Terrible tsarinas

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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,