovsky, a Ukrainian Cossack choir singer she bought from a nobleman and later made a prince and field marshal; they may have married in secret.
After a string of short reigns ending with the infant Ivan VI, Elizabeth took power and named her nephew, the future Peter III, as heir. At home she let nobles dominate local government while trimming their years of state service, encouraged Mikhail Lomonosov in founding the University of Moscow, and supported Ivan Shuvalov's Imperial Academy of Arts. Her favourite architect, Bartolomeo Rastrelli, gave her Baroque splendour at Peterhof, the Winter Palace and the Smolny Cathedral. French fashions flooded the court in her time.
Abroad, she and the diplomat Aleksey Bestuzhev-Ryumin closed the War of the Austrian Succession through alliance with Austria and France, but that alignment helped trigger the Seven Years' War. Russian forces beat Prussia several times and briefly held Berlin. Her death in January 1762 spared Frederick; she was the last Romanov in the direct male line to reign.
Source: Elizabeth of Russia
