Terrible Tsarinas

avoid, have exposed the role you played in the revolution,”1 he

wrote to him on January 15, 1741.

In the meanwhile, Elizabeth had ordered a Te Deum and a

special religious service to underscore the troops’ oath of loyalty.

She also took care to publish a proclamation justifying her acces-

sion “under the terms of our legitimate right and because of our

blood proximity to our dear father and our dear mother, the Em-

peror Peter the Great and the Empress Catherine Alexeyevna; and

also in accordance with the unanimous and so humble request of

those who have been faithful to us.”2

The reprisals announced in tandem with all this celebration

were severe. The secondary players in the counter-conspiracy

joined the principal “instigators” (Münnich, Loewenwolde, Oster-

mann and Golovkin) in the cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress.

Prince Nikita Trubetskoy, charged with judging the culprits,

wasted no time with pointless formalities. Magistrates were

named on the spur of the moment to assist him in his delibera-

tions, and all their sentences were final. A large crowd of specta-

tors, eager to applaud the misfortunes of others, followed the ses-

sions hour by hour. There were many foreigners among the ac-

cused, which delighted “the good Russians.” Some of these venge-

ful spirits took particular pleasure in stating, with a laugh, that in

this it was Russia suing Germany. Elizabeth is said to have sat

behind a curtain, listening to every word of the proceedings. In

any case, the verdicts were largely (or entirely) dictated by her.

Most of the defendants were sentenced to death. Of course,

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Terrible Tsarinas

during the coup d’état just the day before, she had sworn she

would end capital punishment in Russia; therefore, Her Majesty

allowed herself the innocent pleasure of granting clemency at the

last minute. She considered that such sadism tinged with leni-

ency was part of her ancestral instinct, since Peter the Great had

had a record of mixing cruelty and lucidity, entertainment and

horror. However, each time the court chaired by Nikita Trubet-

skoy issued a death penalty, it had to specify the means of execu-

tion. Trubetskoy’s men were most often satisfied with decapita-

tion 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, Oster-

mann was condemned to be tortured on the wheel before being

beheaded; Münnich 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 execu-

tion, 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 mes-

senger from the palace brought word that, in her infinite kind-

ness, Her Majesty had deigned to commute their sentences to ex-

ile in perpetuity. The spectators, at first disappointed at being

deprived of such an amusing spectacle, wanted to attack the bene-

ficiaries of this imperial favor; then, as though suddenly enlight-

ened, 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 ven-

tured 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 po-

litical criminals had finally been brought down, and praising the

tsarina for her heart of gold, Münnich 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 mem-

bers of the Brunswick family, with the ex-regent Anna Leo-

poldovna 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 re-

cruiters. They invited Alexis Petrovich Bestuzhev to succeed Os-

termann, and his brother, Mikhail Bestuzhev, replaced Loewen-

wolde as Master of the Royal Hunt. Among the military men, the