Anna of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Anna Ioannovna signed away her absolute power on the 18th of January 1730, in the presence of the Supreme Privy Council in her capital of Mitau. The document was called the "Conditions," and it stripped her of the right to declare war, levy taxes, or promote anyone to office without the council's consent. She signed it. Then, forty-three days later, she tore it apart.

  The woman who became Empress of Russia had spent nearly two decades governing a small duchy on the Baltic coast, far from the glittering court her uncle Peter the Great had built. She was born the daughter of a mentally disabled co-tsar, raised in austerity by a strict widowed mother, married off at seventeen, and widowed within weeks. By the time the council selected her as empress, she was forty years old, childless, and living in what is now Latvia. The nobles who chose her expected gratitude and pliability. They received neither.

  What followed was a decade marked by an ice palace built for a forced wedding, a secret police apparatus that processed roughly 20,000 victims, and a foreign policy that cost the Russian Empire a hundred thousand men and millions of rubles in a single war. Within Russia, Anna's ten-year reign is remembered as a "dark era." The questions worth asking are how such a reign began, what drove it, and what it left behind.

• 2. A Childhood of Contrasts

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  Anna was born in Moscow as the daughter of Tsar Ivan V and his wife Praskovia Saltykova. Ivan V shared the throne of Russia with his younger half-brother Peter the Great, but Ivan was mentally disabled and, by most accounts, could not govern effectively. Peter therefore ruled alone, and Ivan V died in February 1696, when Anna was three years old.

  Praskovia Saltykova raised her three surviving daughters in a manner that reflected her own character: disciplined, austere, and morally exacting. Anna had one surviving elder sister, Catherine, and one younger sister, Praskovya. Their mother came from a family of modest means by noble standards, had been a devoted wife to the ailing Ivan, and she expected her daughters to match her own standards of virtue and thrift. The household was shaped by religious observance and domesticity. Anna's education included French, German, religious texts, and folklore, along with some music and dancing.

  As she grew older, Anna earned a reputation for stubbornness and a mean streak, even acquiring the nickname "Iv-anna the Terrible." She was also notably famed for her big cheeks. Then Peter the Great ordered the family to relocate from Moscow to St. Petersburg. The city, still new, was a theater of European court splendor. For Anna, who had grown up in her mother's austere household, the move was transformative. She loved it. The lavishness she encountered there stood in sharp contrast to everything her mother had prized, and that contrast would shape the kind of ruler she became.

• 3. The Courland Years

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  Peter the Great arranged for Anna, then seventeen, to marry Frederick William, Duke of Courland, in 1710. The wedding on the 11th of November 1710 was staged on a grand scale. Anna's uncle provided a dowry of 200,000 roubles. The feast included two dwarfs who jumped out of enormous pies and danced on the tables.

  The couple spent several weeks in the Russian Empire before setting out for Courland. They never arrived together. Only twenty miles outside St. Petersburg, on the 21st of January 1711, Duke Frederick died. The cause was disputed: some attributed it to a chill, others to the effects of alcohol. Anna continued on to Mitau, the capital of Courland, which is now known as Jelgava in western Latvia. She would govern that province for nearly two decades.

  During those years the Russian resident at her court, Count Peter Bestuzhev, served as her adviser and reportedly as her lover. She never remarried, though her enemies insisted she carried on a long affair with a Baltic German courtier named Ernst Johann von Biron. The Courland years gave Anna something none of the other candidates for the Russian throne possessed in 1730: practical administrative experience. She had governed a duchy for almost twenty years. The Supreme Privy Council, when it weighed its options, would find that fact difficult to ignore.

• 4. The Conditions and Their Fate

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  Tsar Peter II, grandson of Peter the Great, died childless of smallpox in the winter of 1729-30. His death left the male Romanov line, which had ruled since 1613, without a direct heir. The Supreme Privy Council, led by Prince Dmitri Golitzyn, faced four candidates: Anna's elder sister Catherine, Anna herself, their younger sister Praskovya, and Elizabeth, the surviving daughter of Peter the Great.

  Elizabeth and her sister carried a complication: they had been born before Peter the Great formally married their mother, Catherine I, who had previously been a maid in his household. Anna's mother Praskovia Saltykova, by contrast, had been a nobleman's daughter. The council also noted that Anna's elder sister Catherine was married to Karl Leopold, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Even separated from him and living inside Russia, her husband's existence raised the prospect of a foreign prince meddling in Russian governance. Catherine also had a daughter, which would lock in a line of succession the nobles perhaps preferred to leave open.

  Anna was selected: a childless widow with no foreign husband, some governing experience, and, the council hoped, a readiness to feel indebted to those who elevated her. The "Conditions" they drew up were modeled on a Swedish precedent. She could not wage war, make peace, impose taxes, punish nobles without trial, or grant estates without the council's agreement. She signed on the 18th of January 1730.

  She reached the Russian capital shortly after. On the 20th of February 1730, she dissolved the Supreme Privy Council entirely. By the 7th of March 1730, a group numbering somewhere between 150 and 800 people, depending on the source, arrived at the palace and petitioned her to repudiate the Conditions and rule as an autocrat. Among those urging her was her own elder sister Catherine. Anna tore up the document. She had the framers of the Conditions executed or exiled to Siberia. On the night she destroyed it, an aurora borealis lit the sky, making the horizon appear, in the words of one contemporary, "in all blood."

• 5. Power and Its Instruments

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  Anna resurrected the Secret Office of Investigation, a body designed to prosecute political crimes, though it occasionally handled non-political cases as well. Senator A. I. Ushakov ran the office, though popular rumor long credited the power behind it to Biron. Punishments handed down by the office were, in the source's own description, painful and disgusting. Some of those convicted of plotting against the government had their noses slit and were beaten with the knout. Russian authorities counted roughly 20,000 people, including members of the highest native nobility, who fell victim to the apparatus of Anna and Biron's police.

  Anna's personality found expression in more theatrical cruelties as well. She compelled Prince Mikhail Alekseevich Golitsyn to serve as her court jester and arranged his marriage to an unattractive Kalmyk maid named Avdotya Buzheninova. To mark the occasion she had an ice palace built, measuring thirty-three feet high and eighty feet long, complete with icy beds, steps, chairs, windows, and even logs of ice arranged in a fireplace of ice. The prince and his bride were placed in a cage on top of an elephant and paraded through the streets. They were then left to spend their wedding night in the palace during an extremely cold night in winter. Anna told them to keep their bodies close if they did not wish to freeze. The couple survived after Avdotya Buzheninova Golitsyn traded a pearl necklace to a guard in exchange for a sheepskin coat.

  Anna also kept a shotgun by a palace window to shoot birds whenever the urge to hunt came upon her. A government established with such instruments of fear and humiliation at the center also, in 1740, created the Office for the Affairs of New Converts. Situated in the Bogoroditsky Monastery in Kazan and staffed by monks, the office presided over a large increase in conversions to Orthodoxy. Converts received goods and cash as a reward for accepting baptism. A Chuvash petition recorded that clergy also beat converts and baptized them against their will. Hundreds of mosques were destroyed. By the 1750s, the number of pagans and Muslims who had converted exceeded 400,000.

• 6. War, Diplomacy, and the Baltic Germans

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  Russia fought two major conflicts during Anna's reign. The War of the Polish Succession, from 1733 to 1735, saw Russia ally with Austria in support of Augustus II's son against Stanislaw Leszczynski, who had French and Swedish backing. Russia's direct involvement ended relatively quickly. The Russo-Turkish War of 1735 to 1739 was a far heavier undertaking.

  The war took four and a half years, a hundred thousand men, and millions of rubles. Its gains, on the surface, amounted to little more than the city of Azov and its surrounding territory. Yet the consequences ran deeper. The Russian commander Munnich demonstrated that Russian grenadiers and hussars could defeat Ottoman forces that outnumbered them by two to one. The Tatar hordes of the Khanate of Crimea were destroyed in the process. Russia's unexpected performance raised its standing across Europe.

  In 1732, before the Turkish war began, Russia returned to Nader Shah the northern Iranian territories Peter the Great had seized during the Russo-Persian War. The Treaty of Resht also opened the possibility of an alliance against the Ottoman Empire. Three years later, in 1735, the remaining territories taken from Iran in the North Caucasus and South Caucasus were handed back under the Treaty of Ganja.

  Biron's influence over Anna brought Baltic Germans into government offices across the empire, generating deep resentment among ethnic Russian nobles. The historian Walter Moss, however, cautioned that the popular image of total Baltic German domination under what Russians called the Bironovschina was an exaggeration. Anna's court was nonetheless almost entirely composed of foreigners, the majority of them German. She gave them ruling positions in her cabinet and other decision-making roles because she placed very little trust in native Russians. Two Qing Dynasty embassies, the only ones China sent to Europe during the entire eighteenth century, came to Anna's court: first at Moscow in 1731, and then at St. Petersburg the following year. These were also the only occasions on record where officials of the Chinese Empire kowtowed before a foreign ruler.

• 7. Science, Art, and the Cadet Corps

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  Anna founded the Cadet Corps in 1731, one year after taking the throne. Boys entered at the age of eight and underwent a rigorous training program covering all subjects necessary for a significant military career. Later rulers, including Catherine the Great, expanded the program to include the arts and sciences alongside military study.

  The Russian Academy of Science, which Peter the Great had established, continued under Anna's funding. Its enrollment was small: the university section never exceeded twelve students, and the secondary school barely topped a hundred. The subjects taught included mathematics, astronomy, and botany. Many of its professors were recruited from the Holy Roman Empire, bringing a Western framework to Russian instruction. One student tutored by those German professors later became the teacher of Catherine the Great, a man named Adodurov. The Academy also sent expeditions into the field; the Bering Sea Expedition, which sought to determine whether Asia and America had once been connected, also generated studies of Siberia and its people that were referenced for years after the expedition returned. The government and the church both interfered with the Academy's funding and research, sometimes altering data to match their respective positions.

  Anna was a firm patron of the arts, and during her reign the Academy began to include theater, architecture, engraving, and journalism in its curriculum because no dedicated arts school yet existed. The reign also saw the founding of what became the Russian Ballet. On the 4th of May 1738, the Imperial Theatre School, later known after 1957 as the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet, was established through the initiative of French ballet master Jean-Baptiste Lande. It was the first ballet school in Russia and only the second in the world.

• 8. Death and Contested Legacy

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  Anna's health failed in the final period of her reign. She suffered from an ulcer on her kidneys and recurring attacks of gout. As her condition worsened, she named her grandnephew Ivan VI as her successor and appointed Biron as regent, a move designed to preserve the line of her father Ivan V and block the descendants of Peter the Great from the throne. Anna died on the 28th of October 1740 at the age of forty-seven, from a kidney stone. Her final words were directed at Biron. She was buried three months later, on the 15th of January 1741.

  Ivan VI was two months old at the time of her death. His mother, Anna Leopoldovna, was despised for her German advisers and connections. Within a short time, Elizabeth Petrovna, the legitimized daughter of Peter the Great, won popular support, confined Ivan VI to a dungeon, and exiled his mother.

  Anna's legacy divided sharply along geographic lines. In the West her reign was read as a continuation of Peter the Great's project: the steady transformation of Russia from Muscovite tradition toward European court culture. Inside Russia the judgment was harsher. The Saxon minister Lefort described her empire as comparable to a storm-threatened ship, manned by a pilot and crew "who are all drunk or asleep." The repeal of Peter the Great's primogeniture law in 1730 gave nobles the right to divide estates among heirs; the rules of 1731 made landlords responsible for their serfs' taxes, tightening economic bondage further; and by 1736, compulsory state service for nobles began at age twenty and ran for twenty-five years. These measures shaped Russian noble and serf life long after Anna's ice palace had melted.