Empress Elizabeth and Prussia

One thing that startled me in re-reading Gulag Archipelago was Solzhenitysn's praise of the Empress Elizabeth for never having anyone executed during her reign. He says she was the only Russian ruler to do so.

Now in my mind, the Empress Elizabeth has become famous for something else. She tragically died too soon. Not that she died young, but if only she had lived for even another year longer, there would have been no Prussia, and the 20th century might have been a much more peaceful place. Frederick II of Prussia, (commonly called 'Frederick the Great', but I don't think of him as great) was a much more civilized ruler than Hitler, and even more civilized than William II (or the generals who were really determining strategy during William's reign), he had one weakness as a ruler, that his descendants as rulers of Prussia and Prussia dominated Germany shared. Like German generals in the 20th century, he was a good field commander, and usually won his battles. And like German supreme commanders in the 20th century, this didn't do him good, because he found himself in a war with too many enemies at once. The Seven Years war saw Prussia taking on Russia, Austria, and France (plus at least one other small German state), with only Britain as an economic ally (well they were fighting the French in North America, but not in Europe). And despite all the battlefield victories he had won, Frederick and his army were getting overwhelmed in 1762. And then, Elizabeth dies, and her son Peter, the new Tsar, a great personal fan of Prussia, makes peace, and the alliance against Prussia collapses.

And somehow for all the 19th century Prussian elaboration of the science of war, they never codified the obvious principle -- avoid fighting too many enemies at once. And along comes 1914, the only plan the Prussian army (while it was the German empire by then, the heart of the army was all Prussian) is the Schlieffen plan. Not a bad contingency plan in case a two front war is inevitable, it was a terrible plan for the situation when a one front war was still quite possible. If the Germans had stood still, and waited for the war to start before actually wading in to defend Austria, there might have been only the Austro-Serbian war of 1914, or the Austro-German-Russian war of 1914 (both easily won by Austria or Austria and Germany). Would the French have attacked Germany just because Russia had attacked Germany to defend Russia? The history I remember is that the French held their troops back 5 miles from the German border just to avoid an accident that would make war inevitable. But Germany plunged into the two front war, and the Schlieffen plan brought in Great Britain as well, all because Germany was unified around a Prussia, that never had realized what an awful mistake Frederick II had made, only to be delivered by a stroke of luck.