Empress Elizabeth
Empress Elizabeth reigned for twenty years, from November 25, 1741 to December 25, 1761. Her reign was not without glory, not even without benefit. Her youth was not instructive. The princess could not bear any strict rules or pleasant memories from the homeless second family of Peter, where the first words that a child learned to pronounce were aunt, mother, soldier, and the mother was in a hurry to sell her daughters in marriage as soon as possible, so that in the event of the death of their father they would not have rivals in the succession to the throne. Growing up, Elizabeth seemed like a young lady who was brought up in a girl's room. All her life she didn't want to know when to get up, get dressed, eat dinner, go to bed. The servants' weddings gave her great entertainment: she herself cleaned the bride to the crown and then from behind the door admired how the wedding guests were having fun. In her address, she was either too simple and affectionate, then she lost her temper over trifles and scolded whoever she came across, a lackey or a courtier, with the most unfortunate words, and the ladies-in-waiting got it even more painfully. Elizabeth fell between two opposite cultural currents, was brought up among new European trends and traditions of pious domestic antiquity. Both influences left their imprint on her, and she knew how to combine the concepts and tastes of both: from vespers she went to the ball, and from the ball she kept up to matins, reverently honored the shrines and rites of the Russian Church, wrote out descriptions of court Versailles banquets from Paris and festivals, loved French performances to a passion and knew all the gastronomic secrets of Russian cuisine to a subtlety. The obedient daughter of his confessor, Fr. Dubyansky and a student of the French dance master Rambour, she strictly observed the fasts at her court, so that the gastronomist Chancellor A.P. Bestuzhev-Ryumin, only with the permission of the Patriarch of Constantinople, was allowed not to eat mushrooms, and in the whole empire no one better than the empress could perform the minuet and Russian dancing. The religious mood was warmed in her by an aesthetic feeling. The bride of all sorts of suitors in the world, from the French king to her own nephew, under Empress Anna, saved by Biron from the monastery and the ducal Saxe-Coburg Meiningen slum, she gave her heart to the court chorister from the Chernigov Cossacks, and the palace turned into a musical house: they wrote out both Little Russian singers, and Italian singers, so as not to violate the integrity of the artistic impression, both of them sang both mass and opera together. The duality of educational influences explains the pleasant or unexpected contradictions in the character and lifestyle of Elizabeth. Lively and cheerful, but keeping her eyes on herself, at the same time large and slender, with a beautiful round and ever-blooming face, she loved to impress, and, knowing that a man's costume especially suits her, she established masquerades without masks at court. , where men were required to arrive in full women's attire, in extensive skirts, and ladies in men's court dress. The most legitimate of all the successors and successors of Peter I, but raised to the throne by rebellious guards bayonets, she inherited the energy of her father, built palaces in twenty-four hours and traveled the then path from Moscow to St. Petersburg in two days, regularly paying for each driven horse. Peaceful and carefree, she was forced to fight almost half of her reign, defeated the first strategist of that time, Frederick the Great, took Berlin, laid the abyss of soldiers on the fields of Zorndorf and Kunersdorf; but since the reign of Princess Sophia, life in Russia has never been so easy, and not a single reign before 1762 left such a pleasant memory. With two great coalition wars that exhausted Western Europe, it seemed that Elizabeth, with her 300,000-strong army, could become the arbiter of European destinies; the map of Europe lay in front of her at her disposal, but she looked at it so rarely that for the rest of her life she was sure of the possibility of traveling to England by land - and she also founded the first real university in Russia - Moscow. Lazy and capricious, frightened by any serious thought, abhorred by any business occupation, Elizabeth could not enter into complex international relationships Europe of that time and understand the diplomatic intricacies of their Chancellor Bestuzhev-Ryumin. But in her inner chambers, she created for herself a special political environment of hangers-on and storytellers, gossips, headed by an intimate solidarity cabinet, where the prime minister was Mavra Yegorovna Shuvalova, the wife of the inventor and projector known to us, and the members were Anna Karlovna Vorontsova, nee Skavronskaya, a relative of the Empress, and some just Elizaveta Ivanovna, who was called the Minister of Foreign Affairs: “All cases were submitted to the empress through her,” a contemporary notes. The subjects of this study were stories, gossip, trickery, all sorts of tricks and persecution of the courtiers against each other, which gave Elizabeth great pleasure. These were the "spheres" of that time; important ranks and bread places were heard from here; major government business was done here. These cabinet studies alternated with festivities. From her youth, Elizabeth was dreamy and, being a Grand Duchess, once in a charming oblivion she signed a business paper instead of her name with the words Flamefire... Having ascended the throne, she wanted to fulfill her girlish dreams into a magical reality; performances, pleasure trips, courts, balls, masquerades stretched out in an endless string, striking with dazzling brilliance and luxury to the point of nausea. Sometimes the whole courtyard turned into a theatrical foyer: day after day they talked only about the French comedy, about the Italian comic opera and its landlord Locatelli, about intermezza, etc. But the living rooms, where the palace inhabitants left the lush halls, were struck by crampedness, squalor conditions, slovenliness: the doors did not close, the windows blew; water ran over the wall-boards, the rooms were extremely damp; Grand Duchess Ekaterina had huge cracks in her bedroom in the oven; near this bedroom, 17 servants crowded in a small chamber; the furniture was so meager that mirrors, beds, tables and chairs were transported as needed from palace to palace, even from St. Petersburg to Moscow, broken, beaten and placed in this form in temporary places. Elizabeth lived and reigned in gilded poverty; she left behind in her wardrobe with more than 15 thousand dresses, two chests of silk stockings, a bunch of unpaid bills and the unfinished huge Winter Palace, which had already absorbed more than 10 million rubles from our money from 1755 to 1761. Shortly before her death, she really wanted to live in this palace; but in vain she tried in vain to have the builder Rastrelli hasten to finish at least her own living rooms. French haberdashery shops sometimes refused to release newfangled goods to the palace on credit. For all that, in her, not like in her Courland predecessor, somewhere deep under a thick crust of prejudices, bad habits and spoiled tastes, there still lived a man who sometimes broke through, then in a vow before seizing the throne no one would be executed by death and in fulfilling this vow decree of May 17, 1744, which actually abolished the death penalty in Russia, then in the refusal to approve the ferocious criminal part of the Code, drawn up in the Commission of 1754 and already approved by the Senate, with exquisite types of the death penalty, then in preventing the obscene petitions of the Synod about the need to abandon this empress of vow, then, finally, in the ability to cry from an unjust decision, torn out by the intrigues of the same Synod. Elizabeth was a smart and kind, but disorderly and capricious Russian lady of the 18th century, who, according to Russian custom, was scolded by many during her lifetime and, according to Russian custom, everyone mourned after her death.
When completing the tasks of part 1 (A) in the answer sheet No. 1, under the number of the task you are performing, put an “x” in the box, the number of which corresponds to the number of the answer you have chosen.
A1. Which of the named dates are connected with the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna?
1) 1682–1725
3) 1741–1761
2) 1730–1740
4) 1762–1796
A2. To the architectural monuments of the XVIII century. applies
1) Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg
2) Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin
3) St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow
4) Hagia Sophia in Veliky Novgorod
A3. Among the bodies of state power created under Peter I, is
1) State Council
3) Zemsky Sobor
2) Supreme Privy Council
A4. Reforms of Peter I in the region government controlled led to
1) election of state bodies
2) strengthening the influence of the noble boyars
3) elimination of the order system
4) the abolition of the estate system
A5. Which of the following concepts is associated with the era of palace coups in Russia?
1) "Khovanshchina"
2) "Trouble"
3) "oprichnina"
4) "Bironism"
A6. The sharp deterioration in the situation of the peasants and the urban lower classes at the beginning of the 18th century. was caused by
1) church schism
2) a change in the tax system
3) the appearance of copper money
4) establishing a tax on salt
A7. Which of the following refers to the consequences of the socio-economic transformations of Peter I?
A) activation of social mobility of the population
B) the disappearance of differences between the estate and the estate
C) the disappearance of "white settlements"
D) the final enslavement of the peasants
D) increased taxation
E) the formation of monopolies
Specify the correct answer.
A8. Read an extract from a historian's work and indicate the title of the document in question.
“The ranks were divided in this painting into 14 classes, starting with the general admiral, field marshal, grand chancellor, to ensign and naval and office commissioner. But the sons of nobles did not enjoy the benefits of their father's ranks on an equal basis with their daughters. Every soldier who rose to the rank of a staff officer was made a nobleman, and he could not be denied a patent and a coat of arms, and vice versa, the noblest boyar, disgraced by punishment, was reduced to commoners.
1) "Sudebnik"
2) "Combat order"
3) "General Regulations"
4) "Table of Ranks"
The tasks of part 2 (B) require an answer in the form of one or two words, a sequence of letters or numbers, which should be written first in the text examination work, and then transfer to the answer sheet No. 1 without spaces and other characters.
Write each letter or number in a separate box in accordance with the samples given in the form.
IN 1. Establish a correspondence between processes and terms related to them.
For each position of the first column, select the corresponding position of the second and write down the selected numbers in the table under the corresponding letters.
Transfer the resulting sequence of numbers to the answer sheet No. 1 (without spaces and any symbols).
Answer: 2134.
IN 2. Arrange events in chronological order developments. Write down the letters that represent the events in correct sequence to the table.
A) the beginning of the reign of Peter I 1696
B) the proclamation of Russia as an empire
B) acceptance Cathedral Code 16
D) the beginning of the Northern War of 1700
Transfer the resulting sequence of letters to the answer sheet No. 1 (without spaces and any symbols).
Answer: VAGB.
AT 3. The list below contains the names of statesmen of Russia in the 18th century. Choose from the list names related to the first half of the 18th century and circle the corresponding numbers. Record the circled numbers in the table.
1) Alexander Menshikov
2) Fedor Ushakov
3) Alexander Suvorov
4) Franz Lefort
5) Boris Sheremetev
6) Petr Rumyantsev
Transfer the resulting sequence of numbers to the answer sheet No. 1 (without spaces and any symbols)
Answer: 145.
AT 4. Read an excerpt from the work of the historian V. O. Klyuchevsky and write the name of the empress in question.
“The most legitimate of all the successors and successors of Peter I, but raised to the throne by the rebellious bayonets of the guards, she inherited the energy of her great father ... Peaceful and carefree, she was forced to fight for almost half of her reign ... Not a single reign ... left such pleasant things about herself memories".
Answer: Elizabeth Petrovna.
For answers to the tasks of part 3 (C), use the answer sheet No. 2. First write down the task number (C1, etc.), and then the detailed answer to it. Write down your answers legibly.
Tasks С4-С7 provide different types activities: presentation of a generalized description of historical events and phenomena (C4), consideration of historical versions and assessments (C5), analysis of the historical situation (C6), comparison (C7). As you complete these tasks, pay attention to the wording of each question.
C5. In historical science, there is an opinion that the cruel measures of the Peter the Great reforms are justified by their progressive nature.
What other assessment of Peter's reforms do you know? Which assessment do you think is more convincing? Give provisions, facts that argue your chosen point of view.
13.11.2009: ANNIVERSARY OF THE SEVEN-YEAR WAR (part 1)
December 18 (29), 2009 marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, daughter of Peter the Great (ruled 1689-1725) and Catherine I (ruled 1725-1727). Elizabeth Petrovna reigned for 20 years - from 1741 to 1761.
In 2007-2011 marks 250 years of Russian victories in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). In addition to Europe, the war also engulfed the colonies - North America and India, but there, far from its borders, Russia did not participate in the struggle. Elizaveta Petrovna, seeing the danger in European troubles, directed a blow precisely at Prussia of Frederick II Hohenzollern.
What do we know about the Seven Years' War? Now, alas, almost nothing. Under Stalin, during the Great Patriotic War and after the victory of 1945, the authors of military-historical works paid due attention to the Seven Years' War and Russian victories. With the onset of the “thaw”, those events were mentioned in passing, but no maps of the war were published. There was no separate chapter about it in the multi-volume history of the 18th century. They talked in general about the army and navy, copied pre-revolutionary generals, they were also denounced, diluting plagiarism with a “class approach”. Finally, in the era of “glasnost”, even minimal patriotism was no longer played. At Moscow State University, where, as you know, there is a "brotherhood", the "masters" announced at lectures: "We do not consider the wars waged by Russia."
Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. 1758-1760
Ust-Ruditskaya mosaic workshop. Russian Museum
And what about abroad? In fascist Germany, for example, for the slightest criticism of Frederick II, already in 1935 they were fired from the university, forbidding them to work as a teacher, - testified the then US Ambassador W. Dodd.
On June 22, 1942, 13 German divisions launched Operation Fredericus II (Frederick II), intending to dismember the troops of our Southwestern Front and go to the Oskol River. The Germans failed to achieve what they wanted. This offensive was part of the general plan of Germany to break through to the Volga, Stalingrad and the North Caucasus (I.Kh.Bagramyan. So we went to victory. M., 1988, p.354-358). As you can see, the Seven Years War and the Great Patriotic War are firmly connected.
In modern France, they do not remember the Seven Years' War. Pro-German foreign policy, the desire to please the United States, internationalism within the country does not need the legacy of the old, monarchist France.
In England, as before, an idol is Thomas Carlyle, a freemason, philosopher and historian of the 19th century. He admired the master of the Templars, Jacques de Mollet, Cromwell and Robespierre, Frederick II and Napoleon. Carlyle hated Louis XV (compared to the "animal"), the Marquise de Pompadour and the Prince de Soubise - they de "wasted French blood" in the Seven Years' War. The Duke de Broglio is terrible: "a veteran and strict disciplinarian with the firm foundations of a sergeant major." In short, they all interfered with the lodges. Later we will understand how and why.
August 1 (12), 2009 - 150 years of our decisive victory over the army of Friedrich at Kunersdorf on the Oder River in the midst of the Seven Years' War. "Russian" television, of course, did not remember this date - progressively progressive "amnesia", as in pan-Europe.
The Russian army was commanded by general-in-chief (=full general) Pyotr Semyonovich Saltykov. Elizaveta Petrovna promoted him to field marshal general for the victory over Friedrich. Ivan Ilyin rightly remarked: “Since Peter the Great, Europe has been afraid of Russia; from Saltykov (Kunersdorf), Suvorov and Alexander the First - Europe is afraid (italics Ilyin. - N.S.) of Russia ”(I.A. Ilyin. Collected works. M., 1993. V.2. Book 1, p. .65).
The name and deeds of Elizabeth Petrovna are hushed up or presented in a caricature form so that we forget about her reign - about the connecting era between the time of Peter the Great and Catherine II the Great (1762-1796), whose 280th birthday anniversary was celebrated in 2009. Historian S .M. Solovyov came to the conclusion: "... paying tribute to Catherine II, let's not forget how much inside and outside was prepared for her by Elizabeth" ("History of Russia since ancient times", Book XII, M., 1993. T. 24, p. 608).
Some call Catherine the Great "German", ignoring her life, service to Russia, reliance on Russian talents and Russian people. She continued the deeds of Peter the Great, remembering him by no means for a red word. And this is her best self-portrait. (In the 1990s, Peter was also “remembered”, one of the voucher funds was named after him!)
The famous Greek nationalist historian K. Paparrigopoulos (+1891) wrote that the educated Greek strata were looking for an heir to the throne among the Catholic dynasties of the West, but the “envoys of the people of Greece”, having arrived in St. Petersburg in 1790, asked Catherine II to provide assistance against the Ottomans and give to the Greeks of her grandson Constantine, as "the successor of the family of our autocrats." Orthodox people of the 18th century did not doubt the legality of our monarchs.
Elizaveta Petrovna saved Russian empire from pulling apart and turning into a powerless "Holy Roman Empire" of that time - into a confederation of trading oases (the so-called free imperial cities), despotic principalities and bishoprics. For example, Salzburg was a separate state ruled by a local Catholic archbishop. When they turned out to be a native of military family, for example, from the Austro-Italian family Colloredo, then the line between the church and the barracks disappeared. Western biographers of Mozart do not mention that his ferocious persecutor, Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg Hieronymus Colloredo, had two uncles and a brother who were participants in the Seven Years' War. And all three are Austrian field marshals. In the same Austria, some of the lands were part of the "Holy Roman Empire", and some were not.
Of course, this “sacred” German-speaking whim had nothing to do with the real, ancient Roman Empire, where St. Constantine adopted Orthodoxy as the state religion in 325. In the Middle Ages, the Germans wanted to become "Romans" and they established the "First Reich". Amorphous, with elected emperors, it did not interfere with anyone, but it flattered pride, having existed until 1806. The capital of this “virtual” empire was not Berlin, but the insignificant Catholic city of Regensburg (now southern Germany), where congresses of German princes, merchants and bishops - Reichstags ("imperial councils").
Petrine Russia was a much stronger state. Many people don't like it. Their logic is simple: the strengthening of the Russian national imperial state is an absolute evil, and the formation of pan-Germanism and the British world power is a masterpiece of progress. Now, as in the 18th century, “pious” pretexts for attacks are being found: Elizabeth was “born before the marriage” of Peter the Great and Catherine I and therefore had no right to the throne.
But in the history of Western states, being born out of wedlock did not interfere with the recognition of the legitimacy of succession to the throne, as well as descent from mistresses who never became wives. Let's take a look at the most important examples.
The "Sun King" Louis XIV (reigned 1661-1715) legitimized his children born from a deceased mistress, the Marquise de Montespan, giving them the right to the throne. The mother of the next king of France, Louis XV (reigned 1715-1774), Marie-Adelaide of Savoy, is a descendant of King Henry IV of France (1589-1610) and his mistress Gabrielle d'Estre.
In 1731, Antonio Farnese died, and the 200-year-old dynasty of the dukes-sovereigns of Parma and Piacenza in northern Italy, direct descendants of Pope Paul III Farnese, the founder of the Jesuit order, ended. Cardinals and popes also became fathers: fairy tales about "celibacy" (celibacy) and "asceticism of Catholicism" - exclusively for domestic Russian consumption.
So, "Christian" Europe, with its "chastity", "legal traditions", "humanism", is it possible? But "despotic", "dissolute", "barbaric" Russia is impossible? A forgery, generously paid for, needs no comparative history. To denigrate the Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, any nonsense will do - in hardcover and in mass circulation.
The friends of Europe are not at all concerned about the chaos into which the Russian Empire plunged under the worthless niece of Peter - Empress Anna Ioannovna (1730-1740), then under her niece - the ruler - Princess Anna Leopoldovna of Mecklenburg and their favorites (1740-1741). When Biron and Munnich were no longer there, the Mengdens and the Saxon envoy Count Linar entered into force, interfering in all Russian affairs. Behind the scenes remained Osterman, whose origin is as mysterious as his coat of arms.
Julia Mengden was the maid of honor and confidante of Anna Leopoldovna, and Linar occupied her heart. Husband Duke Anton-Ulrich of Brunswick, on the contrary, never fascinated Anna Leopoldovna. Their son, the infant Ivan VI Antonovich, was proclaimed emperor at the age of two months in October 1740 and never reigned. First, Biron was regent, and then Anna Leopoldovna.
IN. Klyuchevsky notes the grumbling in the army and the people: “This is how the night guards coup was prepared on November 25, 1741, which enthroned the daughter of Peter I. This coup was accompanied by violent patriotic antics, a violent manifestation of national feeling, offended by the domination of foreigners: Germans lived, and even Chancellor Osterman and Field Marshal Munnich himself were decently crushed. Guards officers demanded from the new empress that she rid Russia of the German yoke. She gave the resignation to some Germans. The guard was dissatisfied, demanding the total expulsion of all Germans abroad ”(“ Collected Works in Nine Volumes ”. M., 1989. Vol. IV, p. 278).
Klyuchevsky adds: “In the patriotic reign of Elizabeth, Russian people of hereditary noble and Cossack origin stood near the throne, who did not share the boyar plans of 1730, but jealously guarded the interests of the estate in which they were born or sheltered as adopted children” (p. 298).
Of course, the simple Razumovsky Cossacks, who became nobles under Elizabeth, cannot please either the “new Russians” or the Westerners. They are indifferent to the Razumovskys, their blessings of their native Little Russia and the anniversary of Elizabeth Petrovna.
Elizabeth settled Orthodox Serbs in New Serbia with the fortress of St. Elizabeth, which became the city of Elisavetgrad (now Kirovograd), and Novomirgorod. Serb settlers were mostly from Vojvodina, a region north of Belgrade. But in 1757 Serbs also moved to Russia from Dalmatia, from the coast of the Adriatic Sea. They were led by the Bishop of Dalmatia Simeon (Koncharevich), who was expelled from his homeland by the Catholic Austrians. Bishop Simeon died in 1769 in Kyiv, in the Peter and Paul Monastery.
Serbs served in tsarist army. Little Russians who fled from the Commonwealth were allowed to settle in New Serbia (the Polish border ran along the Dnieper, turning west from the fortresses of Chigirin and Kamenka). Orthodox Greeks settled in Nizhyn, seeking refuge from the Ottomans. So Elizabeth, step by step, inhabited the old cities and conquered the deserted lands from the Turks and Tatars, who drove into captivity, to the Crimea, to the slave markets, thousands of Slavic farmers.
Modern Ukraine, on the contrary, maintains a laudatory English-language site “khan-saray”: “The current successor of the Crimean dynasty, Caesar Giray, lives in England. He visited Bakhchisarai in 1995." (www.hansaray.org.ua/e_geray_ist.html). That is, even under President Kuchma, who posed as a "friend of the Russians." 2004 marked the 230th anniversary of Catherine's victories over the Turks, the conclusion of the Kuchuk-Kainarji peace of 1774, but Kuchma did not notice this anniversary.
The "new Russia" has its anniversaries. Monographs are praising Anna Leopoldovna and her Lutheran husband Anton-Ulrich of Brunswick, who received the rank of Generalissimo from her.
He would not have been remembered if he had not been the brother of one of the generals of Frederick II - Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick. The English Parliament granted Ferdinand in 1762, at the conclusion of the Seven Years' War, a huge lifetime pension of £3,000 for services rendered to England during the war. Since Friedrich for the Germans is der Grosse (“Great”), then everything that surrounded him, from loyal generals to hardy horses, is in the light of his genius.
The Russian Empire would turn into a mirage under the rule of the Generalissimo - an agent of Berlin. Friedrich looked at Anton-Ulrich in this way, sending in 1740 to St. Petersburg his close friend General Winterfeld, who was initiated into many secrets and later killed in the Seven Years' War.
Elizaveta Petrovna is accused of vengefulness, cruelty, is called the "usurper" of the throne, who has corrected all legal and moral laws. Daughter of Peter the Great… seized the throne?! For 20 years of the reign of Elizabeth, the guards and the army remained faithful to her, without making a single attempt at a military coup, i.e. she was not considered a usurper. This is a late myth, "squeezed" into the 18th century.
Anton-Ulrich and Anna Leopoldovna, sent by Empress Elizabeth, first to the Riga fortress, and finally, under house arrest in Kholmogory, died there. Anna Leopoldovna in 1746, under Elizabeth Petrovna. Anton-Ulrich Duke of Brunswick in 1774, already under Catherine II. The widower Anton-Ulrich did not waste time under arrest, having produced side children.
The mentally retarded son of Anton-Ulrich and Anna Leopoldovna - Ivan VI Antonovich - spent his childhood under arrest also in Kholmogory. And the rest of his life under a false name in the cell of the Shlisselburg fortress. He is now declared the rightful heir, whose life was ruined in Russia, deprived, as they say, of "European sophistication."
The other children of the Duke of Brunswick and Anna Leopoldovna, two sons and two daughters, were already sent by Catherine II in 1780 to Denmark, to the Danish queen, their relative. There they died in adulthood and were buried as Lutherans. The last of the sisters of Ivan VI died in 1807 at the age of 66, unsuccessfully asking Emperor Alexander I to ... return to Russia and be tonsured a nun.
Alexander I did not answer. The struggle with Napoleon was in full swing, and Alexander I did not want to give rise to a new turmoil, showing excessive mercy. And he did the right thing, not trusting the last representative of the Brunswick house. She, dying in Denmark, appointed two Danish princes as her heirs. Fortunately, they had the sense not to claim the Russian throne.
The Romanovs have long been falsely accused of cruelty, lack of "civilization".
But didn't King James II Stuart of England (1685-1689) execute his own nephew, the Duke of Monmouth, who claimed the crown? However, England is a “rule of law”, where executions are not executions, but only acts of justice. In 1689, James II was forever expelled from England by his own daughter, Mary II, and her Dutch husband, William III of Orange. Insidiousness of relatives? No. "Glorious Revolution" - this is how it is commonly considered in English historiography.
Or - "Iron Mask", a prisoner with whom the jailers were forbidden to talk. So ordered the French "sun king" Louis XIV. No one saw the face of the Iron Mask. There was no trial for him. Modern French researchers who have studied the surviving archives have not been able to establish who he was and why the authorities were afraid of him (the task is not solvable in principle). The prisoner was not executed, he died in 1703, buried under a false name and without witnesses. The ministers of Louis XIV, having outlived the king, refused to reveal even to their own families the secret of the Iron Mask. This intrigued even A.S. Pushkin.
Finally, King Alfonso VI of Braganza of Portugal (reigned 1662-1667). In 1666 he married a French princess. She, having become queen, on the advice of a Jesuit confessor, fled from the palace to the monastery of Lisbon. Immediately, in November 1667, the king's brother, Prince Pedro, a friend of wealthy usurers - "new Christians", staged a coup. The court of the Catholic Diocese of Lisbon declared the marriage of King Alfonso VI invalid. He was forced to recant.
In 1669, he was secretly sent to the castle of Angra, in the remote Azores. There, as a prisoner, limited by a corridor, Alphonse VI lived for five years. The squadron then returned him to Portugal. He was locked in the royal palace of Sintra, in a room where he listened to mass through a crack, remaining invisible to everyone for another nine years, until his death in 1683. Why not Shlisselburg?
Prince Regent Pedro, brother of Alphonse, married his wife - a Frenchwoman, who, as the scholastics assured, did not enter into marriage with Alphonse. Pedro became King Pedro II. The kings of Portugal until 1910 and the emperors of independent Brazil until 1889 are his descendants.
So, in Portugal, everything is legal - there was a court, and, as you know, in Europe it is always independent and incorruptible. The decision of the court was approved by Pope Clement IX, and he de - "Vicar of St. Peter", a spiritual authority, disinterestedly elected by the conclave. And in Russia - the Orthodox Synod, as the "Euro-priests" say, "non-canonical" and "servant of the autocracy." Russian autocracy is “the right to rule without the right,” as one mossy Marxist who has become a “Euro-integrist” and a guest of Radio Liberty assures the audience of Europe.
The chimeras imposed on the Russian people are by no means harmless, as it might seem. Mirages, after all, are also "politically expedient." First of all, in the flow of mythology, the Russian person must finally forget about the "imperial remnants" and "great-power chauvinism" of Peter the Great and Elizabeth Petrovna. Ivan Ilyin wrote about Elizabeth: “She rules in the spirit of Peter, but is deprived of his political genius” (I.A. Ilyin. Collected works. M., 1996. T. VI. Book II, p. 503-504) .
The exaltation of empty names, from Anna Ioannovna to Anna Leopoldovna and her family, is according to the European pattern. There are still monarchs in Europe, but they do not interfere in anything, they do not oppose the settlement of their countries by illegal migrants, they do not interfere with the slave trade and drug trafficking, they enter into unequal marriages. Nevertheless, magnificent receptions, issuance of awards, distribution of titles, changing of the guard at the royal palaces are unchanged. Appearance without will, a semblance of antiquity, majesty without grandeur - this is the ideal of the "progressive" monarch of Europe.
Elizaveta Petrovna and her famous parents do not have the slightest resemblance to the imposed ideal of a "cultural modern" monarch. Streams of slander are still being poured on Catherine I and for any reason, but they never say why they hate her so much. One excitable Americanophile from the Caucasus said, after all, what was the matter. Fury causes a memorable decree of Catherine I on civil and financial affairs.
Elizaveta Petrovna, having inherited the firm character of her parents, perceived their great-power policy as “az yes beeches”. This is enough to turn her into a frivolous lover of dresses and the theater, supposedly far from the subtleties of diplomacy and war.
However, it was she who, having ascended the throne, broke the attacking Sweden by force of arms. The lands to the northwest and west of Vyborg, including Friedrichsgam (now Hamina in Finland), were transferred to Russia. The terms of the former Nystadt peace of 1721, concluded by Peter the Great after victories in the Northern War, were confirmed by a peace treaty with Sweden in 1743 in Abo (now Turku in Finland). This peace was signed by an ally of Peter the Great, general-in-chief A.I. Rumyantsev, promoted to earl in 1744. He is the father of the famous Russian commander P. A. Rumyantsev, who later proved himself in the Seven Years' War, and even later in the wars with the Ottoman Empire under Catherine II.
Was Elizaveta Petrovna educated? Klyuchevsky slightly reproached her: “During the two big coalition wars that exhausted Western Europe, it seemed that Elizabeth with her 300,000-strong army could become the arbiter of European destinies; a map of Europe lay before her at her disposal, but she looked at it so rarely that for the rest of her life she was sure of the possibility of traveling to England by land; and she also founded the first real university - Moscow ”(p. 314).
"Wow! Not to know that England is an island…”, exclaim “Russian intellectuals”. However, this is not too much ignorance, especially against the general background. For example, the English Freemason, politician, historian Henry St. John, known by his title of Viscount Bolingbroke. The character of the famous vaudeville of the French playwright Eugene Scribe "A Glass of Water" (1840). Scribe's Bolingbroke is almost a real Bolingbroke (1678-1751), a master of detective work and casuistry, a hypocritical patriot and a loyal conspirator.
Bolingbroke, in Letters on the Study and Use of History (1735), had no idea of the limits of the Russian Empire. He mentioned the “Tsar of Muscovy” without a name, and “Muscovites” as a people, along with Peruvians, Mexicans and Negroes (Decree. Op. M., Nauka, 1978, p. 16, 63). Bolingbroke's knowledge of Russia, the then largest power in Europe and Asia, remained at the level of the old reports of the English merchant "Moscow Company" of the 16th - early 17th centuries.
We are being imposed a "complex of imperial guilt." But Russian people have nothing to repent of. Let us recall the words of Klyuchevsky about Elizabeth Petrovna: “The most legitimate of all the successors and successors of Peter I, but raised to the throne by rebellious guards bayonets, she inherited the energy of her great father, built palaces in twenty-four hours and in two days traveled the then path from Moscow to Petersburg, regularly paying for each driven horse. Peaceful and carefree, she was forced to fight almost half of her reign, defeated the first strategist of that time, Frederick the Great, took Berlin, laid the abyss of soldiers on the fields of Zorndorf and Kunersdorf ... ”(p. 314).
There was no war on Russian soil. Elizaveta Petrovna did not wait for an enemy invasion, but was the first to strike at the enemy.
Russian troops had to cross the Commonwealth, which owned Belarusian, Little Russian, Polish and Lithuanian lands. From all sides it covered a separate part of the kingdom of Frederick II of Hohenzollern - East Prussia with Königsberg (West Prussia belonged to the Poles). The other major strongholds of Friedrich - Brandenburg along the middle course of the Oder River with the capital Berlin, Pomerania and Silesia - also bordered on the Commonwealth, so much so that the Polish wedge separated Pomerania and Silesia. Prussia did not constitute a single whole, but was fragmented into many parts, down to tiny acquisitions. How did this streak originate?
Hohenzollerns - from South German Nuremberg, where they were "burgraves" (mayors). One of them, Frederick VI, little known, became Prince of Brandenburg in 1417 by the grace of Sigismund, Emperor of the "Holy Roman Empire". Sigismund is the son of Emperor Charles IV (1347-1378) and the daughter of Prince Bohuslav V (1365-1374). Charles IV - Czech; he built the huge "Charles Bridge" in Prague. Bohuslav V ruled the Polish Pomerania and the north-east of present-day Germany.
Burgrave Frederick VI, having received Brandenburg from the Slavs, quickly forgot about it, but immediately changed the numbering, renaming himself Frederick I - it is more pleasant to be a prince than a burggrave.
In 1637, Boguslav XIV, the last weak prince of Pomerania, devastated by the war, died childless. Soon the eastern and later the western part of Pomerania (Pomerania) with the city of Stettin (since 1945 - Polish Szczecin) was seized by the Hohenzollerns.
East Prussia with Koenigsberg (now, after the victory of 1945, Russian Kaliningrad) are the former possessions of the defeated Teutonic Order, which became a subordinate principality of the Commonwealth. These lands, as a dowry of his wife, received in 1618 the next prince of Brandenburg. Already in 1631 in Königsberg arose Masonic lodge- the so-called "German society". Recent archaeological excavations have brought a lot of surprises, which they immediately stopped talking about - secret signs on masonry and Teutonic crosses, similar, as you know, to the crosses of the Templars.
In 1701, Prince Frederick III of Brandenburg, having joined the Anglo-Austrian camp for money, received the royal title from the Austrian Emperor Leopold I of Habsburg, head of the "Holy Roman Empire", and immediately renamed himself "King of Prussia" Frederick I. His grandson - Friedrich II. In the early 1740s. he "thanked" Austria by capturing Silesia from her with its capital in Breslau (since 1945 - Polish Wroclaw).
What started the Seven Years' War? English king George II (1727-1760), who was also the prince of the North German state of Hanover, concluded in January 1756 an alliance of England with Frederick II - the so-called first Westminster, or Whitehall, Treaty (later the second Westminster Treaty was signed). Prussia went over to the side of England for annual payments. This turned the policy of France and Austria upside down. For a century and a half, they fought fiercely with each other. And suddenly, in May 1756, they became allies, concluding the first Treaty of Versailles (followed by the second and third). Both powers realized that a more dangerous enemy was growing on their enmity - the power of the Hohenzollerns.
On December 31, 1756, Russia joined the alliance of Austria and France, stipulating its non-participation in the Anglo-French war over the colonies. France drew closer to Russia on the basis of hostility to Prussia. But Paris maintained its two-hundred-year alliance with the Ottoman Empire and did not promise to fight it on our side. The French influence in Constantinople now did not warm up, but restrained the Ottomans, which puzzled them a lot.
Elizaveta Petrovna, not relying on diplomacy, sent Hetman K.G. Razumovsky - to observe the southern border of Russia. And no matter how much later Friedrich and the British gave bribes to the Ottoman viziers, they, absorbing gold, waited for someone to take, but did not move.
The Russian-French alliance threw Sweden into disarray, where pro-French forces were strong, eager for war with Russia. Friedrich in the 1740s I really hoped for the Swedes in their planned campaign against Russia. The alliance of France, Austria and Sweden against Friedrich was concluded in Stockholm on March 21, 1757. Austria promised the Swedes Pomerania, once Swedish, and then part of Prussia.
The French king Louis XV ordered his ambassador to influence the Saxon-Polish king Augustus III and the Polish Sejm. The French and Austrians agreed to the passage of Russian troops through the Commonwealth - to the lands of Prussia.
Elizaveta Petrovna took advantage of all the mistakes of Frederick, which he did not pay attention to, considering her alliance with England an excellent strategy. Frederick arrogantly neglected the Russian army, confident that his generals could handle it. But after the capture by Russian troops East Prussia he realized that he had underestimated the enemy.
In the Seven Years' War, Russia attacked Prussia from the east and northeast - from the Commonwealth, East Prussia and Pomerania, and finally from Silesia - from the southeast. The Russian fleet dominated the Baltic, defending St. Petersburg and helping the ground troops. Austria pushed into Silesia and from the south, from Bohemia and Saxony. France - from the west, from the Rhine valley, and from the southwest, from the river Main, reaching the center and north of present-day Germany.
England sent help to Frederick via the North Sea and the coastal principality of Hanover. He dodged so as not to be crushed. But by the end of 1761, as we will see later, he was nevertheless pushed back to the edge of the abyss.
The guise of Protestantism (the sect of Calvinists, or Reformed) poorly concealed Frederick's godlessness. Of the most different countries Europe, he touted the settlers who made up late XVIII century, almost a third of the population of Prussia. Even from wandering gypsies, Frederick set up settled colonies, and as the French historian Lavisse wrote in late XIX century, "... their descendants can still be recognized by their facial features, by their customs ...".
German historian Delbrück in "History of military art within the framework of political history"(Berlin, 1920; Russian translation: M., 1938. Vol. 4, p. 228-229) writes about the borrowing by the Germans of many French military terms in late XVII in. In 1688-1689. out of 1000 officers of the Brandenburg army, at least 300 were French emigrants (Calvinists), out of 12 generals - 4.
In 1768, after the end of the Seven Years' War, the army of Frederick II had 90,000 hired foreigners and only 70,000 Prussians. Delbrück admits: “Under such conditions, the stick becomes the main tool for educating troops and a symbol of the contempt with which the common soldier was treated, especially in Prussia. This situation in turn caused the development of strong desertion and measures to counteract it.
For wars, money was needed, and their search required connections with the relevant circles. German historiography does not deal with this delicate issue.
Friedrich's chief lawyer and his "grand chancellor" in 1747-1755. was Baron Samuil von Koktseyi (Cocceji), who went over to Prussia. Samuil's father, also a lawyer, a native of the commercial city of Bremen, wandered from country to country, giving advice to various princes, and in 1712 became an "imperial baron", i.e. his title was recognized in all the states that were part of the confederation - the "Holy Roman Empire".
Among the hired cavalrymen of Frederick were Mohammedans from Bosnia - lancers (Uhlanen, Bosniaken). And one of his best field marshals Moritz Dessau died in 1760 from a wound received in the battle with the Russian army at Zorndorf in 1758. Moritz Dessau is the son of Prince Leopold Dessau. He was employed by Brandenburg back in 1695, for which he was nicknamed der alte Dessauer ("old Dessau"). Carried away by the daughter of a pharmacist. She bore him three sons who made military career including Moritz. In hindsight, the Austrian emperor, as the head of the "Holy Roman Empire", recognized the marriage of the "old Dessau" and the pharmacist as legal, and for their children - the rights to the Principality of Dessau.
Another example of Friedrich's cunning. Six years before his death, in 1780, he granted the nobility to his officers, Loewe (Lowe) and Zem (Sehm). For this, Friedrich was praised two hundred years later, in 1992, by The New York Times in an article about the international families of the German aristocracy (translated from the Kaiser's Berliner Tageblatt - Berlin Daily).
Remembering these and many similar cases, the current champions of the "purity of Aryan blood", like their predecessors in the Kaiser's "Second" and Nazi "Third Reich", could not be proud of their origin from Wotan and the Nibelungs, denouncing the Russian Empire in an imaginary Asian origin.
N. SELISCHEV,
member of the Russian Historical Society
The personality of Empress Elizabeth is in many ways contradictory. Elizabeth fell between two opposite cultural currents, was brought up among new European trends and traditions of pious domestic antiquity. Both influences left their imprint on her, and she knew how to combine the concepts and tastes of both.
The religious mood was combined in it with an aesthetic feeling. The bride of all sorts of suitors in the world, from the French king to her own nephew, under the Empress Anna, saved by Biron from the monastery and the ducal Saxe-Coburg Meiningen slum, she gave her heart to the court chorister from the Chernigov Cossacks. Elizabeth until the end of her life was confident in the possibility of traveling to England by land; and she also founded the first real university in Russia - Moscow.
The most legitimate of all the successors and successors of Peter I, but raised to the throne by rebellious guards bayonets, she inherited the energy of her great father, built palaces in twenty-four hours and traveled the then way from Moscow to St. Petersburg in two days, regularly paying for each driven horse. Peaceful and carefree, she was forced to fight for almost half of her reign, defeated the first strategist of that time, Frederick the Great, took Berlin, laid the abyss of soldiers on the fields of Zorndorf and Kunersdorf.
Klyuchevsky notes that since the reign of Princess Sophia, life has never been so easy in Russia, and not a single reign before 1762 left such a pleasant memory. In it, somewhere deep under a thick crust of prejudices, bad habits and spoiled tastes, there still lived a man who sometimes broke out into the open in a vow before seizing the throne not to execute anyone by death and in the decree of May 17, 1744, which fulfilled this vow, which actually abolished the death penalty. execution in Russia, then in the non-approval of the fierce criminal part of the Code, drawn up in the Commission of 1754 and already approved by the Senate, with exquisite types of the death penalty, then in the prevention of obscene petitions from the Synod about the need to abandon the vow given by the Empress, then, finally, in the ability to cry from an unjust decision torn out by the intrigues of the same Synod.
Elizabeth was a smart and kind, but disorderly and capricious Russian lady of the 18th century, who, according to Russian custom, was scolded by many during her lifetime and, according to Russian custom, everyone mourned after her death.
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