Terrible tsarinas

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The Extravagant Anna unusual at the very least. According to the tsarina’s instructions, the Cabinet Minister, Artyom Volynsky, had a vast house hastily built on the Neva embankment between the Winter Palace and the Admiralty, out of blocks of ice that were welded together by dribbling water in between them. The house was 60 feet long, over 20 feet wide, and 30 feet high, and was topped by a gallery with colonnade and statues. A staircase with a balustrade led to a vestibule, behind which the apartment reserved for the couple was located. It held a room furnished with a great white bed, whose curtains, pillows and mattress were carved of ice. To the side was a bathroom, also cut from ice, as evidence of Her Majesty’s concern for the intimate necessities on behalf of her “proteges.” Further on was a dining room, of similarly polar aspect but richly furnished in formal china and tableware, ready to welcome the guests for a superb and shivery and feast. In front of the house stood ice cannons, with a stack of cannonballs of the same material, and an ice elephant that was said to be able to spit a stream of frosty water 24 feet into the air, plus two ice pyramids inside of which were exhibited, to warm up the visitors, some humorous and obscene images. 5 Her Majesty expressly invited representatives of all the races of the empire, dressed in their native costumes, to participate in the great festival given in honor of the marriage of the buffoons.

On February 6, 1740, after the unfortunate Mikhail Golitsyn and the counterfeit old Kalmyk woman had their ritual blessing at the church, a carnival procession similar to those that had so amused Peter the Great set forth to the clanging of bells. Ostiak, Kirghiz, Finn, Samoyed, Yakut - they all filed along, proud in their traditional clothes, parading down the street. The crowds who had come running from every part of the city to enjoy this free spectacle were flabbergasted. Some of the participants rode horses of a species never before seen in St. Petersburg, others rode in rein«83»

Terrible Tsarinas deer-drawn sledges or dog-sleds, on the back of a goat or, more hilarious yet, on the back of a pig. The newlyweds themselves were seated on an elephant. After passing in front of the imperial palace, the procession stopped across from the “Duke of Courland’s Riding School,” where a meal was served for all the participants. The poet Trediakovsky recited a comic poem and couples from the different regions performed folk dances, accompanied by their traditional instruments, for the benefit of the Empress, the court and the “young couple.”

As night was finally falling, they all set out again, in good cheer but still with their wits about them, toward the house of ice which, in the lengthening shadows of twilight, sparkled with the gleam of a thousand torches. Her Majesty Herself took care to escort the newlyweds to their cold bed and withdrew with a ribald smile. Sentries were placed in front of all the exits, at once, to prevent the turtledoves from leaving their icy love nest before daybreak.

That night, while lying with Buhren in her well-heated room, Anna Ivanovna appreciated more than ever her soft bedcovers and warm clothes. Did she even think of the ugly Kalmyk and the docile Golitsyn, whom she had condemned capriciously to this sinister comedy and who might well have been dying of cold in their translucent prison? In any event, if any hint of remorse flitted through her mind, it must have been driven out very quickly by the thought that this was quite an innocent joke and very much in line with the liberties that are allowed any sovereign, by divine right.

By some miracle, the noble buffoon and his hideous partner were, according to a few contemporaries, pulled out of this matrimonial ice cube with nothing worse than a runny nose and some frostbite. According to some, they even managed to go abroad, under the following reign, where the Kalmyk suppos edly died af«84»

The Extravagant Anna ter having given birth to two sons. As for Golitsyn, by no means discouraged by this chilling matrimonial test, he was said to have married again and to have lived on to a very advanced age, without any further misadventures. Diehard monarchists thus maintain that even the worst atrocities committed in Russia in the name of the autocracy of that era could only have been beneficial.

In spite of Anna Ivanovna’s obvious indifference to public affairs, Buhren was sometimes constrained to acquaint her with important issues. In order to better insulate her from the annoyances that are inseparable from the exercise of power, he suggested to her that they create a secret chancellery that would be responsible for monitoring Her subjects. Fed by the public treasury, an army of spies was let loose throughout Russia. Denouncements popped up on all sides, like mushrooms after a s weet rainfall.

Informers wishing to express themselves verbally were let into the imperial palace by a hidden door and were received, in the offices of the secret chancellery, by Buhren in person. His innate hatred for the old Russian aristocracy encouraged him to accept without question any accusations against members of that caste.

The more highly placed the culprit, the more the “Favorite” enjoyed 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 someone to a remote province, for life. In the specialized administrative department of the Sylka (Deportation), the employees, overwhelmed 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, Buhren created a new regiment of the Guard, the Ismailovsky Regiment, and gave the command not to a Rus«85»

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 famous dignitaries were, on the basis of their prominence in itself, the most highly suspect in the view of the chancellery’s henchmen. It was practically a crime not to have German or Baltic ancestors in one’s lineage.

Frightened and indignant, Anna Ivanovna’s subjects certainly considered Buhren responsible for these evils, but they also blamed the ts arina. The boldest dared to mutter among themselves 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 ambition 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 astute maneuver to swear never to partition the country; this did not convince anyone and did not earn him any gratitude. Moreover, counting on support from Austria - which as usual would let him down - he went to war with Turkey. Munnich achieved a series of successes on the battlefield, but the losses were so heavy that Os termann was constrained to sign a peace accord. At