Because the Guards trusted her to continue Peter's policies, his widow rather than any of his relatives became his successor. Governing in association with Peter's closest adviser, Alexander Menshikov, who had employed her and converted her to Russian Orthodoxy before introducing her to the tsar, Catherine's two-year reign was relatively uneventful. Its most important achievement was to inaugurate Russia's Academy of Sciences, chartered before Peter's death but not opened until 1726. All of its members were foreigners. In 1727 the dying empress named her husband's eleven-year-old grandson as her successor, with Menshikov as regent. This arrangement lasted only six months, until Russia's old aristocrats persuaded young Peter II to alter his grandfather's policies and return the capital to Moscow.
Two years after Catherine I died, a German journalist named David Fassmann paired her with Zenobia in his 129th Dialogue in the Land of the Dead. Because both women had accompanied a husband or son into battle, it highlighted their wartime experiences. Zenobia complains about being insulted by men, Catherine about Russian soldiers needing brandy before battles. The author knew the ancient ruler of Palmyra better than he knew Catherine; Fassmann thought Catherine came from minor nobility (a great exaggeration) and wasn't certain of her birth year. Zenobia boasted of her descent from Cleopatra but acknowledged that Catherine's achievement was unprecedented for a woman of her rank. After Peter's death, “there was no man who was in the smallest degree capable of ruling.” Only the Turks expressed amazement at her rule and refused to send ambassadors to a land governed by a woman.7 One year after this dialogue appeared, Catherine's stepgrandson died unmarried, leaving Russia once again without a male tsar.
An Underrated Empress?
The next woman to rule the Russian Empire, Anna Ivanovna, remains an ugly duckling: an undeniable coarseness permeated her ten-year reign. Although England's Bloody Mary and even Spain's Juana the Mad have now found academic defenders, this empress continues to resist positive evaluations. Russia's leading historian has shown no desire to rehabilitate her reign, while her best-known biography in English comes from a ballet expert unable to read Russian. Disdain for this large, unusually strong, and physically unattractive female monarch began early. Soon after her accession, a Russian nobleman commented that “although we are confident of her wisdom, high morals, and ability to rule justly, she is still a female and thus ill-adapted to so great a number of duties.” When the same ecclesiastical dignitary who had preached at Catherine I's coronation in 1724 undertook the same task for Anna Ivanovna's, his sermon avoided discussions of female exceptionality and, astonishingly, he never even mentioned the new empress by name. Many charges have been leveled against her: an “absolute nonentity” in government; a shallow, coarse woman, devoid of introspection and cruel to the point of sadism. Several female rulers of early modern Europe enjoyed hunting, but only Anna Ivanovna had the results recorded when she gunned down a thousand small animals and a few wild boars during a single summer.8
Like her recent female predecessor, Anna Ivanovna called herself an autocrat but governed through an all-powerful male minister. A crucial difference was that Anna's principal minister, Ernst Biron, whom she made Duke of Courland in 1737, was a minor Baltic German noble rather than an upstart Russian like Menshikov. Russians have never forgiven her for imposing a “German tyranny” for which they invented a special term, bironsh-china, that combines notions of brutality, corruption, and foreign rule. Russia had experienced many brutal regimes—Peter the Great's was especially noteworthy—and corrupt officials permeate its history; what made bironshchina so intolerable was a quasi-colonial foreign domination that employed such brutality and profited most from the corruption.
However, Europe's two greatest German-born eighteenth-century rulers, both writing in French, showed considerable respect for Anna's political record. In 1746 Frederick the Great, who acquired Prussia's throne shortly after Anna's death, wrote that her reign “was marked by many memorable events, and by some great men whom she was clever enough to employ; her weapons gave Poland a king. In 1735 she helped Emperor Charles VI by sending 10,000 Russians to the edge of the Rhine, a place where this nation had been little known. Her war against the Turks was a succession of prosperities and triumphs” in which “she dictated terms to the Ottoman empire.” Anna did more than wage war. “She protected the sciences in her capital,” Frederick continued. “She even sent scientists to Kamchatka to find a shorter route for improving commerce between Muscovites and Chinese. This princess had qualities that made her worthy of the rank she occupied; her soul was elevated, her mind firm; she repaid service liberally and punished with severity; she was good by temperament, and voluptuous without disorder.” But Frederick had little praise for her chief minister, who had once been expelled from Prussia's university. Biron, “the only one who had a noticeable ascendancy on the spirit of the Empress, was naturally vain, crude and cruel, but firm in business and not intimidated by vast undertakings.” He possessed “some useful qualities, without having any that were good or agreeable.”9
In her private sarcastic dialogue the Castle of Chesmé, Catherine the Great preferred Anna's rule to those of her successor Elisabeth and her predecessor Catherine I. Here Anna tells Elisabeth, “I liked authority as much as you, but I didn't waste it on frivolities.” Challenged about who had made better use of her authority, Anna replies, “My reign showed more nerve than yours,” to which Elisabeth retorts, “What some people call nerve, others call cruelty.” When Catherine I interrupts them by remarking that Elisabeth was always her favorite, Anna retorts tartly, “We noticed that more than once” and asks, “Didn't she sign your name to Prince Menshikov's orders?” However, Catherine II's greatest praise for Anna comes later, when young Peter II tells her, “I loved you because your firm and masculine spirit made me suppose that you were further removed than any of my female kin from trivial bickering.”10
Anna Ivanovna's selection as empress seemed fortuitous. With no male Romanovs available, Russia's aristocrats decided that a widowed and childless niece of Peter the Great, who had been ruling a small, poor Baltic principality for nineteen years as a Russian protectorate, would be more manipulable than her sisters or Peter's daughter. They imposed constitutional limitations which she signed unhesitatingly and then tore up publicly as soon as she had been proclaimed (the torn original remains in Russia's state archives).11 Anna moved quickly to secure her position by creating a new guards regiment, commanded by Biron's brother. Too old to have children, she resolved the succession issue by bringing her older sister's German-born daughter to court to be raised as a Russian. Anna's most important early decision was to return Russia's capital to St. Petersburg, where it would remain until 1917.
Some of her other early decisions proved equally permanent. In 1731 Anna created a ruthlessly efficient secret police bureau. It quickly expanded the definition of high treason through the notorious phrase “by word or deed” (slovo i delo) and except for a six-month abolition in 1762 it endured under various titles at least as long as the Russian Empire. In 1732 Anna also created an elite training school for Russian military officers, the first founded by a woman ruler (Maria Theresa began one more than twenty years later). Housed in Menshikov's former palace, the Cadet Corps endured until 1917, benefitting Russia's cultural as well as its military history. During Anna's reign it participated in Russia's nascent theatrical tradition, and five years after her death its printing office produced the first useful maps of Russia's empire. Another durable creation of Anna's reign was the ballet school founded in 1736 to train young Russians of both sexes.
Anna's propaganda preferred to celebrate other achievements. The ice palace which she had constructed in the bitter winter of 1740 and opened to the public is notorious today as the site of a bizarre and sadistic icy wedding of court dwarfs, but at the time it was presented as both a scientific and an artistic triumph. Peter the Great introduced the custom of striking medals glorifying the ruler's achievements; Anna was the first tsarina
to imitate him. Commemorations of her coronation were in Russian, while one in Latin celebrated her liberation of the Don River basin from the Tartars in 1736 for a European audience. Three medals, two in Russian, commemorated her peace treaty of 1739 with the Ottoman Empire. It gained land for Russia in the same region where her illustrious uncle had been defeated in 1711, and the Latin version proclaimed “Peter Great, Anna Greater” (Petrus Magnus, Anna Maior).12 Soon after her death, a life-sized bronze statue, the first that celebrated a modern woman ruler, depicted her accompanied by a small child (see fig. 12).
Many blemishes offset Anna's successes. A state bank of 1733 soon failed, while taxes increased and other reforms were stalled by wars over the Polish succession (1733–35) and against the Ottoman Empire (1735–39) which filled much of her reign. A general survey to resolve disputes about landownership was announced in 1731 but stagnated after its guidelines were drafted in 1735. Her restored capital suffered a serious famine in 1733 and a devastating fire in 1737. Her government pursued religious dissenters with considerable brutality: a Jew was burned alive in St. Petersburg in 1738 for converting a naval officer, who was burned along with him. Both state persecution of Russia's Old Believers and state attempts to convert Muslims through bribes long outlasted Anna's reign. In failing health, Anna named the newly born son of her own Russianized niece as her heir, passing over Peter I's daughter. On her deathbed, a “positive declaration” signed by 194 Russian dignitaries named Biron as regent instead of the baby's mother.
After her death, another German Dialogue in the Land of the Dead paired Empress Anna with Elizabeth I of England. A woodcut of both women bore the legend, “The heart of a courageous hero in a woman's breast frightens enemies and brings joy to others,” and its subtitle promised to assess both women's “wise and successful governments.” Inside, Anna's achievements were overshadowed by those of England's long-dead monarch, who receives twice as much space as the newly arrived Russian empress who sought her out. At its end, Elizabeth learns that Anna's testament named her newly born great-nephew as her heir, but with her favorite Biron as regent rather than her niece. Elizabeth immediately predicts a bitter struggle between them, and a messenger bursts in to announce that Biron has been overthrown.13
Biron's regency lasted exactly three weeks before he was replaced by Russia's second female regent, Anna Leopoldovna, who held power in her son's name for exactly a year. Known before her conversion in 1733 as Elisabeth Katharina Christine von Mecklenburg-Schwerin, she had married a German prince related to both Russian and Austrian royalty. Her husband's role remains mysterious, apart from procreating children: the regent gave birth to a daughter in 1741. The combination of Anna Leopoldovna's unimportant husband and her exceptional closeness to a female companion, Julia Mengden, makes her regency resemble the reign of England's Queen Anne. Its strangest incident was the arrival of a Persian embassy seeking to marry the shah to the daughter of Peter the Great, bringing as gifts fourteen elephants: nine for the infant tsar, four for the intended bride, and one for the regent (they were still alive when the future Catherine II arrived). Its most important act was Russia's endorsement of Austria's Pragmatic Sanction supporting Maria Theresa's claims, a policy which provoked France's traditional ally Sweden to declare war on Russia. After the regent's army, commanded by two English Jacobite exiles, won a victory in Finland and before Anna Leopoldovna could proclaim herself empress, French diplomacy helped organize a coup that overthrew the regent and replaced the baby tsar with the last surviving child of Peter the Great, his daughter Elisabeth.14
The most remarkable aspect of Anna Leopoldovna's one-year regency is the extent of its erasure from official Russian memory. The fate of the infant who had been proclaimed Tsar Ivan VI is extraordinary even by Russian standards: he was taken to a remote fortress and left to rot for more than twenty years as “Nameless Prisoner Number One,” until his guards killed him because someone tried to liberate and restore him. Meanwhile, in 1745 the acts of his mother's regency were officially expunged from Russian records, and no state document could contain the name or title of Ivan VI. Coins issued in his name were recalled and melted down, although a few have survived. Even books describing his reign, whether in Russian or European languages, were ordered to be collected by the secret service and locked up in the Academy of Sciences. However, like the charter so ostentatiously torn up by Empress Anna in 1730, Russia's state papers from the year 1740–41 were preserved and finally published in the 1880s.
Even though the new empress categorically opposed capital punishment, the personal fate of her immediate predecessors was severe. After an abortive plot to restore them was discovered in 1743, the ex-regent and her husband were transported to a remote Arctic village, while two high-ranking noblewomen were whipped and banished permanently to Siberia. In 1746 the former regent died in childbirth; she received a state funeral, at which no mention was made of the cause of her death. Her husband survived in the Arctic for another thirty years. Not until 1780 did Catherine II permit their four surviving children to move to Denmark, where Anna Leopoldovna's last child finally died in 1807.
Peter the Great's Daughter
Russia's third female autocrat and fourth woman to rule its empire in sixteen years, Tsarina Elisabeth would remain on her throne for twenty years, the longest female reign since her English namesake died in 1603. She was also the third woman ruler, after Elizabeth I and Christina, who never married. Yet she has always been eclipsed by her flamboyant successor Catherine II, who composed autobiographical memoirs describing most of her predecessor's reign in rather sly fashion. For such reasons, Elisabeth's best recent foreign-language biography is subtitled “the other Empress.”15
The cultural distance between Elisabeth's reign and her mother's seems greater than the eighteen years which separated their coronations. In early 1742 an entourage of twenty-four thousand people and nineteen thousand horses left the new capital for a five-day trip to Moscow. Elisabeth made her formal entry through four triumphal arches. The first, erected by the city government, included images of the biblical Judith and Deborah in addition to her parents and herself. The second featured a deliberately unfinished statue of her father, with an effigy of his daughter wielding the equipment needed to finish it and an epitaph urging her to “Act with firmness and courage.” Her carriage was drawn by eight Neapolitan horses, and behind her, in a carriage drawn by six horses, rode her young orphaned nephew and designated heir. Eighty-five cannon salvos saluted her entrance to the cathedral. The archbishop's sermon struck an old-fashioned note by greeting Elisabeth as a regent for a grandson of Peter the Great, who sat in the place traditionally reserved for the tsar's wife.16
But at her coronation ceremony eight weeks later, the same archbishop saluted her as “all-powerful Empress and Autocrat of all the Russias” after she had placed the crown on her own head. The new empress then entered the sanctuary, strictly reserved for priests, and took communion in both kinds. The accompanying festivities included an Italian opera, La clemenza di Tito; it was performed before five thousand spectators, with court nobility and military cadets playing minor roles and a Ukrainian choir singing from a libretto whose Italian words were transcribed phonetically into Cyrillic. Three years later these events were artfully massaged in a pamphlet published for foreign consumption by the Academy of Sciences.17
In an age when protocol mattered greatly, Elisabeth devoted considerable attention to diplomacy, and gaining formal acceptance of Russia's imperial status throughout Europe became her first objective. In 1721 her father had proclaimed himself Emperor (Tsar) of All the Russias, thus giving Russia equal standing with the Holy Roman Empire and putting it ahead of all European kingdoms, but neither France nor Austria had acknowledged this new title. In 1725 France also rejected Peter's proposal that its young king marry Elisabeth. A memorandum argued that the Romanovs were unworthy of such an alliance because they ignored both primogeniture and the Salic law. Elisabeth used the War of the Austrian Succ
ession to make early progress toward international recognition of her imperial rank. In 1743 Frederick II gave Russian diplomats precedence at the Prussian court, while his enemy Maria Theresa, acting as monarch of Hungary, recognized Elisabeth's imperial title later in 1743, and the king of Poland followed in 1744. But the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII, elected instead of Maria Theresa's husband, evaded the issue, while his French allies stubbornly refused to entitle her empress. In 1745 France botched the issue so badly that Russia broke off diplomatic relations for a decade, and a rupture with France's ally Frederick II soon followed. From this point on, the female Russian autocrat became a firm ally of the female Habsburg heiress against the misogynistic Prussian king.18
As part of her diplomatic offensive Elisabeth produced commemorative medals intended primarily for foreign consumption; in 1772 Prussia owned eleven of these with Latin inscriptions but only four with Russian inscriptions. Elisabeth's Latin medals celebrated her domestic achievements: freeing prisoners (1741), opening a canal begun by her father (Perfecit Parentis Opus, 1752), and proclaiming a tax rebate (1753). Several were struck in 1754: for founding a national university in Moscow, declaring a tax rebate for twenty-three years, and creating a town called New Serbia; but her most remarkable medal that year celebrated the birth of her nephew's son. It depicts the empress offering incense to the gods, but the baby's father is not shown, and his mother is never mentioned. The final medal from her reign, in Cyrillic but featuring Russian soldiers dressed as ancient Romans, celebrated two victories over Prussia in 1759.19
The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800 Page 23