The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Actually there was no end to her cruel games. ‘Find out what baby she bore,’ she instructed one of her governors, ordering him to investigate a mother just delivered of a child. Childless herself and unmarried, she wished to torment this couple, by pretending to the father that the baby had been born handicapped. ‘A person or a monster, a son or daughter? Write it all. If she recovers, send her and baby here. And when you report, write one letter with the truth and another letter which is fake with something funny especially if you describe the baby as not a normal human!’

  She made up for her lack of drinking by presiding over a circus of grotesques, including Beznoika the Legless Mama, Tall Daryushka the Handless and Garbuchka the Hunchback.

  Like an omnipotent schoolgirl bully, Anna arranged female hair-pulling fights between crippled crones that had to draw blood, and dwarf-tossing. ‘She spent entire days chattering and listening to fools,’ recalled Ernst Münnich. Her favourite dwarf was Pedrillo, a Neapolitan violinist who, after Biron had asked if his pregnant wife was as ugly as a goat, invited empress and court to visit his home where they found him in bed with a lactating goat in a nightdress.

  Peter the Great’s Jewish jester da Costa was now entertaining his fourth tsar but Anna preferred reducing aristocrats to the status of fools, forcing Prince Mikhail Golitsyn and Count Alexei Apraxin to serve in her circus. Golitsyn, the grandson of Regent Sophia’s minister, had secretly converted to Catholicism to marry an Italian girl and, as a punishment, Anna ordered him to abandon the wife and serve as her cupbearer for kvass, renaming him Prince Kvassky. Anna was delighted when he arrived in the first consignment of tomfoolery sent by her cousin the Moscow governor, Semyon Saltykov. ‘We’re grateful to you for sending Golitsyn, Miliutin* and Bakhirev’s wife,’ she wrote, ‘but Golitsyn’s the best and outdoes all the fools here. If you find another like him do let me know.’ Golitsyn’s speciality was to dress as a hen and sit on a straw-basket nest for hours clucking in front of the court. After mass on Sundays, Golitsyn and the other fools sat in rows cackling and clucking in chicken outfits. Yet she also cared for her entertainers. She had her veteran dwarf Bakhirev thrashed for asking not to be tossed – then funded his medical treatment and supply of wine. She was incensed when she discovered that laundresses were mixing up ‘the empress’s blouses and linen’ with those of ordinary courtiers. ‘Henceforth there shall be a separate chamber for our linen. This rule to be enforced most strictly. Only the laundry of Legless Mama may be washed with our laundry.’

  She bombarded Saltykov with requests for novelties and gossip. Her interest in other people’s secrets was occasionally positive – she loved matchmaking – but usually sinister: ‘As soon as you get this letter, go to Vlasov’s sister’s home and get the love letters from the chest and send them to me.’ She spent a lot of time investigating her fools: ‘Go to Apraxin’s storeroom and look for a portrait of his father and send it to us – if he hides anything, the Apraxins will be sorry.’ She often requested more chatty ladies: ‘Find a girl in Pereslavl who resembles Tatiana who will die soon to replace her . . . You know our tastes – girls around forty who are talkative.’ If the performers failed she slapped their faces. One such girl, Nastasia Shestakova, remembered how on arrival she was taken to secret police chief Ushakov, who sent her to the empress. ‘Spend the night with me,’ said the empress. Shestakova was delivered to the bedroom where the empress gave a hand to kiss and then ‘She grasped me so strongly by the shoulders that she seized my whole body and it was painful.’ But Anna was not pleased: ‘You’ve aged, you’ve become yellow. You must touch up your eyebrows . . . Have I aged?’

  ‘Not at all, dear Matushka, there’s not a trace of old age in Your Imperial Highness,’ answered the girl.

  ‘How do I compare in weight with Avdotya Ivanovna?’

  ‘She is twice as heavy.’

  ‘Come closer to me.’ Anna’s kindness ‘became simultaneously terrifying and pleasing’, recalled the girl, who threw herself on her knees. ‘Pick yourself up,’ said the empress. ‘Now speak. Tell me stories of robbers.’

  ‘But I’ve never lived with robbers.’

  ‘Speak now!’ This was a dictatorship of loquacity. She required constant chatter, the imperial eighteenth-century version of talk radio, yet these accounts, like that of Princess Oginski earlier, suggest that she herself was bisexual.

  She was as politically vigilant as she was personally curious. She recalled Ushakov, who had helped kill Tsarevich Alexei, and promoted him to baron and head of her new Secret Chancellery. She so enjoyed his revelations that she would break off her beloved hunting to hear gossip and conspiracies. She founded her own Guards regiment, named after her mother’s estate, the Izmailovsky, filled with German officers whom she trusted after her many years in Germanic Courland. No hint of conspiracy was too small for her. ‘We heard that the bishop of Voronezh didn’t immediately order prayers for my accession and said something suspicious,’ she told a governor. ‘Report immediately and tell no one!’

  Anna declared that she would rule in the spirit of Peter the Great, something no one else could really do. She has been condemned for her caprices, her cruelties and her German favourites – her reign is known as the Bironschina, the time of Biron. Yet there is some sexism in this as her shenanigans were no more grotesque than those of Great Peter himself. And her henchmen were not quite as German as they seemed. She appointed Peter’s able, experienced lieutenants, creating a three-man cabinet ‘attached to Our Court’, consisting of Chancellor Golovkin, Cherkassky (co-organizer of the coup on her behalf) and of course the indispensable Osterman. Lazy, vicious and weak, distracted by hunting, spying and dwarf-baiting, Anna allowed this troika to issue imperial orders signed by all three. Since Golovkin and Cherkassky were often ill or absent, Osterman was chief minister. He was born in Germany but he had served in Russia for thirty years and was married to a Streshneva.

  Anna built on the pact between the autocrat and her serf-owning nobility who were keen to avoid Peter the Great’s universal service. Faced with peasant unrest, Anna allowed nobles to keep at least one son at home to run the estate – the first step back from Peter’s rules – while she permitted masters to hunt down and reclaim escaping serfs. She used her magnificent court to impress foreigners – and reward her officials. In this sense, she was no fool. And even her bullying games probably had a political use: the nobility had tried to neuter the autocrat. Now Anna’s games reminded them of their place.

  She took her time to destroy the Dolgorukys and Golitsyns. Peter II’s friend Ivan Dolgoruky, his unfortunate sister Ekaterina and his family were arrested and despatched to Berezov in Siberia, where they remained for eight years – when a more terrible vengeance awaited them. ‘Confiscate all diamonds, gold and silver from Prince Alexei Dolgoruky,’ she ordered Saltykov, ‘and send it to us.’

  Anna knew that it was an autocrat’s duty to ensure a smooth succession, but she was determined that it would not be the popular Elizaveta.15

  Now twenty-one, Elizaveta was often described as the ‘most beautiful girl in Russia’, much to the irritation of the empress, who watched her cousin’s little court for any hint of treason, ordering Marshal Münnich to ‘find out who goes to Elizaveta’s house’ since ‘she drives out at night and people call out to her, showing their devotion’. Cabmen were hired ‘to observe Her Imperial Highness’. Anna was surely jealous of the Russian Venus.

  When two young Guardsmen connected to Elizaveta were denounced for treasonable talk, Anna had them beheaded – but she also exiled the tsarevna’s new lover, her page Alexei Shubin. Anna’s vigilance was understandable, but at this time Elizaveta’s court was more interested in sex than power: presiding over her own Ukrainian choir, Elizaveta ran several lovers in tandem. One of the choristers, Alexei Razumovsky, was to last for the rest of her life, but she was constantly looking for new ones. ‘Little Mother Tsarevna, how fine that Prince Ordov is,’ lady-in-waiting Mavra Shepeleva wrote to Elizaveta, catchi
ng the tone of their coterie. ‘As tall as Buturlin, just as slim, such eyes just like yours in colour, slim legs, wears his own hair down to his waist, arms as lovely as Buturlin’s. I can also report I bought a snuffbox and the picture on it really resembles you when you’re naked.’ Apart from a few eighteenth-century touches, their chatter was as saucy as that of texting teenagers today.

  Instead of Elizaveta, Anna nominated her niece as heir: the thirteen-year-old Anna Leopoldovna, the daughter of her late sister Ekaterina and Karl Leopold, duke of Mecklenburg. Mrs Rondeau, the English ambassador’s wife, observed that the heiress was ‘neither handsome nor genteel. She is grave, seldom speaks, never laughs,’ a gravity deriving ‘rather from stupidity than judgement’. To father an heir, the empress summoned a fourteen-year-old German, Anton Ulrich, prince of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel-Brevern, as the girl’s future husband. But the heiress hated him on sight and was soon embroiled in her own murky scandal.16

  Once the succession had been decided, Anna wanted to enjoy her freaks and her hunting. ‘We are not to be disturbed with minor matters,’ she told the cabinet, but the less interested a monarch was in politics, the more savage the competition. She let Osterman run her foreign policy, which, with astonishing flexibility, he directed under Catherine I, Peter II and now Anna, disentangling Russia from war with Persia (at the cost of abandoning Peter the Great’s conquests in today’s Daghestan and Azerbaijan), while maintaining an alliance with Austria to limit the continent’s dominant power, France.

  While Osterman dominated abroad, Biron looked for ways to remove Münnich from court. When, in February 1733, Augustus the Strong, king of Poland, died, Anna backed his son as his successor, but Louis XV’s policy was to construct an ‘Eastern Barrier’ of Poland, Sweden and the Ottomans to prevent Russian expansion. He backed his own candidate and sent French troops. Then as now, Russia abhorred Western advances up to its borders – and ever since the Time of Troubles, when the Poles had taken Moscow, it feared a strong Poland. Anna intervened in this War of the Polish Succession, but when her generals became bogged down, Biron proposed that Münnich take command, removing him from Petersburg and hopefully embroiling him in an inglorious quagmire. Instead Münnich defeated the French – and returned with a grandiose plan to win further glory.

  During the Polish war, the Crimean Tatars raided Ukraine, sparking a joint Russian and Austrian war against the Ottomans, promoted by Münnich who promised to capture Constantinople within four years. Osterman warned against this, but the flashy Münnich got his way.

  In early 1736, Münnich stormed the fortress of Azov, while Anna’s Irish general, Peter Lacey, burned the Crimean capital, Bachtiserai. But the war was costly, Russia’s system of provisioning was inept and Münnich’s brazen egotism offended his generals, who were quickly on the verge of mutiny, appealing to Anna and Biron. When he tried to resign in a huff, Anna reprimanded him, complaining to Osterman, ‘The behaviour of these generals causes great sorrow. We bestowed not only high rank but great fortunes and their behaviour doesn’t accord with my generosity.’ But her analysis reveals her common sense: ‘We can’t destroy the Turkish state on our own . . . What do we do with this discord among our generals? If we can find a way to destroy the Treaty of Pruth [forced on Peter the Great], wouldn’t it be better to end the war? We depend on your skill and loyalty and you and your family will be in my favour.’ But even Oracle Osterman could not get her out of the war yet.17

  Prince Anton of Brunswick, the stammering fiancé of the heiress, was serving under Münnich, who admired the boy’s courage but thought him sexually ambiguous. So did his fiancée. Anna Leopoldovna’s governess was a Baltic German noblewoman named Madame d’Aderkass who became inseparable from her charge, sparking lesbian rumours while simultaneously both governess and princess became enamoured of Count Maurice Lynar, the young Saxon ambassador. When the empress heard rumours that ‘accused this girl of sharing the tastes of the famous Sappho’, Anna expelled the governess and had Lynar recalled.

  ‘What her crime is, is yet a great secret,’ wrote Jane Rondeau, the English ambassador’s wife, adding that the heiress had been ‘examined’ to check her virginity and for ‘semblance de hommesse’. The Englishwoman concluded that ‘Most people think it must be something very notorious or Her Majesty would never have sent her away in such a hurry.’ Anna Leopoldovna did enjoy intimate relationships with girls because she became ever closer to her maid-of-honour, Baroness Julie von Mengden. The heiress’s marriage was now urgent.18

  As an autocrat becomes older, the struggle for influence intensifies, which in turn makes the sovereign more suspicious and therefore more dangerous. Biron promoted a new minister, the energetic Artemii Volynsky, to the Council. Volynsky had been Peter the Great’s adviser on Persia, though the first emperor had beaten him with his cane for embezzlement. Anna found the confrontational and innovative Volynsky refreshing, but her favour encouraged him to overthrow Biron himself.

  Though Biron was at the height of his powers, he suffered from the perennial fear of all favourites: that after the death of his patroness, he would be destroyed. So, like Menshikov, he dreamed of becoming duke of Courland. The old dynasty there had just become extinct and he begged Anna to procure him the throne. She had him elected duke, but, back in Petersburg, he spotted an opportunity in the matter of the heiress’s marriage to rise even higher.

  Now that Prince Anton of Brunswick was back from the war, the empress arranged the heiress’s betrothal, but the girl did not want to marry that ‘milksop’. ‘Nobody wants to consider that I have a princess on my hands who has to be married,’ the empress told Biron. As for Prince Anton, ‘neither I nor the princess like the prince’, and Biron too thought him ‘ordained to produce children in Russia but lacking the intelligence even for that’. Even if the choice of Anton was a mistake, ‘Time’s passing; she’s in her prime,’ said the empress. ‘Ladies of our status don’t always marry out of love,’ and there were diplomatic implications for Anton was the candidate of Russia’s ally, Austria. When the heiress said she would prefer anyone else, Biron suggested his own son, irritating the empress. But it was his own protégé, Volynsky, who led the canvassing against Biron. Finally the heiress declared that she would prefer to marry Anton, nephew of the Holy Roman Emperor, than the son of a groom. Biron was furious.

  On 3 July 1739, Biron processed to the wedding in a coach attended by twenty-four footmen, eight running footmen, four heyducks, four pages, and two gentlemen-in-waiting. The empress, in a hooped silver gown and and her hair speckled with diamonds, accompanied the heiress in a golden carriage, the latter wearing ‘a stiffened bodied gown of silver, a stomacher of diamonds and her black hair curled with four tresses twisted with diamonds and a coronet of diamonds.’ The carriages were accompanied by running ‘negroes dressed in black velvet so exactly fitted to their bodies that they appeared naked’ except for white feathers in their hair.

  Afterwards, the empress helped dress the bride while Biron brought the nightshirted bridegroom to bed. ‘All this’, mused Jane Rondeau, ‘to tie together two people who heartily hated each other.’ The heiress, now Anna of Brunswick, ‘showed it throughout the feasting – and continues to treat him with the utmost contempt’. Yet they had to conceive a son.19

  Now in the fourth year of the war against the Ottomans, Russia was restless* as Münnich invaded the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia on the lower Danube (present-day Romania). In September at Stavuchany Münnich finally defeated the Ottomans and negotiated peace, winning back Azov and a part of the Caucasus, but he did not win the right to build a fleet on the Black Sea. The war had cost Russia much in blood and treasure – and the gains were meagre.

  Anna watched her old enemies: Vasily Dolgoruky and Dmitri Golitsyn were denounced and arrested for privately disparaging the empress. Far away in Siberian exile, Ekaterina Dolgorukaya, once Peter II’s fiancée, had been courted by a presumptuous clerk who was thrashed by her brother. The clerk denounced them for t
reasonable talk and the empress arrested the family and had them concentrated in Shlisselburg. Under torture, Ivan, Peter II’s favourite, confessed to falsifying the tsar’s will and to sedition. None of these fallen bunglers was a threat, but Anna ordered a judicial massacre: Golitsyn was sentenced to death but died in prison. Marshal Dolgoruky was sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment on Solovetsky Island, while his cousins Ivan and three others were beheaded, the innocent pawn Ekaterina Dolgorukaya locked in a monastery. Meanwhile a luckier bride had better news: the princess of Brunswick was pregnant.20

  The empress, who amused herself by inventing new torments for her chicken-clucking fool Golitsyn, decided to marry him to a fat and ugly middle-aged Kalmyk servant nicknamed Buzhenina – Pork ‘n’ Onions – after the empress’s favourite dish. Her minister Volynsky pandered to her playful sadism and devised a spectacular of freakish whimsy: the empress and a cavalcade of women in national dress from each of the ‘barbarous races’ processed to the new Winter Palace in carriages pulled by dogs, reindeer, swine and camels followed by an elephant with a cage on its back containing Golitsyn and Pork ‘n’ Onions. The empress led the couple on to the frozen Neva to reveal an ice palace thirty-three feet high amid a fair of wonders including an ice cannon that fired real shells and an elephant that projected water jets into the air. Inside their bridal palace, Anna showed the ‘bridal fools’ a lavatory commode and (the big joke) a four-poster bed with mattress and pillows all carved out of ice – but, to the empress’s glee, lacking any soft linen or bedclothes. The log fire too was a trick – lit by naphtha. Leaving the frozen couple, guarded by soldiers, Anna retired to the Winter Palace. They survived their wedding night, and Pork ‘n’ Onions later produced two sons.21

  The impresario of the Ice Wedding, Volynsky, started to plot against Biron. At his salon, he discussed reform and criticized Anna’s grotesque ineptitude. ‘Our sovereign is a fool,’ he told his coterie. ‘When you report, you get no decision from her at all.’ Reading a description of Joanna II, queen of Naples, as ‘weak, foolish and dissolute’, the minister exclaimed, ‘SHE! This is she!’