Terrible Tsarinas: Five Russian Women in Power (9 page)

Misled by her dignified and docile air, the plenipotentiaries never suspected that she had already made arrangements to have her favorite join her, in Moscow or St. Petersburg, as soon as she signaled to him that the road was clear. This possibility seemed all the more likely since she was getting word from her partisans in Russia that she had considerable support among the minor nobility. This group was eager to move against the upper aristocracy, the
verkhovniki
as they were popularly called, which they accused of encroaching on the powers of Her Majesty in order to increase their own. Rumors were even circulating that in the event of any conflict, the Imperial Guard, which had always defended the sacred rights of the monarchy, would be disposed to intervene in favor of the descendant of Peter the Great and Catherine I.

Having worked out the details of her secret plan, and having ensured the delegation of her complete subservience, and making a show of bidding Bühren a final good-bye, Anna set out, followed by a retinue worthy of a princess of her rank. On February 10, 1730, she stopped for the night at the village of Vsyesvyatskoye, at the gates of Moscow. Peter II’s funeral was to take place the following day. She would not make it in time - and this delay suited her very well. Besides, as she soon heard, a scandal marred the day of mourning. At the last moment Catherine Dolgoruky, the late tsar’s fiancée, had demanded that she be given a place in the procession among the members of the imperial family. Those who were truly entitled to this privilege refused to allow her to join them; and after an exchange of invectives, Catherine had gone home, furious. These incidents were reported to Anna Ivanovna in detail; she found it all very amusing. They made the calm and quiet of the village of Vsyesvyatskoye, muffled under a blanket of snow, seem all the more pleasant.

But now she had to direct her thoughts to making her entrance into the former capital of the tsars. Concerned to ensure her popularity, she offered a round of vodka to the detachments of the Preobrazhensky regiment and the Horse Guards who had come to greet her, and forthwith she promoted to colonel the head of these units, Count Simon Andreyevich Saltykov, her principal collaborator, who had been a lieutenant-colonel. By contrast, receiving a courtesy visit from the members of the Supreme Privy Council, she greeted them with frosty correctness; she pretended to be surprised when the chancellor, Gabriel Golovkin, tried to present her with the Order of St. Andrew, which was hers, by right, as sovereign. “It’s true,” she observed with irony, blocking his gesture, “I had forgotten to take it!” And, calling over one of the men in her entourage, she invited him to hand her the cord, thus snubbing the chancellor, who was flustered by such contempt for customs. On their way out, the members of the Supreme Privy Council must have been thinking, privately, that this tsarina was not going to be as easy to handle as they had thought.

On February 15, 1730, Anna Ivanovna finally made her solemn entrance into Moscow and, on the 19th, oaths to Her Majesty were sworn in the Assumption Cathedral and the main churches of the city. Having been warned of the Empress’s poor opinion of it, the Supreme Privy Council decided to release some ballast and to modify somewhat the traditional text of the commitment, swearing fealty to “Her Majesty and the Empire,” which should calm any apprehensions. Then, after many secret meetings, and taking into account the uncontrolled maneuverings among the officers of the Guard, they resigned themselves to softening still further the wording of the “interdicts” initially envisaged. Enigmatic and smiling as ever, Anna Ivanovna noted these small corrections without comment. She received her cousin Elizabeth Petrovna with apparent fondness, accepted her hand-kissing and affirmed that she felt much solicitude for their common family. Before dismissing her, she even promised to see to it personally, as sovereign, that Elizabeth Petrovna would never lack for anything in her retirement.

However, in spite of this overt subservience and benevolence, she had not lost sight of her goal, in leaving Mitau to return to Russia. Within the Guard and the lesser and middle nobility, her partisans were preparing a brilliant deed. On February 25, 1730, she was sitting on her throne, surrounded by the members of the Supreme Privy Council, with a crowd of courtiers squeezing around them in the grand salon of the Lefortovo Palace; suddenly, a few hundred officers of the Guard barged in, with Prince Alexis Cherkassky, declared champion of the new empress, at their head.

In a rambling speech he struggled to explain that the document signed by Her Majesty, at the instigation of the Supreme Privy Council, was in contradiction with the principles of the monarchy by divine right. In the name of the million subjects devoted to the cause of Holy Russia, he begged the tsarina to denounce this monstrous act, to convoke the Senate, the nobility, the senior officers, and the church fathers as soon as possible, and to dictate to them her own concept of power.

“We want a tsarina-autocrat, we do not want the Supreme Privy Council!” one of the officers shouted, kneeling before her. Anna Ivanovna, a consummate actress, feigned astonishment. She appeared to have discovered, suddenly, that her good faith had been abused. Believing that she was acting for the good of all in renouncing some of her rights, she now found that she had only done a service to the ambitious and the malicious! “What’s this!?” she exclaimed. “When I signed the charter at Mitau, was I not responding to the desires of the entire nation?” And in that moment, the officers of the Guard took a step forward, as if on parade, and exclaimed in unison: “We will not allow laws to be dictated to our sovereign! We are your slaves, but we cannot tolerate rebels taking it upon themselves to control you. Say the word and we will throw their heads at your feet!”

Anna Ivanovna struggled to contain her joy. In a blink of an eye, her triumph repaid all the affronts she had suffered. They thought they could outsmart her, but it was she who had outwitted her sworn enemies, the
verkhovniki
. Glaring at these disloyal dignitaries, she declared: “I do not feel secure here any longer!” And, turning toward the officers, she added: “Obey only Simon Andreyevich Saltykov!”

That was the man whom she had just promoted, a few days before. The windowpanes shook with the officers’ cheers. With just one sentence, this able woman had swept away the Supreme Privy Council, thus proving herself worthy of leading Russia to glory, justice and prosperity.

The moment of truth had come. The Empress had the text of the charter read aloud, and after each article, she posed the same question: “Is that what the nation wants?” And, each time, the officers shouted their response: “Long live the sovereign autocrat! Death to the traitors! Death to anyone who refuses her this title!”

Approved by plebiscite even before she was crowned, Anna Ivanovna then concluded, in a sweet tone that contrasted with her imposing matronly stature: “Why, then this paper is useless!” And, to the hurrahs of the crowd, she tore the document to bits and scattered them at her feet.2

At the conclusion of this tumultuous event, which she regarded as her real coronation, the Empress and her entourage (still swelled by the officers of the Guard) went to see the members of the Supreme Privy Council - who had preferred to withdraw to another area, rather than watching her moment of triumph. They had thought they were trimming her claws, and here she was slashing them to the quick. Whereas the majority of the councilors were dumb-struck, Dmitri Golitsyn and Vasily Dolgoruky turned to face the mass of their opponents and publicly admitted their defeat. “Let everything be done in accordance with the divine will of Providence!” Dolgoruky said, philosophically.

Again, the crowd burst into cheers. “The Day of Dupes” was over. When it was no longer risky to take sides, Ostermann suddenly emerged. He had pretended to be seriously ill, confined to his room by his doctors; now, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, he congratulated Anna Ivanovna, swore his unfailing devotion to her and announced, privately, that he was preparing to bring a lawsuit in the name of Her Majesty against the Dolgorukys and the Golitsyns. Anna Ivanovna smiled with a scornful joy. Who thus dared to claim that she was not of the same blood as Peter the Great? She had just proven the opposite. And this idea alone filled her with ride.

The hardest part was over; she could prepare for the coronation without any unnecessary emotion. Striking while the iron was hot, she set the coronation ceremony to take place just two weeks later, on March 15, 1730, with all the usual pomp, in the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin. Catherine I, Peter II, Anna Ivanovna: the sovereigns of Russia followed one another at such short intervals that the waltz of “Their Majesties” made everyone dizzy. This empress was the third one in six years to proceed through the streets of Moscow. The novelty was wearing thin, but the crowds still came out to cheer enthusiastically and to proclaim their veneration of their “little mother.”

Meanwhile, Anna Ivanovna was not sitting idly by. She started by naming Simon Andreyevich Saltykov, who had served her cause so well, to the post of General-in-Chief and Grand Master of the court; and she relegated to his own domains the far too busy Dmitri Mikhailovich Golitsyn, to do penance there. But most important of all, she hurried to send an emissary to Mitau, where Bühren was impatiently awaiting the good word. He immediately set out for Russia.

In the old capital, meanwhile, the celebrations surrounding the coronation went on, accompanied by gigantic light shows. The scintillating fireworks were soon rivaled by an unusually brilliant aurora borealis. Suddenly, the horizon blazed up. The sky turned radiant, as though it had been injected with blood. Among the people, some dared to call it an ill omen.

Footnotes

1.
Mémoires
du prince Dolgoruky
, cited by K. Waliszewski, L’Héritage de Pierre le Grand.

2. Details and comments reported in L’Avenement d’Anna Ire, by Korsakov; citations quoted in Waliszewski,
Op. Cit.

Married at the age of 17 to Duke Frederick William (who had developed a reputation as a quarrelsome and drunken prince), Anna Ivanovna had retired with her husband to Annenhof, in Courland (today’s Lithuania, more or less). A few months after leaving Russia, she found herself widowed. She then moved to Mitau, where she lived in dereliction and embarrassment. During these years when the whole world seemed to have forgotten her very existence, she had a constant companion in Ernst Johann Bühren, a petty nobleman from Westphalia. A man of little education but unlimited ambition, Bühren replaced her first lover, Peter Bestuzhev. He proved to be very effective at the day’s work, in the office, and at night, in Anna’s bed. She accepted his guidance as readily as his caresses; and he relieved her of all her worries and provided all the pleasure she could wish for. Although his real name was Bühren, and although his family and friends had Russianized it to Biren, he preferred a “Frenchified” version - Biron. He was a grandson of one of Jacques de Courland’s stablemen, but that did not stop him from pretending to a very honorable heritage; he claimed to be related to the noble French family, de Biron.

Anna Ivanovna took him at his word. Moreover, she was so attached to him that she discovered hundreds of similarities in the way they both approached life; this harmony of tastes went as far as the details of their intimate behavior. Like his imperial mistress, Bühren adored luxury but was none too scrupulous when it came to moral or bodily purity. A woman of horse sense and robust health, Anna was not offended by anything and even appreciated Bühren’s odor of sweat and cattle sheds, and the Teutonic roughness of his language. At the table as in bed, she preferred substantial satisfactions and strong scents. She liked to eat, she liked to drink, she liked to laugh. A very large woman with a well-rounded belly and an ample bust, her body, weighed down with fat, was topped by a bloated, puffy face crowned by abundant brown hair and lit up by eyes of a sharp blue, whose boldness disarmed people before she even spoke. She was mad for brilliantly-colored dresses trimmed with gilt thread and embroidery; and she had little use for the aromatic toilette waters in use at the court. Among her entourage, it was said that she insisted on cleansing her skin with melted butter.

She took pride in having as many horses as there are days in the year. Every morning, she would inspect her stables and kennels with all the satisfaction of a miser inventorying his treasure - but she was full of contradictions. While she adored animals, she also took a sadistic pleasure in killing them and even torturing them. Soon after accepting the crown and being installed in St. Petersburg, she ordered that loaded rifles be kept in every room of the Winter Palace. Sometimes she would be struck by an irresistible impulse - cracking open a window, she would snap up her weapon and shoot a bird out of the sky. As the salons shook with the explosion and filled with gun-smoke, she would call her startled ladies in waiting and order them to do the same, under penalty of being dismissed.

She also enjoyed Dutch humming-tops and she would have her representative in Amsterdam buy bundles of the special string out of which the whips were made for spinning the tops. She exhibited the same passion for silks and trinkets, which she would order from France. She was fond of performances of any kind. Everything that flatters the spirit, everything that tickles the senses, was charming to her.

On the other hand, she did not see any need to cultivate learning by reading books or listening to the discourses of alleged specialists. Greedy and lazy, she went along according to her instincts and utilized the briefest leisure moments to take naps. Having drowsed for an hour or so, she would call in Bühren, negligently sign whatever papers he put before her and, having thus fulfilled her imperial obligations, she would open the door and hail the young ladies of honor who sat in the next room sewing embroideries.

“
Nu, dyevki, poiti!
[OK, girls, give us a song!],” she would cry.

Her docile followers would strike up the choir, singing some popular refrain, and she would listen to them with a happy smile, nodding her head. This interlude would go on as long as the s ingers were able to more or less keep up a pretense of following the tune. If one of them, overcome by fatigue, lowered her voice or hit a wrong note, Anna Ivanovna would correct her with a resounding roar. Often, she would call storytellers to her bedside, and have them entertain her with the tales she had enjoyed in her childhood, always the same ones; or she would call in a monk who was good at explaining the truths of religion. Another obsession which she flattered herself with having inherited from Peter the Great was her passion for grotesque exhibitions and natural monstrosities. Nothing was funnier to her than the spectacles performed by buffoons and dwarves. The uglier and stupider they were, the more she applauded their jokes and antics. After 19 years of provincial mediocrity and obscurity, she wanted to remove the veneer of propriety and impose on the court a life of unprecedented luxury and chaos. Nothing struck her as too beautiful nor too expensive - when it came to satisfying the whims of the sovereign.