Terrible tsarinas

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The Extravagant Anna shook with the explosion and filled with gun-smoke, she would call her startled ladies in waiting and order them to do the same, under penalty of being dismissed.

She also enjoyed Dutch humming-tops and she would have her representative in Amsterdam buy bundles of the special string out of which the whips were made for spinning the tops. She exhibited the same passion for silks and trinkets, which she would order from France. She was fond of performances of any kind.

Everything that flatters the spirit, everything that tickles the senses, was charming to her.

On the other hand, she did not see any need to cultivate learning by reading books or listening to the discourses of alleged specialists. Greedy and lazy, she went along according to her instincts and utilized the briefest leisure moments to take naps.

Having drowsed for an hour or so, she would call in Buhren, negligently sign whatever papers he put before her and, having thus fulfilled her imperial obligations, she would open the door and hail the young ladies of honor who sat in the next room sewing embroideries.

“Nu, dyevki, poiti! [OK, girls, give us a song!],” she would cry.

Her docile followers would strike up the choir, singing some popular refrain, and she would listen to them with a happy smile, nodding her head. This interlude would go on as long as the s ingers were able to more or less keep up a pretense of following the tune. If one of them, overcome by fatigue, lowered her voice or hit a wrong note, Anna Ivanovna would correct her with a resounding roar. Often, she would call storytellers to her bedside, and have them entertain her with the tales she had enjoyed in her childhood, always the same ones; or she would call in a monk who was good at explaining the truths of religion. Another obsession which she flattered herself with having inherited from Peter the Great was her passion for grotesque exhibitions and natural mon«77»

Terrible Tsarinas strosities. Nothing was funnier to her than the spectacles performed by buffoons and dwarves. The uglier and stupider they were, the more she applauded their jokes and antics. After 19 years of provincial mediocrity and obscurity, she wanted to remove the veneer of propriety and impose on the court a life of unprecedented luxury and chaos. Nothing struck her as too beautiful nor too expensive - when it came to satisfying the whims of the sovereign.

However, this Russia that accident had given her to rule was not, strictly speaking, her fatherland. And she hardly saw the need to make it her own. Certainly, she had some good old Russian families in her pocket including, among the most devoted, old Gabriel Golovkin, the Trubestkoy princes and Ivan Baryatinsky, Paul Yaguzhinsky (that famous hot-head), and the impulsive Alexis Cherkassky, whom she made her chancellor. But the reins were in the hands of the Germans. The empire’s policies were set by a team composed entirely of men of Germanic origin, taking orders from the terrible Buhren.

The old boyars, so proud of their genealogy, were swept from center stage when Her Majesty and her favorite came into power.

Coming from backgrounds in the civil administration as well as the military, the new bigshots of the regime included the Loewenwolde brothers, Baron von Brevern, the Generals Rodolph von Bismarck and Christoph von Manstein, and Field Marshal Burkhard von Munnich. A four-man cabinet replaced the Supreme Privy Council and Ostermann, in spite of his ambiguous past, still served as Prime Minister; but it was Ernst Johann Buhren, the Empress’s favorite, who chaired the meetings and made the final decisions.

Impervious to the concept of pity, never hesitating to send a troublemaker to the dungeon, to Siberia or to the torture chambers for a good thrashing, Buhren did not even need to ask Anna