Terrible tsarinas

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Machinations around the Throne

[Dolgoruky], the pages, the cooks and God knows whom else.”

Hinting that the sovereign under supervision had unnatural tastes and that the delightful Ivan was inciting him in forbidden pleasures instead of curbing his inclinations, Lefort continued: “One could almost believe that these misguided people [the Dolgorukys] are encouraging the various vices by fostering [in the Tsar] the sins of the Russia of the past. I know an apartment contiguous to the billiard parlor where the deputy governor [Prince Alexis Grigorievich Dolgoruky] hosts pleasure parties for him… they don’t go to bed until 7:00AM.”4 That these young people should satiate their appetites in such entertainment suited Menshikov just fine. As long as Peter and his aunts continued to dope themselves in love intrigues and casual affairs, their political influence would be nil. On the other hand, the “Most Serene One” feared that Duke Charles Frederick of Holstein, with his exasperating ambitions, might be ignoring his wife Anna’s warnings and might be overdoing things, in an effort to destroy the modus vivendi that the Supreme Privy Council had managed to impose upon the junior tsar and his close relatives. In order to cut short Charles Frederick’s foolish dreams, Menshikov took away from him (via an ukase that escaped Peter II’s vigilance one evening during a drunken binge) the island of Oesel, in the Gulf of Riga, which the couple had received as a wedding present, and cut back the duke’s expense account. These displays of pettiness were accompanied by so many minor vexations at the hand of Menshikov that the Duke and his wife were annoyed for good and decided to leave the capital, where they were treated like poor relations and intruders. Hugging her sister before embarking with her husband for Kiel, with heart overflowing, Anna was gripped by a disastrous presentiment. She confided to her friends that she was very much afraid of Menshikov’s intrigues, on behalf of Elizabeth as well as Peter. She felt he was an