The Tough Lives of Women in Tsarist Russia

The Roman Dynasty ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917. Here, author Ellen Alpsten tells us of the tough life that women led during the period – and considers how one of the heroines in her book came to be such a powerful figure in a male-dominated country.

A 1750s portrait of Elizabeth Petrovna, Empress of All Russia from 1741 to 1762.

Both researching the wild, pitiless world of the Russian Baroque – think late 17th and early to mid-18th century – and writing The Tsarina’s Daughter made me discover many fascinating if fearsome facts. Next to the incredible ingenuity applied to make people suffer in torture and execution for the slightest offence to any authority, be it the Russian Orthodox Church or the Tsar, I was shocked to learn about the rampant maltreatment of women. 

God’s Beast of Burden

My research made me reflect about my gender and the lives we led throughout history. Women were God’s beast of burden: multitasking and toiling from dawn to dusk. If people and historians go misty-eyed when speaking of the 'good old days', thinking of a closer social cohesion and man's limited spiritual horizons, which made for a simpler life, these were terrible days for the ‘weaker sex’. ‘Her-story’ is not only written by Queens and Princesses, but any woman, of which social standing whatsoever, everywhere. Girls received no education other than household chores. Early marriage - sometimes as early as the age of 12 – happened to an often much elder man, who suited your parents, cementing their status and relationships in the village. This husband probably soon turned violent with drink: the liquor of the serfs, the million-fold ground cover of the Russian Earth is called kvass, a bitter drink made of fermented bread. Only steady stupor allowed the poor to suffer their fate. For any woman, annual childbirth was a gamble of life and death. Also, in Russia, the harsh climate and the lack of healthcare forced a mother to see at least half of her offspring die. There was no privacy and certainly not the modern luxury of me-time, or neither dreams nor hopes - just toiling, toiling, toiling from dawn till dusk. 

War as a harbinger of progress

If life was marginally better for women of high standing, the Petrine laws of inheritance introduced by Peter the Great changed the situation substantially for all women. War brought unimaginable suffering to women – losing their sons and husbands – but it was also a harbinger of progress and modernity. In the case of my research for the Tsarina series, I learnt about the most important conflict European history ever forgot: The Great Northern War, Russia’s battle for survival against the then supreme power-player Sweden. No price was too high to pay for Russia’s survival. In Peter the Great’s realm nothing was as superfluous and expendable as human life. His legislative system responded to the challenge the war against Sweden raised: If all men stand in battle, the women have to be allowed to work, running trade. If all sons stay in the field, an unmarried eldest daughter must be allowed to inherit, whilst a second daughter might be widowed and is provided for by property. 

A milestone for Emancipation

The Italian newspaper La Stampa in its glorious review of The Tsarina's Daughter pointed out the changing female situation as a strong point of the novel: ‘Her voice overcomes a fate raging against her.’ 

If the women in The Tsarina’s Daughter have mostly no choice then to succumb to male dominance, my heroine Elizabeth makes an exception to that rule. If her path proved to be stony and often marked by life-threatening situations, her decisions remind us of the freedom that modern women have today. In her life, we witness a milestone in female emancipation and empowerment. Like an inverse Cinderella story, she bears testimony of the strength of human nature and the absolute will to survive. She also transgressed other borders – when threatened with being banished to a convent for her many affairs and the freedom with which she lived her passions, the Spanish envoy noted, deeply scandalized, that ‘she has not an ounce of nun’s flesh on her body and all her faults are in character and not in her appearance.’ 

A Popular People’s Princess

How then could a woman such as my heroine Elizabeth Petrovna, the great Tsar’s daughter and the only surviving of her fifteen siblings, overcome the deeply enrooted obstacles of a male dominated system? Peter the Great’s death left a vacuum of power, which allowed for one of the most complex situations in Russian history. Such as Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the country could not master the spirits that it roused: the huge influx of westerners generated by the great Tsar and his successors. As the realm struggled for survival, Elizabeth cleverly played the popular card. The Russians are a communal people – the word for happiness -‘shast’ye’- means being part of something bigger. The Tsarina’s Daughter was one of them, sharing the complexities and stark opposites of the Slavic soul: born to countless palaces, she preferred camping in the Russian countryside. If JS Bach was invited to become the Romanov’s composer of choice, she sung crude peasant songs and danced with her subjects through many a White Night. While she at her death owned 15,000 gemstone-encrusted gowns, she preferred dressing in often traditional male dress, allowing for an unencumbered lifestyle. She allowed unwittingly for an image of a Russian woman that was further institutionalized by the Soviets, equalizing the female situation in Russia – at least nominally so.

The Tsarina’s Daughter by Ellen Alpsten (Amazon), published by Bloomsbury, is out in hardback on July 8, and Tsarina, Ellen’s first book, is out in paperback now (Amazon US | Amazon UK).

The Romanovs - The Tsarina’s Daughter

The Roman Dynasty ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917. Here, author Ellen Alpsten tells us of her fascination with Russian history and how she started to write her series on the Tsarinas.

Catherine I, one of the Russian Tsarinas. She was empress from 1725-27.

If ever there was a walk on the wild side, the early Romanovs in the 17th and 18th century took it. The wild and unbridled world of the Russian Baroque gives me the perfect backdrop for my novels of the ‘Tsarina’ series: epics cloaked in ice and snow, personal passions ruthlessly push on in the quest for power, resulting in the birth of the nation we know today.

My family’s stance on Russia is ambivalent – my father grew up in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany. Forced to learn Russian he felt free to hate the Soviets. My cousin, however, runs a small, highbrow publishing house, which works with latter-day Russian intellectuals. I myself discovered this geographical behemoth and historical riddle when reading a book called ‘German and Russians’ by author Leo Sievers. It introduced me to the larger-than-life characters of Ivan the Terrible, the ‘Times of Troubles’ and finally the rulers of the young Romanov dynasty, who had been voted into office. I fell in love, head over heels, with these lives, fascinated by their uncompromising fullness.

But how to find out more about the shadowy figures that captured me the most: the women who dared to rise against the oppressing patriarchy in the world’s largest and wealthiest realm? The first century of Romanov rule was largely female-dominated. If the fact had not been ignored, research centered on Russian’s final Tsarina, Catherine the Great, who was not even a Romanov by blood, but a German Princess. Instead, I hoped to surprise and tell something new. Yet where to start? 

Growing fascination

Nikita Romanov said it in 1666: ‘We are as cursed – our men are as meek as maidens, and our women as wild as wolverines.’ Dwelling deeper on such a quote did not allow for half-measures. I read voraciously, and such divers oeuvres ranging from Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky to modern sociological studies such as the deeply disturbing ‘The unwomanly face of war’ by Svetlana Alexeyevich, Biographies like ‘Young Stalin’ by Simon Sebag Montefiore and also the lost, genteel worlds of the few that came at the expense of millions in Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Speak, Memory’. How else should a foreigner grasp a culture as complex as the Russian? My interest morphed into a passion: I watched Russian films such as ‘Battleship Potemkin’ and the experimental ‘Russian Ark’ movie. And, lucky me, there were fascinating original sources galore, such as the diary of the German merchant Adam Olearius, who visited Tsar Mikhail Romanov’s court, stunned by a people ‘hardly better than animals.’ Invaluable, too, were letters of foreigners at the Russian Court such as the British Mrs Rondeau, and reports by the Dutch ambassadors and his colleagues sent by Princes of German nationality. Rounding off things with Robert Massie’s and Henri Troyat’s biographies about Peter the Great was unavoidable. Last but not least, Professor Lindsey Hughes of the ‘London School of Slavonic Studies’ tome 'Russia in the time of Peter the Great' turned out to be my bible as I dwelled deeper and deeper into the strange, shocking, sensuous world of both Russian history and its soul. It combines seemingly insurmountable contrasts casually, a lack of compromise that is fascinating. Finally, I even read Russian myths and fairy tales, which disclose so much about the imagination of a people.  

It took me a year to dare write the first word of my then debut, ‘Tsarina.’ The series is like threading a loom to weave a story as rich as any tapestry covering the walls of the Winter Palace. The novels attempt an answer to what my heroines’ lives were really like, flying in the face of a brutal patriarchy, and taking Russia from backward nation to beginnings of the modern superpower. Fleshing out those bare bones forced me to consider a myriad of aspects. 

Writing

The Russians are a communal people – the word for happiness -‘shast’ye’- means being part of something bigger. Neither ‘Tsarina’ nor ‘The Tsarina’s Daughter’ ever surrendered to fate’s blows but made the best of a given situation. Their minds were not academically trained, they acted with courage, care and cunning, counting on people and rewarding family, friendship, and loyalty. Whatever obstacle there was to overcome, they dusted themselves off and saw another day, ready to be surprised by its gifts. This makes ‘The Tsarina’s Daughter’ a very modern book. 

The strict framework of dates, events and details of the Russian Baroque and the Petrine era set of the beauty of my hitherto hidden historical heroines the better. If I was free to construct ‘my’ characters, every aspect had to be correct, from the clothes they wore, to the food they ate, the beliefs they held and how houses, roads, villages, carts etc. looked. As for the dramatic curve, I followed advice that the best-selling French author Benoîte Groult had once given me when I worked as her assistant: ‘To wish our hero well, the reader needs to see her/him sink low.’ Elizabeth, ‘The Tsarina’s Daughter’, falls from riches to rags and rises from rags to Romanov! 

After all this research I hope that nobody, who has read ‘Tsarina’ or ‘The Tsarina’s Daughter’, will ever forget my heroines again; and I hope for my writing to be as raw and unafraid as their lives were. Any writer dreams of finding such unspoiled, unexploited characters as the ‘Tsarina’ series. 

If an artist has a central theme to his creation, they are mine.

The Tsarina’s Daughter by Ellen Alpsten (Amazon), published by Bloomsbury, is out in hardback on July 8, and Tsarina, Ellen’s first book, is out in paperback now (Amazon US | Amazon UK).