Elizabeth Petrovna was born in Moscow on 18 December, 1709. She was educated by foreign tutors, who taught her a love of dancing and foreign languages. Besides being fluent in Italian, German and French, she was an excellent dancer and rider.

Elizabeth was officially proclaimed a princess (tsarevna) on 6 March, 1711 and heiress (tsarevna) on 23 December, 1721. Under her mother (Catherine I) and nephew (Peter II), she led a merry and frivolous lifestyle.

Elizabeth was commonly regarded as the leading beauty of the Russian Empire. Many foreign princes hoped to marry Elizabeth, but the only suitor whom she loved was Carl August, the younger brother of Prince Carl Friedrich of Holstein. He died of smallpox in summer 1727 and Elizabeth never forgot him. She remained forever attached to Holstein and, when she became empress, summoned her nephew Peter to Russia, along with his bride, Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, whose mother was Carl August's cousin. Although she never married, Elizabeth had long line of admirers, including General Alexander Buturlin, Lord Steward Semyon Naryshkin (her cousin), and a page of the chamber called Alexei Shubin, whom Anna Ioannovna exiled to Siberia in 1732.

As the daughter of Peter the Great, Elizabeth was particularly popular with the guards regiments created by her father. She often visited the regiments, marking special events with the officers and acting as godmother to their children. The guards repaid her kindness on the night of 25 November, 1741, when the thiry-two-year-old princess seized power with the help of the Preobrazhensky Regiment. Arriving at the regimental headquarters, wearing a breast-plate over her dress and grasping a silver cross, she addressed three hundred grenadiers. Holding up the cross, she asked the men: "Who do you want to serve? Me, the natural sovereign, or those who have stolen my inheritance?" After swearing allegiance to her, kissing her hand, and the cross, the troops marched to the Winter Palace, where they arrested the infant emperor, his parents and their Lieutenant Colonel, Count von Munnich. It was a daring coup and it passed without bloodshed. Elizabeth had vowed that if she managed to capture the throne, she would not sign a single death sentence as empress.

She kept her word. The following day, a royal manifesto proclaimed a new empress, Elizabeth I, explaining that the preceding reigns had led Russia to ruin: "The Russian people have been groaning under the enemies of the Christian faith, but she has delivered them from the degrading foreign oppression." The population had indeed suffered under a series of German favourites and Elizabeth exiled the most unpopular of them, including Heinrich Johann Friedrich Ostermann, Burkhard Christoph von Munnich and Carl Gustaf Lowenwolde. The new empress was crowned in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow on 25 April, 1742. During the ceremony, she herself placed the crown on her own head. Elizabeth had no political ambitions of her own and disliked governing.

Documents often waited months for her signature. When given a treaty with Austria to sign, a wasp settled on the pen and the empress put the quill aside. She only returned to signing the document six months later. She sided against Prussia in the Seven Years War out of her personal dislike of Frederick the Great.

View of the Summer Palace of Empress Elizabeth from the Fontanka in St. Petersburg
Artist: Unknown

In her youth Elizabeth had fallen in love with Alexei Razumovsky. In 1756, Elizabeth made him a Field-Marshall for his birthday, 17 March, even though he did not know the first thing about military tactics and had never commanded a unit. On his birthday in 1757, he was presented with the Anitchkov Palace.

Elizabeth Petrovna had another intimate friend--Ivan Shuvalov. The son of a guards captain, Ivan Menshoi Shuvalov, and Tatyana Rostislavskaya, he had pleasant manners and a handsome face. Ivan Shuvalov received a good education and knew several European languages. He began his career as a page of the chamber at the court of Grand Duchess Catherine Alexeyevna, who remembers him as a quiet, modest young man whom she often came across with a book in his hands. Ivan Shuvalov fell in love with Princess Anna Gagarina, an intelligent and well-read girl who was eight years his senior. She reciprocated his love and the couple hoped to get married. Ivan's cousins, however, decided that there was more benefit to be gained from making him the favourite of Elizabeth Petrovna. They prevented the marriage between th twenty-two-year-old Ivan and the thirty-year-old Anna and managed to arrange an audience with the forty-year-old empress.

Elizabeth took an immediate liking to Ivan Shuvalov. In September 1749, she appointed him gentleman of the bedchamber, followed by the usual posts and titles awarded to all favourites--chamberlain, lieutenant general, adjutant general and knight of the Orders of St. Alexander Nevsky and the White Eagle. Elizabeth's ministers attempted to ingratiate themselves with the empress's favourite by offering him even more titles and awards--senator, count and the Order of St. Andrew. Shuvalov, however, was not interested. He was happy with his status as the empress's secretary, which gave him access to her at all times. His opinion decided the outcome of all requests and petitions submitted to Elizabeth. Ivan drafted replies to the reports submitted by foreign diplomats and military commanders, writing the texts of Imperial decrees without bearing any legal responsibility for them. In 1761, the French diplomat Jean-Louis Favier wrote: "He interferes in all affairs, although he does not have any special titles or posts . . . In short, he enjoys all the advantages of a minister without actually being one." Anyone wanted to reach the empress could do so only through Shuvalov.

Elizabeth's health deteriorated in the late 1750s, when she suffered a series of dizzy spells. She refused to take any medicine and became reticent and irritable. She forbade the word "death" to be uttered in her presence. Elizabeth died in St. Petersburg on 25 December, 1761, and was buried in the St. Peter and St. Paul Cathedral on 3 February, 1762, after lying in state for six weeks.

Empress Elizabeth at Tsarskoe Selo
Artist: Eugene Lanceray, 1905