by Henri Troyat
But, as luck would have it, Ivan V had produced only female progeny. So that even in that case, they would have to accept a woman ruler for Russia. Wasn’t that dangerous? Another harsh debate broke out over the advantages and disadvantages of a “gynocracy.” Admittedly, Catherine I had recently proven that a woman can be courageous, determined and clear-minded when circumstances require. However, as everyone knows, “that sex” is slave to the senses. Thus a female sovereign would be likely to sacrifice the grandeur of the fatherland for the pleasures dispensed by her lover. Those who supported this thesis bolstered it by citing Menshikov who, they pointed out, had led Catherine by the nose. But wouldn’t a tsar be as weak as the tsarina had been in the hands of the Most Serene, if he had a lover who was as adept and skilful at both loving and intrigues? Didn’t Peter II himself demonstrate complete abdication of authority under the wiles of female seduction? So that what mattered, when it came to choosing whom to place on the throne, was not the gender per
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The Surprise Accession of Anna Ivanovna se so much as the character of the individual in whom the country was placing its confidence. Under these conditions, asserted Dmitri Golitsyn, a matriarchy would be entirely acceptable, provided that the individual being offered such an honor was worthy to assume it.
This principle having been accepted by everyone present, he went on to consider the remaining candidates. From the very beginning, he brushed aside the absurd idea of installing Elizabeth Petrovna, Peter II’s aunt, since in his opinion she would have given up the success ion implicitly by leaving the capital to live as a recluse in the countryside, bad-mouthing all her relatives and complaining about everything. All three daughters of Ivan V seemed more promising, to him, than this daughter of Peter the Great. However, the eldest, Catherine Ivanovna, was known for her strange moods and crotchety temperament. Moreover her husband, Prince Charles Leopold of Mecklenburg, was a nervous and unstable man, an eternal rebel, always ready to fight - be it against his neighbors or his subjects. The fact that Catherine Ivanovna had lived apart from him for ten years was not a sufficient guarantee for, if she were proclaimed empress, he would return to her at a gallop and would never stop dragging the country into costly and useless wars. The youngest, Praskovya Ivanovna, rickety and scrofulous, had neither the health, the clear thinking, nor the moral balance required to manage public affairs. That left the second, Anna Ivanovna. She admitted to being 37 years old, and seemed to have plenty of energy. Widowed since 1711 by Frederick William, Duke of Courland, she was still living in Annenhof, near Mitau, in dignity and destitution. She had failed to marry Maurice of Saxony, but had recently become enamored of a small landed proprietor in Courland, Johann-Ernest Buhren. During his presentation, Dmitri Golitsyn glossed over this detail and promised that, in any event, if the Supreme Council required it,
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Terrible Tsarinas she would drop her lover without regret and come running back to Russia.
This suggestion seemed to be convincing. Golitsyn then pressed his point, saying, “We agree on Anna Ivanovna. But we should trim her wings a bit!” Golitsyn had in mind subtly reducing the ruler’s powers and extending those of the Supreme Privy Council; everyone agreed. The representatives of Russia’s oldest families, brought together in a conclave, saw this initiative as a God-sent occasion to reinforce the political influence of the old- stock nobility vis-a-vis the hereditary monarchy and its temporary servants. By this juggling act, they could relieve Her Majesty of a share of the crown, even while pretending to help her adjust it on her head. After a succession of Byzantine discussions, the initiators of this idea agreed that Anna Ivanovna should be recognized as tsarina, but that her prerogative should be limited by a series of conditions to which she must subscribe beforehand.
Upstairs, the members of the Supreme Privy Council removed to the grand salon in the palace, where a multitude of civil, military and ecclesiastical dignitaries awaited the results of their deliberations. Learning of the decision taken by the supreme advisers, Bishop Feofan Prokopovich timidly recollected the will of Catherine I according to which, after the death of Peter II, the crown should revert to his aunt Elizabeth, as a daughter of Peter I and of the late empress. Never mind that the child was born before the parents were married: her mother had transmitted to her the blood of the Romanovs, he said, and nothing else counted when the future of Holy Russia was concerned! Dmitri Golitsyn, indignant at such a speech, shouted, “We will not have any bastards!”1 Shocked by this attack, Feofan Prokopovich swallowed his objections; the discussion moved on to a consideration of the “practical conditions.” The enumeration of the limits to imperial
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The Surprise Accession of Anna Ivanovna power ended with an oath to be sworn by the candidate: “If I do not keep these commitments, I agree to forfeit my crown.” According to the charter envisaged by the supreme council, the new empress would commit to work to expand the Orthodox faith, not to marry, not to designate an heir and to work closely with the Supreme Privy Council - whose assent would be required in order to declare war, to conclude peace, to raise taxes, to interfere in the affairs of the nobility, to fill key positions in the administration of the empire, to distribute lands, villages, and serfs, and to monitor her personal expenditure of State funds.
This cascade of interdicts astounded the assembly. Wasn’t the Council going too far? Weren’t they committing a crime of lese-majesty? Those who feared that the powers of the future empress were being reduced without regard for tradition ran afoul of those who were delighted to see this reinforcement of the role of the real boyars in the conduct of Russian political affairs. The second group very quickly drowned out the first. Even the bishop, overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the majority, kept his mouth shut and ruminated over his fears, alone in a corner. Sure that they had the entire country behind them, the Supreme Privy Council charged Prince Vasily Lukich Dolgoruky, Prince Dmitri Golitsyn and General Leontiev with bearing a message to Anna Ivanovna, in her retirement at Mitau, specifying the conditions under which she would accede to the throne.
Meanwhile, however, Elizabeth Petrovna was being kept abreast of the discussions and the stipulations being bandied about at the Supreme Council. Her doctor and confidant, Armand Lestocq, warned her of the machinations going on in Moscow and begged her “to take action.” But she refused to make the least effort to exercise her rights to the succession of Peter II. She had no children and did not wish to have any. In her eyes, her nephew Charles Peter Ulrich, the son of her sister Anna and Duke Charles
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Terrible Tsarinas Frederick of Holstein, was the legitimate heir. But little Charles Peter Ulrich’s mother had died, and the baby was only a few months old. Drowning in sorrow, Elizabeth hesitated to look beyond this mourning. After a number of disappointing adventures, broken engagements, evaporated hopes, she had taken a dislike to the Russian court and preferred the isolation and even the boredom of the countryside to the bustling din and superficial glitter of the palaces.
While she reflected thus, with a melancholy mixed with bitterness, on an imperial future that no longer concerned her, the emissaries of the Council were hastening to bring word to her cousin Anna Ivanovna. She received them with a mocking benevolence. In truth, her spies and the well-wishers that she still had at the court had already informed her of the contents of the letters which the delegation would bring her. Nevertheless, she did not indicate in any way what her intentions might be; without batting an eye, she read the list of rights that the guardians of the regime dictated she should renounce, and said that she would agree to it all. She did not even seem to mind being required to break with her lover, Johann Buhren.
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 par
tisans 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
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The Surprise Accession of Anna Ivanovna 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 Buhren 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 fiancee, 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,
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Terrible Tsarinas 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
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The Surprise Accession of Anna Ivanovna 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 Rus sia, 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
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Terrible Tsarinas 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 t
his idea alone
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The Surprise Accession of Anna Ivanovna 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 Buhren 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.