The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  On 26 August, Menshikov fell ill, coughing blood – but he still dictated instructions to the tsar from his sickbed: ‘I ask you to fulfil my request that until you reach adulthood you be obedient to Baron Osterman and the honourable ministers and do nothing without their advice’ – by which Menshikov meant his own advice, to ‘be a just Sovereign, take care of your health and, knowing what earnest care I took with your upbringing, deign to protect my family and be merciful to your bride to whom at the appointed time you will be married’. But this dictation from the dying dictator did not work any more: ‘I shall not marry before the age of twenty-five,’ the tsar announced. The Supreme Privy Council, terrified of Menshikov, advised caution.

  ‘I will show you who is emperor,’ shouted the boy. ‘Menshikov or me!’

  Menshikov had now ‘alienated all those close to him – a man with whom it was intolerable to live. Everyone conspired against him.’ On 7 September Menshikov arose from his deathbed. But he was too late: as he lay sick, power, that mysterious, invisible alchemy of personality, fear and authority, had leached away. The following day, Peter signed the order to arrest him. Menshikov was awoken at dawn by General Semyon Saltykov and sent into comfortable exile. ‘The vain and empty glory of the arrogant Goliath has perished,’ wrote one official, ‘everyone is ecstatic and I now live without fear.’ But when the Menshikovs reached Tver, the prince was arrested and accused of spying for Sweden. Tried and sentenced, ‘this colossus of a pygmy, raised almost to royal status, this arrogant man who showed us an example of ingratitude of spirit’, departed for Berezov in Siberia with just his family. The winter was so cruel that his wife, his daughter Maria then he himself soon perished, the end of an extraordinary ride.9

  Peter decided he wanted to rule without a minister like Menshikov, but he was too young and feckless and his government immediately sank into a ‘terrible state of chaos’. He promoted Ivan Dolgoruky to the pivotal court position of grand chamberlain, and after claiming that he would decide everything himself, the tsar spent every minute in the company of his young mentor whose father and uncles he promoted to the Supreme Privy Council along with the veteran Marshal Dolgoruky. They joined Osterman and Dmitri Golitsyn in a cabinet where power see-sawed dizzily between these three factions, proving that autocracy needed an autocrat to function at all. ‘The tsar doesn’t deal with business,’ wrote a foreign diplomat. ‘No one is paid; everyone steals as much as he can,’ while an epidemic of diplomatic illnesses paralysed the state. ‘All the members of the Council are “unwell” and do not attend meetings.’

  Ivan Dolgoruky was alarmed that Peter was falling in love with Aunt Elizaveta. ‘She’s a beauty the like of which I’ve never seen,’ wrote the Spanish envoy, the duke of Liria. ‘An amazing complexion, glowing eyes, perfect mouth, a throat and bosom of rare whiteness. She’s tall, exceptionally lively, dances well, rides fearlessly, is very flirtatious and doesn’t lack brains.’ Her nickname was Russian Venus. For once this was not just royal hyperbole.

  Osterman revived his plan of marrying the two, but the Golitsyns deployed a good-looking young Guards officer of a family much favoured by Peter the Great, Alexander Buturlin, to provide better guidance than Peter was receiving from that dissipated jackanapes Dolgoruky. Buturlin became Peter’s new mentor and for a while he seemed to be in charge of policy. Then Ivan Dolgoruky fell (genuinely) ill. Peter rallied to his companion, keeping vigil at his bedside. As he recovered so did the fortunes of the Dolgorukys, while outside the sickroom Elizaveta waited with Buturlin, who became her first lover.10

  After Peter II had been crowned in Moscow in February 1728, he did not return to Petersburg, a decision that was both recreational and political.* The hunting was better around Moscow, and he was rejecting Peter the Great’s work, surely in honour of the father killed by his grandfather, for he also pardoned all the conspirators exiled in the Tsarevich Alexei case – and recalled his grandmother, Tsarina Eudoxia, long since discarded. Peter II declared that he loathed his grandfather’s navy – ‘I don’t intend to sail the seas as did my grandfather’ – and he abolished the Preobrazhensky Office. The boy became popular for his moderation, his Russianness – and his inactivity, after his grandfather’s hyperactive tyranny.

  He was jealous of Buturlin’s affair with Elizaveta and posted the officer to Ukraine. Elizaveta was heartbroken, yet this short crisis between boy and aunt gave the Dolgorukys their chance to bid for the supreme prize. ‘There is no court in Europe’, complained Liria, ‘that is so volatile as this one.’

  In September 1729, Peter went hunting with Ivan Dolgoruky and 620 hounds at Gorenki near Moscow. The Dolgoruky kennels became the chancellery of Russia; all business was at a standstill. ‘There is no tsar here,’ wrote Liria from Moscow, ‘nor any ministers. We can accomplish nothing.’ Ivan Dolgoruky’s father, Alexei, introduced the fourteen-year-old tsar to his daughter Ekaterina, who was three years older. ‘Without being a beauty, she had a very pretty face’ and ‘languishing big blue eyes’. His wiser cousin, Marshal Vasily Dolgoruky, who had narrowly survived Peter the Great’s terror, advised strongly against the entire stratagem, but the family could not resist trying to divert the plenitude of autocracy to themselves. As so often in such a scheme, the pawn, Ekaterina, wanted nothing of it – she was in love with an Austrian diplomat, Count Melissimo – but Peter fell in love with her and agreed to marry her. The Dolgorukys tried to tighten their grip by marrying their debauched booby, Ivan, to the luminous Elizaveta, who refused such a mésalliance.

  In Moscow, the Dolgorukys triumphantly announced the betrothal of their daughter to the tsar. The couple sat on a dais in the Lefortovo Palace receiving congratulations. When Elizaveta kissed his hand, Peter looked forlorn, while ‘the pretty victim’ Ekaterina, ‘dressed in a stiffened bodied gown of silver tissue with a coronet on her head’, was ‘very melancholy and pale’, noticed the English ambassador’s wife. Suddenly the ‘forsaken swain’ Melissimo approached, ‘to everyone’s surprise’. Ekaterina ‘snatched her hand out of the emperor’s and gave it to the other to kiss, ten thousand different passions on her face’.

  The marriage was set for 18 January 1730. Peter presided over the Blessing of the Waters on the 6th, but when he reviewed the troops in the freezing cold and walked behind the gilded sleigh of his fiancée Dolgorukaya, he complained of a headache. The next day, spots revealed smallpox. Osterman stayed at the bedside of his pupil in the Lefortovo Palace. At 3 a.m. on 18 January, the day set for his marriage to Ekaterina, Peter died.* So close yet so far, the Dolgorukys came up with a desperate plan.11

  ‘Scarce had Peter II closed his eyes than his friend Prince Ivan Dolgoruky came out of the chamber flourishing his drawn sword and cried out “Long live Empress Ekaterina”,’ by which he meant his sister, Ekaterina Dolgorukaya. No one joined in his acclamation, but the Dolgorukys had falsified Peter’s will to nominate his fiancée. Faced with a near-extinct dynasty, they were effectively launching a coup to subvert and replace the Romanovs.

  Osterman claimed to be ill and retired to his sickbed. Gathering in the Lefortovo Palace near the tsar’s body, the seven remaining members of the Supreme Privy Council – four Dolgorukys and two Golitsyns plus old Golovkin – met to decide on a new monarch. Peter was the last of the male Romanovs, which gave the councillors the first real opportunity since 1613 to change the very nature of autocracy. First Alexei Dolgoruky produced the forged will leaving the empire to his own daughter. Even his cousin Marshal Vasily Dolgoruky refused to support this preposterous chicanery. Prince Dmitri Golitsyn brushed aside the Dolgorukys: ‘We must choose from the illustrious Romanov family and no other.’ There were five female candidates. The rightful empress by Empress Catherine’s will was Elizaveta, but Golitsyn reminded his peers that she was born illegitimate. In any case, she refused to bid for the throne, later musing, ‘I’m glad I didn’t. I was too young . . .’ Amazingly Tsarina Eudoxia, Peter the Great’s rejected first wife, now restored to her rank, proposed herself as succ
essor to her grandson – but she had no following. Golitsyn proposed ‘to choose one of the [three] daughters of Tsar Ivan [V]’, Peter the Great’s handicapped brother. The eldest girl, the Wild Duchess Ekaterina, was ruled out for being married to the oafish duke of Mecklenburg, so Golitsyn chose the next: Anna, the downtrodden widow of Courland. ‘She was born in our midst from a Russian mother and a good old family,’ he said – in other words, she was no upstart Empress Catherine and she had neither faction, nor known views, and she was single. Golitsyn* suggested that ‘to make our lives easier and provide ourselves with more freedoms’, Anna would be a figurehead, forced to accept only limited powers.

  ‘Although we might achieve this,’ mused one of the Dolgorukys, ‘we might not hold on to power.’

  ‘We’ll hold on to it all right,’ replied Golitsyn, dictating the terms to be offered to Anna, ending with the words: ‘Should I not fulfil any part of this promise, I shall be deprived of the Russian throne.’ This plan has been compared to the monarchy dominated by a landed oligarchy that developed in England after the Glorious Revolution forty years earlier, but really it was a brazen Dolgoruky power-grab, meagrely camouflaged by highfalutin ideals. To pull it off, they had to get to Anna before she discovered that this was just the scheme of six old aristocrats. So they closed the gates of Moscow and despatched a Golitsyn and a Dolgoruky to offer her their conditions: the tsar would no longer be able to marry, appoint an heir, declare war, levy taxes or spend revenues – without the permission of the Council. This would have constituted the greatest change in Russian government between 1613 and 1905.

  As soon as this news spread through the Lefortovo Palace, the race was on to beat the cabal to Anna. Karl Gustav von Löwenwolde, a Baltic courtier who had been one of Anna’s lovers, despatched a courier to reach her first.

  That night, on 18 January, Anna went to bed in the dreary town of Mitau not knowing that she was already empress of Russia.

  She learned the astonishing news from Löwenwolde. So on the 25th, when Princes Vasily Lukich Dolgoruky (uncle of Ivan and Ekaterina) and Mikhail Golitsyn (brother of Dmitri) arrived to offer her the throne, she knew what to expect. Now thirty-seven years old, a swarthy, deep-voiced scowler, she had cheeks ‘as big as a Westphalian ham’ and a face that her mother’s fool had compared to a bearded Muscovite: ‘Ding-dong here comes Ivan the Terrible!’ After twenty years of humiliation, this tsar’s daughter would have agreed to anything to get out of Courland. ‘I promise to observe the conditions without exception,’ she wrote – and prepared to leave for Moscow, where the Guards were now seething with outrage at the aristocratic coup.

  As soon as she arrived outside Moscow, Anna was joined by her Saltykov cousins, by her sister Ekaterina – and, secretly, by her lover, a former groom named Ernst Biron. On 15 February 1730, Anna entered Moscow in a carriage to the boom of 156 cannon. While she was carefully watched by the cabal, Osterman cunningly arranged that her ladies-in-waiting were the wives of its enemies. These women handled the messages from Osterman – hidden in clocks, sewn into shirts and wrapped in baby’s swaddling-clothes – that informed her that the aristocrats had few supporters. Peter the Great’s henchmen had been created by the autocracy, so had the Guards; many officers believed that autocracy was the only system that could govern Russia; and all resented this machination of Dolgorukys and Golitsyns. The senior officers – the Generalitet – were organized by Osterman to sign a petition. Meanwhile Anna cultivated the Preobrazhensky Guards, served them vodka with her own hand and declared herself their colonel.

  On 25 February in the Kremlin, when Anna majestically greeted the elite in the company of the Golitsyns and Dolgorukys, Prince Alexei Cherkassky, Russia’s richest man and figurehead of the Generalitet , presented the petition asking her to rule as autocrat.

  ‘What right have you got, prince, to presume to make law?’ asked Vasily Lukich Dolgoruky.

  ‘As much as a Dolgoruky. You’ve deceived the empress!’ insisted Cherkassky, supported by the Guards, who offered to kill Anna’s enemies. Instead, the empress invited the Golitsyns and Dolgorukys to a dinner. Afterwards, they returned to the hall where the Generalitet asked her to assume absolute power – but she feigned confusion: ‘The conditions I signed in Mitau weren’t the wish of the people?’

  ‘Nyet!’ roared the Guards.

  Turning on the cabal, Anna said, ‘That must mean you deceived me!’ She sent for the signed conditions. ‘So this isn’t necessary,’ she declared, as she slowly tore the paper in half.12

  On 28 April 1730, Anna was crowned by Archbishop Prokopovich with a new crown made up of over 2,500 precious stones and 28 diamonds. As she processed out of the cathedral, she stopped at a specially built loge to greet that other woman summoned from the distant past: Peter the Great’s ex-wife Eudoxia – who had wanted to be empress herself.13

  Anna promoted her lover Biron to grand chamberlain and count of the Holy Roman Empire – quite a rise. Three years her senior, Biron, the ‘extremely handsome’ son of a Courlandian huntsman of minor nobility, had been a groom who then charmed his way into the favour of Anna’s lover Bestuzhev. When Bestuzhev was exiled, Biron replaced him as Anna’s paramour. Biron was coarse and uneducated – he had once killed someone in a fight. The groom had such a ‘great fancy for horses’ that ‘he talked to men as horses and horses as men’. ‘Haughty and ambitious, abrupt and even brutal, avaricious, he was an implacable enemy.’ Biron ‘exercised a total authority’ over Anna. ‘She couldn’t bear to be separated from him for a minute,’ and ‘if he had a sombre expression the empress would look worried. If he was cheerful, her joy was obvious.’ They often walked around holding hands and fell ill at the same times. ‘Never was there an intimate couple who so completely shared both their joys and sorrows.’

  Osterman staged a Lazarus-like recovery, returned to his post as vice-chancellor and was promoted to count by the grateful empress, who now abolished the Supreme Privy Council and ran most of her domestic and foreign affairs through Osterman the Oracle. He was no fashion-plate: notorious for the ‘filth’ of his ‘disgusting clothes’, stinking soiled wig, brimming spittoon, ‘servants dressed like beggars’, he was mocked for the ugliness and reek of his mistresses. Nonetheless he was a ‘master of subtlety and dissimulation’ with ‘so strange a way of talking that few persons could ever boast of understanding him. Everything he said or wrote could be taken two ways.’

  Mocking Osterman’s hypochondria, Biron laughed that ‘He complains of earache and his face and head are bandaged . . . and he has not shaved or washed for weeks.’ Yet Anna needed Osterman. ‘For God’s sake take heart and come see me tomorrow,’ she wrote to him. ‘I need very much to talk to you and I shall never let you down. Fear nothing and everything shall come right!’

  Anna did not feel safe in Moscow – and she wished to channel some of her uncle Peter’s glory – so she returned to Petersburg. On arrival, she was impressed by the fireworks and triumphal arches prepared by General Burkhard Christoph von Münnich, a German military engineer hired by Peter the Great who rose to become Peter II’s chief of artillery and ‘one of the best generals of his age’. Anna took a liking to this ‘handsome-faced, very fair, tall and slender’ general. He fancied himself as a gallant, but the ladies laughed at ‘his German stiffness’: when he flirted ‘with all the ladies . . . suddenly snatching your hand and kissing it in raptures’, his efforts resembled ‘a frolicsome cow’. This showman had already curried favour with Anna by denouncing two officials for hesitating to support her in the first days of her reign. Behind the courtly manners seethed ‘devouring ambition’. Anna promoted him to head the War Collegium and to the rank of field marshal. It seemed as if three Germans now ran Russia – Biron, Osterman and Münnich.14

  Anna disliked the poky Winter Palace so she commissioned the Italian architect Carlo Rastrelli to demolish the old edifice and build a new one to befit her imperial aspirations – and meanwhile moved into the late Admiral Apraxin’s house next d
oor. Biron, his wife and his son joined her. Living between there and Peterhof, she rose daily between 6 and 7 a.m., breakfasted with the Birons, met her ministers at nine, then at noon dined with the Birons. She and Biron craved magnificence with all the excitement of a tsar’s poor relative and a provincial groom arrived in power. But despite the vast sums now spent on clothes, carriages, palaces, games of pharo and Italian theatre, ‘the richest coat would sometimes be worn with the vilest wig’, observed a German visitor, ‘or a splendidly dressed man would appear in the wretchedest carriage. You see gold and silver plate in heaps on one side, grossest filth on the other. For one well-dressed woman, you see ten frightfully disfigured. The union of finery and meanness is universal.’

  The empress ‘is a very large made woman, very well shaped for her size’, observed Jane Rondeau, the wife of the British envoy who was much favoured by her, and whose letters give the only positive portrait of the empress, with her ‘brown complexion, black hair, dark blue eyes. She has an awefulness in her countenance at first sight but when she speaks, she has an inexpressibly sweet smile and she talks a good deal to everybody.’ Anna was kind to Münnich’s son Ernst, who found her ‘gentle and compassionate but had the fault of allowing evil done in her name’ by a ‘vindictive’ Biron.