Terrible Tsarinas

Having worked out the details of her secret plan, and having

ensured the delegation of her complete subservience, and making

a show of bidding Bühren 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 fol-

lowing 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 fiancée, 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 en-

trance 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, re-

ceiving 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,

< 69 >

Terrible Tsarinas

thus snubbing the chancellor, who was flustered by such con-

tempt for customs. On their way out, the members of the Su-

preme 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 sol-

emn 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. Enig-

matic and smiling as ever, Anna Ivanovna noted these small cor-

rections 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 benevo-

lence, 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

< 70 >

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 Russia, he begged the tsarina to denounce this mon-

strous 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 mo-