Short answers, pulled from the story.
Anna Ioannovna was Empress of Russia from 1730 to 1740. Before becoming empress, she served as regent of the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia from 1711 to 1730. She was the daughter of Tsar Ivan V and the niece of Peter the Great.
The Supreme Privy Council, led by Prince Dmitri Golitzyn, chose Anna because she was a childless widow with no foreign husband and nearly two decades of governing experience in Courland. Her elder sister Catherine was passed over because her husband, Karl Leopold, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, posed a risk of foreign interference in Russian governance.
The Conditions were a declaration Anna signed on the 18th of January 1730 that required her to govern according to the Supreme Privy Council's counsel and barred her from declaring war, levying taxes, punishing nobles without trial, or appointing officials without the council's consent. On the 7th of March 1730, she repudiated the document after a group of between 150 and 800 petitioners urged her to assume autocratic power, and she subsequently had the framers executed or exiled to Siberia.
Anna resurrected the Secret Office of Investigation to prosecute political crimes. It was run by Senator A. I. Ushakov. Russian authorities recorded roughly 20,000 victims, including members of the highest native nobility, who fell to the apparatus of Anna and Biron's police.
Anna had an ice palace built to mark the forced wedding of Prince Mikhail Alekseevich Golitsyn, whom she had made her court jester, to a Kalmyk maid named Avdotya Buzheninova. The structure measured thirty-three feet high and eighty feet long and included icy beds, chairs, windows, and logs of ice. The couple was paraded to the palace on an elephant and left there on an extremely cold winter night; they survived after Avdotya traded a pearl necklace for a sheepskin coat from a guard.
The Imperial Theatre School, the first ballet school in Russia and the second in the world, was founded on the 4th of May 1738 through the initiative of French ballet master Jean-Baptiste Lande. After 1957 it became known as the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet. Anna also founded the Cadet Corps in 1731 and continued funding the Russian Academy of Science, where the foundation for the Russian Ballet was laid.