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Beginning with Peter the Great, Russian czars had married only foreign princesses
By Olga Martynenko
Moscow News
Many of those who have read Peter the Great by Alexei Tolstoi are bound to remember the painful scene of the first nuptial night that the 16-year-old czarevich had with Yevdokia Lopukhina: He was forcibly married and did not love her. That happened exactly 315 years ago, when feelings were not a factor to be taken into account, especially in dynastic marriages. Yet the willful czar so deeply-liked and even hated his wife that he banished her to a convent, years later finding a companion that he really fancied. As is known, she was an ethnic German from the Baltic region, nee Martha Skavronskaya, of the lower middle class, purportedly a sutler, who was crowned as Catherine I.
Queen Elizabeth I showed admirably shrewd judgment turning down Ivan the Terrible of Russia when he asked for her cotusinhhand in marriage, because she believed him to be of unsound mind.
The great reformer also proved a trail-blazer in the Romanovs' family affairs, establishing a tradition that was not broken by any one of his successors.
All of them, including the hapless Nicholas II, married foreign, mainly German, princesses. The only difference was that the subsequent empress came of noble families. Those “gentle Europeans” (Protestants and Lutherans) readily converted to the Orthodoxy, following local customs, as a general rule had a large number of offspring, and felt as Russian as could be. And that was how they were seen in both Russia and Europe. In 1812, the great Beethoven, who was deeply upset by the Napoleonic expansion, dedicated his triumphant Seventh Symphony to the wife of the victorious Emperor Alexander I, not to his compatriot Luise of Baden, as the empress was known before marriage.
Elizabeth, Peter the Great's daughter who reigned after him, had a good match negotiated for her — King Louis XV of France, but the plan fell through, and she happily lived the rest of her life with Alexei Razumovsky, a descendant of a Ukrainian Cossack (also, a foreigner by present-day standards), granting him the title of count and the rank of field marshal. As for Catherine the Great, she herself was the German bom wife of Peter III, who prior to her marriage bore an unmercifully long name — Sophie Friederike Auguste of Anhalr-Zerhst, but that was the only case when the wife refused to obey her husband and simply overthrew him.
But then Catherine the Great's son, Paul I, model spouse. His first beloved wife, Princess Wilhelmine of Hesse- Darmstadt (who was christened Natalya Alexeevna), died in labor. That same year Paul married again — Princess Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg, who was named Maria Fedorovna. She was pretty, intelligent and well educated, and studied engraving and carving in bone and stone, making with her own hands a medal die-stamp for her husband's coronation. She had 10 children, two of them becoming emperors: Alexander and Nicholas. The empress became famous for what is now known by the colorless term of social security, having to that end established the Mariinsky Department. But virtue, as a rule, goes unrewarded: Paul I did not love her.
Despite her beauty, the aforementioned Luise of Baden (Yelizaveta Alexeevna) was also unhappy in marriage. Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich Romanov devoted a monumental work to her from which the prudish Nicholas II personally expunged a chapter about the empress’s affair with horse-guardsman.
Unlike Alexander II’s wife (righ marriage (the future em
Alexander's brother, Nicholas I, who succeeded him to the throne alter his death, married for love, naturally a Prussian Princess again — Friederike Luise Charlotte Wilhelmine, whom he had met in Berlin, Alexandra Fedorovna was also extremely good-looking and intelligent, as noted by, among others, the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, who taught her Russian, while the Russkaya starina magazine praised her refined delicacy and her wonderful soul. The empress bore seven children (the eldest, Alexander, succeeded his father of the throne), did not meddle in state affairs, and engaged in charity, spending two- thirds of her personal funds an charity projects. Although rumors about the unfaithfulness of her husband, a great womanizer, survived until the third millennium, Nicholas I highly valued his virtuous wife (true, he reproached her for her predilection for Lermontov), naming a drama theater in St Petersburg after her. But Alexander II, who openly cheated on his lawfully wedded spouse, also built a theater — even more renowned — and named it after her the Mariinsky.