Book excerpt: Born in 1709, the illegitimate daughter of Peter the Great and a woman of Livonian yeoman stock, Elizabeth was the only one of the Tsar's many children to survive to maturity. She lived through the reigns of four monarchs after her father's death, before seizing the throne in 1741 at the age of thirty-two. Faced with governing a country made unstable by frequent changes of ruler and caught up in a web of international politics, she evolved a policy that set Russia on the road to becoming a major Western power.--From book jacket.