Daughter of Peter the Great

Annotation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. I opine that the chief cause of the almost universal ignorance of the chief events and persons of this epoch making reign is the undeniable difficulty of the subject it self. The Court of St. Petersburg, under Elizabeth, was the focus of European diplomacy, and consequently the arena wherein conflicting ambitions met in mortal strife armed with all the weapons of Chicanery and violence. There is no other period of political history with which I am acquainted wherein it is so hard to separate truth from falsehood, so hard to construct a sober, rational and coherent narrative out of the confused and confusing mass of ambiguous and contradictory documents which the enquirer has to deal with. Another difficulty is, of course, the fact that no small part of the sources is in Russian, a language still, unfortunately, almost unknown among us.