Terrible tsarinas

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Terrible Tsarinas family. According to him, for his next coup d’etat, the ex-favorite of the late empress Anna Ivanovna was counting on the Ismailovsky Regiment and the horse guard, one of which was under the command of his brother Gustav, the other under his son. But the Preobrazhensky Regiment was entirely at the behest of the field marshal and this elite unit would be disposed to act, at the proper time, against the ambitious Buhren. “If Your Highness wishes,” Munnich told the princess, “I would relieve you of this treacherous man in one hour.”9 However, Anna Leopoldovna had no stomach for such adventures. Frightened at the thought of attacking a man as powerful and cunning as Buhren, she balked. However, having consulted her husband, she changed her mind and decided, while some trembling, to play all or nothing. During the night of November 8, 1740, a hundred grenadiers and three officers of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, sent by Munnich, burst into the room where Buhren was sleeping; they yanked him out of bed and, despite his cries for help, they beat him with their rifle butts and carried him out, semi-conscious, to an enclosed carriage. In the wee hours of the day, he was transported to the Schlusselburg Fortress on Lake Ladoga, where he was methodically whipped.

They needed a charge that could be substantiated before they could have him imprisoned, so he was accused of precipitating the death of the empress by having her ride on horseback at the wrong time. Other crimes, added to this one at the appropriate time, were enough to have him condemned to death on April 8, 1741. First, he was to be drawn and quartered, but his sentence was commuted immediately to exile in perpetuity to a remote village in Siberia; and in one fell swoop, Anna Leopoldovna was proclaimed regent.

To celebrate the happy end of this period of intrigues, usurpations and treason, she rescinded the preceding government’s