Terrible tsarinas

«69»

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