Terrible Tsarinas

without question any accusations against members of that caste.

The more highly placed the culprit, the more the “Favorite” en-

joyed precipitating his downfall. Under his reign, the torture

rooms were seldom vacant and not a week went by in which he

did not sign orders exiling someone to Siberia or relegating some-

one to a remote province, for life. In the specialized administra-

tive department of the Sylka (Deportation), the employees, over-

whelmed by the burgeoning files, often expedited defendants to

the ends of the earth without taking the time to verify their guilt,

or even their identity.

To prevent any protest against this blind rigor on the part of

the legal authorities, Bühren created a new regiment of the Guard,

the Ismailovsky Regiment, and gave the command not to a Rus-

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Terrible Tsarinas

sian soldier (they were wary of them, at the top!), but to a Baltic

nobleman, Karl Gustav Loewenwolde, the brother of the Grand

Master of the court, Reinhold Loewenwolde. This elite unit

joined the Semyonovsky and Preobrazhensky regiments in order

to supplement the forces available for maintaining law and order.

Their instructions were simple: every living person within the

country must be rendered incapable of doing harm. The most fa-

mous dignitaries were, on the basis of their prominence in itself,

the most highly suspect in the view of the chancellery’s hench-

men. It was practically a crime not to have German or Baltic an-

cestors in one’s lineage.

Frightened and indignant, Anna Ivanovna’s subjects cer-

tainly considered Bühren responsible for these evils, but they also

blamed the tsarina. The boldest dared to mutter among them-

selves that a woman is congenitally unable to govern an empire

and that the curse inherent in her gender had been communicated

to the Russian nation, guilty of imprudently entrusting its destiny

to her.

Even the errors of international politics were blamed on her;

of course, that was actually Ostermann’s area of responsibility.

This character of such limited capability and such unlimited am-

bition was cocksure of his diplomatic genius. His initiatives in

this field cost the country dearly. For one thing, in order to please

Austria, he intervened in Poland — thus making trouble with

France, favored the candidature of Stanislaw Leszczynski. Then,

after the crowning of Augustus III, he thought it would be an as-

tute maneuver to swear never to partition the country; this did

not convince anyone and did not earn him any gratitude. More-

over, counting on support from Austria — which as usual would

let him down — he went to war with Turkey. Münnich achieved

a series of successes on the battlefield, but the losses were so

heavy that Ostermann was constrained to sign a peace accord. At

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The Extravagant Anna

the Congress of Belgrade, in 1739, he even asked France to medi-

ate — meanwhile trying to bribe the envoy from Versailles — but

the results he obtained were contemptible: he managed to hang

onto Russia’s rights in the Azov peninsula, with the proviso that

the area not be fortified, and he gained a few acres of steppe be-

tween the Dniepr and the southernmost Bug. In exchange, Russia

promised to demolish the fortifications at Taganrog and to give up

its merchant fleet and warships in the Black Sea, leaving all free

navigation to the Turkish fleet. Russia’s only territorial gain dur-

ing Anna’s reign was the effective annexation of Ukraine, which

was placed under Russian control in 1734.

Internationally, Russia was seen as a weak and disoriented

nation, but inside the country new and absurd aspirants to the

throne were cropping up everywhere. This phenomenon was

nothing new. Since the epidemic of false Dmitris appeared at the

death of Ivan the Terrible, the obsession with miraculously resur-

rected tsareviches had become an endemic and national disease.

Nevertheless, this turmoil in public opinion, however ludicrous it

might be, was starting to disturb Anna Ivanovna. She saw the

trend as an increasingly specific threat to her legitimacy, and

Bühren encouraged that view.

She feared above all that her aunt Elizabeth Petrovna might

have a belated renewal of popularity, since she was the sole living

daughter of Peter the Great. There was a chance that among the

nobility the same specious arguments that (thankfully) had failed

to compromise her own coronation might enjoy a resurgence, and

not so innocuously this time. Moreover, she found her rival’s

beauty and natural grace intolerable. It was not enough for her to

eject the tsarevna from the palace in the hope that the court, and

everyone else, would end up forgetting all about this spoilsport.

To forestall any attempt to transfer power to another lineage, she

even thought, in 1731, of an authoritative modification of the fam-

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ily rights in the house of Romanov. Having no child of her own

and being extremely concerned over the future of the monarchy,

she adopted her young niece, the only daughter of her elder sister