Emperor Peter III Years of life 1728–1762 Years of reign 1761–1762 Mother - eldest daughter Peter I Anna Petrovna.Father - Duke of Holstein-Gottorp Karl Friedrich, nephew of Charles XII.Future Russian Emperor Peter III was born on February 10, 1728 in the city of Kiel, the capital of the small

Elizaveta Petrovna, Russian empress(1741-1761) was born on December 18, 1709 (according to the new style - December 29) in the village of Kolomenskoye near Moscow even before her imprisonment church marriage between her parents - Tsar Peter I and Martha Skavronskaya (Catherine I).

She grew up in Moscow, leaving in the summer for Pokrovskoye, Preobrazhenskoye, Izmailovskoye or Alexandrovskaya Sloboda. I rarely saw my father as a child. When the mother left for St. Petersburg, raising future empress Father's sister, Tsarevna Natalya Alekseevna, or the family of an associate of Peter I, was engaged.

The crown princess was taught dancing, music, dressing skills, ethics, and foreign languages.

At the age of 14, Elizabeth was declared an adult and they began to look for suitors for her. intended to marry her to the French King Louis XV. This plan did not come true, and Elizabeth began to be wooed by minor German princes, until they settled on Prince Karl August of Holstein. But the death of the groom upset this marriage. Without waiting for a blue-blooded groom, the 24-year-old beauty gave her heart to the court singer Alexei Razumovsky.

Razumovsky, a Ukrainian Cossack, was a soloist from 1731 imperial chapel. When Elizaveta Petrovna noticed him, she begged him from Catherine I. When Razumovsky lost his voice, she made him a bandura player, later entrusted him with managing one of her estates, and then her entire courtyard. There is information that at the end of 1742 she married him in a secret marriage in the village of Perov near Moscow.

Having become empress, Elizabeth elevated her morganatic husband to the dignity of count, made him a field marshal and a knight of all orders. But Razumovsky deliberately withdrew from participation in public life.

According to contemporaries’ descriptions, Elizaveta Petrovna was beautiful in a European way. Tall (180 cm), had slightly reddish hair, expressive grey-blue eyes, correctly shaped mouth, healthy teeth.

The Spanish envoy Duke de Lirna wrote about the princess in 1728: “Princess Elizabeth is such a beauty that I have rarely seen. She has an amazing complexion, Perfect eyes, excellent neck and incomparable figure. She tall, is extremely lively, dances well and rides without the slightest fear. She is not without intelligence, graceful and very flirtatious."

During the reign of her mother and her nephew, Elizabeth led have a fun life at court. Under the Empress and the Regent, her position became difficult. Elizaveta Petrovna lost her brilliant position at court and was forced to live almost without a break in her estate, Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda.

On the night of November 25, 1741, with the help of a company of guards from the Preobrazhensky Regiment, Elizaveta Petrovna committed palace coup. The little Emperor Ivan VI and his family were arrested, the favorites of the former empress were sentenced to death penalty, but were then pardoned and exiled to Siberia.

At the time of the coup, Elizaveta Petrovna did not have a specific program for her reign, but the idea of ​​her accession to the throne was supported by ordinary townspeople and the lower guards due to dissatisfaction with the dominance of foreigners at the Russian court.

The first document signed by Elizaveta Petrovna was a manifesto, which proved that after the death of Peter II she was the only legal heir to the throne. The coronation celebrations took place on April 25, 1742 in the Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin. The Empress herself placed the crown on herself.

Having secured power for herself, Elizaveta Petrovna hastened to reward the people who contributed to her accession to the throne or were generally loyal to her, and to form a new government from them. The grenadier company of the Preobrazhensky regiment received the name of the life campaign. Soldiers not from the nobility were enlisted as nobles, corporals, sergeants and officers were promoted to rank. All of them were granted lands, mainly from estates confiscated from foreigners.

Elizaveta Petrovna proclaimed a course towards a return to the legacy of Peter the Great. The decree of December 12, 1741 ordered all the regulations of Peter the Great’s time to be “strongly maintained and consistently acted upon in all governments of our state.” The Cabinet of Ministers was liquidated. The Senate, the Berg and Manufactory Collegium, the Chief Magistrate, and the Provisions Collegium were restored. Also in the 1740s, the prosecutor's office was restored. Elizaveta Petrovna replaced the punishments for embezzlement and bribery (execution, whipping, liquidation of property) common under Peter I with a demotion in rank, transfer to another service and, occasionally, dismissal. Humanization public life during her reign was expressed in the abolition of the death penalty (1756), decrees on the construction of nursing homes and almshouses.

Unlike her father, Elizabeth assigned a large role in administrative affairs and culture not only to St. Petersburg, but to Moscow. Branches were created for all collegiums and the Senate in Moscow; Moscow University, founded in 1755, was given two gymnasiums on Mokhovaya Street in 1756. At the same time, the newspaper "Moskovskie Vedomosti" began to be published, and from 1760 - the first Moscow magazine "Useful Amusement".

Her favorites played a major role in the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna. In the early 1750s, the country was practically led by the empress’s young favorite, Peter Shuvalov, whose name is associated with the implementation of the Elizabethan idea of ​​​​the abolition of internal customs, which gave impetus to the development of entrepreneurship and foreign trade (1753-1754).

The decree on the establishment in 1754 of the Loan and State Banks for nobles and merchants also contributed to the development.

Significant recovery and recovery economic life Russia during the reign of Elizabeth were also caused by the administrative activities of Chancellor Alexei Bestuzhev Ryumin, one of the initiators of the convening of the Commission on the Code in the 1750s, Chief Prosecutor Yakov Shakhovsky, brothers Mikhail and Roman Vorontsov.

The names of Ivan Shuvalov and the Russian encyclopedist Mikhail Lomonosov are associated with the founding of Moscow University (1755), the opening of gymnasiums in Moscow and Kazan, with the name of Fyodor Volkov - the formation of Russian national theater. In 1757, the Academy of Arts was founded in St. Petersburg.

Responding to the requests of the social stratum that supported her, Elizaveta Petrovna allowed the nobles, obligated by the law of 1735 to serve in the military or civil service for 25 years, to take preferential long-term leaves, which were so entrenched that in 1756-1757 it was necessary to resort to drastic measures to force in the estates of officers to report to the army. The Empress encouraged the custom of enrolling children in regiments in infancy, so that long before they came of age they could achieve officer ranks. A continuation of these measures was the order to prepare the Manifesto on the freedom of the nobility (which was later signed by Catherine II), the encouragement of huge spending by the nobles on their daily needs, and an increase in the costs of maintaining the court.

Was also active foreign policy Elizabeth. Upon her accession to the throne, Elizabeth found Russia in a war with Sweden. During the Russian-Swedish war of 1741-1743, Russia received a significant part of Finland. Trying to counter the increased power of Prussia, Elizabeth refused traditional relations with France and concluded an anti-Prussian alliance with Austria. Russia under Elizabeth successfully participated in the Seven Years' War. After the capture of Koenigsberg, Elizabeth issued a decree on the annexation of East Prussia to Russia as its province. The climax military glory Russia under Elizabeth became the capture of Berlin in 1760.

Elizaveta Petrovna herself had weaknesses that cost the state treasury dearly. The main thing was the passion for clothes. Since the day of her accession to the throne, she has not worn a single dress twice. After the death of the empress, 15 thousand dresses, two chests of silk stockings, a thousand pairs of shoes and more than a hundred pieces of French fabric remained in her wardrobe. Her outfits formed the basis of the textile collection of the State historical museum in Moscow.

Elizaveta Petrovna died on December 25, 1761. She appointed her nephew (the son of Anna's sister) - Pyotr Fedorovich - as the official heir to the throne.

After the death of Elizaveta Petrovna, many impostors appeared, calling themselves her children from her marriage to Razumovsky. The most famous figure of them was the so-called Princess Tarakanova.

The material was prepared based on information from open sources