Catherine the Great

Elizabeth was determined to defeat Prussia and Frederick. She had entered the war to honor her treaty with Austria, and she meant to see it through. The end of the war was coming; Frederick no longer led the most effective army in Europe, and both the Austrians and the Russians had become veterans. As Frederick’s manpower dwindled, the odds against him lengthened. Proof of this came at the Battle of Kunersdorf, on August 25, 1759, where, fifty miles east of Berlin, fifty thousand Prussians supported by three hundred cannon attacked seventy-nine thousand Russians dug into a strong defensive position. Frederick’s infantry hurled itself against the firmly anchored, well-defended Russian positions. By nightfall, when the fighting ended, Kunersdorf had become Frederick’s worst defeat in the Seven Years’ War; in the aftermath, Prussian soldiers simply flung away their muskets and ran. Although the Russian army suffered sixteen thousand dead and wounded, it inflicted eighteen thousand casualties on the Prussians. The king himself had two horses killed under him, and a bullet was deflected by a gold snuffbox he carried in his coat. That night, he wrote to a close friend in Berlin, “Of an army of forty-eight thousand, I do not have three thousand left. All flee and I am no longer master of my men. Berlin must look to its own safety. This is a terrible mishap and I shall not survive it. I have no more reserves and, to tell the truth, I believe all is lost.” In the morning, eighteen thousand men straggled back to join the king, but the forty-seven-year-old monarch remained in despair. And in pain. “What is wrong with me,” he wrote to his brother, Prince Henry, “is rheumatism in my feet, one of my knees and my left hand. I have also been in the grip of an almost continual fever for eight days.”

In St. Petersburg, Elizabeth rejoiced in the good news and endured the bad. On January 1, 1760, four months after Kunersdorf, she told the Austrian ambassador, “I intend to continue the war and to remain faithful to my allies even if I have to sell half my diamonds and dresses.” The commander of her army in Germany, General Peter Saltykov, repaid her dedication. In the summer of 1760, the Russian army crossed the Oder. Cossack cavalry rode into Berlin and occupied Frederick’s capital for three days.

As her pregnancy advanced, Catherine secluded herself. Her excuse—that it mortified her to see her husband publicly according almost royal honors to his mistress—was a convenience to help her protect her real situation. Now, while the grand duke was talking of repudiating her, there was no chance that he would pretend that this new child was his. Determined not to give him any justification for setting her aside, Catherine concealed her pregnancy, wearing wide hooped skirts, spending her days in an armchair in her room, receiving no one.

Catherine’s secret was better kept than Elizabeth’s. The empress had commanded that news of her condition be hidden from the grand duke and grand duchess. She attempted to conceal the physical ravages of illness: the deathly pale face, the overweight body, the swollen legs. These were hidden beneath rouge and silver gowns. Elizabeth sensed that Peter was waiting impatiently for her death, but she was too exhausted to break her word and carry out her real wish: to transfer the succession to Paul. She had energy and focus enough only to drag herselfy from her bed to a sofa or an armchair. Ivan Shuvalov, her recent favorite, was no longer able to comfort her; she seemed at peace only when Alexis Razumovsky, her former lover and perhaps her husband, was sitting by her bed, soothing her with soft Ukrainian lullabies. As the days passed, Elizabeth lost interest in Russia’s future and took less and less interest in her surroundings. She knew what was coming.

Her agony paralyzed Europe. All eyes were on the sickroom, where the outcome of the war hung on the struggle of a woman fighting for life. The allies’ dearest hope near the end of 1761 was that the empress’s doctors might manage to prolong her life for another six—and, if possible, twelve—months, by which time they hoped that Frederick would be beyond recovery. In private, Frederick himself admitted that he was near the end. The prize for which Russia had struggled for five years was within reach. If only Grand Duke Peter could be held back from his inheritance for a few more months, his enthusiasm for the Prussian king and all of his plans would be meaningless. It was not to be.