Secret Lives of the Tsars

by Michael Farquhar

  Suddenly a loud roll of drums came from the courtyard, drawing the opposing statesmen to the windows. Prince Repnin, president of the College of War and a member of the aristocratic party, reacted furiously, demanding to know why the Guards were there without his order. The commander of the Guard, who had entered the debate chamber, responded coolly, “What I have done, Your Excellency, was by the express command of our sovereign lady, the Empress Catherine, whom you and I and every faithful subject are bound to obey immediately and unconditionally.” With that, many of the Guard present tearfully cried out, “Our father is dead, but our mother still lives!”

  Seizing the momentum, Menshikov raised his voice above the crowd. “Long live our most august sovereign Empress Catherine!”

  “Viva Empress Catherine!” the Guards cheered.

  Then, according to Count Bassewitz, “these last words were immediately resounded by all those present, each wanting to appear to the rest as if he were joining in of his own free will, and not merely imitating the example of others.”

  Thus, on February 8, 1725, the former peasant captive Martha Skavronskaya became Empress Catherine I, autocrat of All the Russias. It was a relatively brief, uneventful reign, with Menshikov in charge and Catherine bombed throughout most of it. The French envoy Jacques de Campredon noted that her “amusements constitute almost daily drinking bouts which take place in the garden and continue the whole night through and well into the next day, and involve persons whose duties require them to always be present at court.”

  The empress could have been her dead husband in drag, so all-consuming was her taste for alcohol. She even revived Peter’s “All-Drunken Synod,” and presided over it with a relish that would have made him proud. Catherine was often the last one standing at these booze-filled gatherings, teetering off to bed at dawn, only to wake up and start swilling once again. Her expense ledgers for Hungarian wine, Danzig schnapps, and other libations told their own story of excess. But the empress never paid any attention to expense, or to her health, for that matter—even as the constant drinking took its terrible toll.

  Just over two years after ascending the throne, the forty-three-year-old peasant empress was dead.

  * * *

  *1 Legend has it that Peter called for a writing tablet and managed to scrawl, “Leave everything to …” before dropping the pen in a sudden fit of tremors.

  *2 Livonia is now split between Latvia and Estonia.

  *3 According to some accounts, she was married to a Swedish soldier who went off to war shortly after the wedding and was never heard from again.

  *4 Menshikov came from the humblest origins, some said as a pie seller, but in the world of Peter the Great, a man’s background had no bearing—only his talent and potential. The tsar met Menshikov when both were mere boys and was immediately impressed by his great wit and intelligence. The two became instant friends, and, as Robert K. Massie wrote, “Menshikov employed his great charm and his variety of useful talents to make himself one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in eighteenth-century Europe.” Even after Menshikov was revealed to be an avaricious plunderer of the state, the normally implacable Peter managed to forgive him. The tsar’s grandson, Peter II, would prove to be far less indulgent, however (see footnote on this page).

  *5 Peter and Catherine’s two surviving daughters were Anne of Holstein, mother to the future Emperor Peter III (see Chapter 6), and Elizabeth, who became empress of Russia in 1741 (see Chapter 5).

  *6 Peter proclaimed Russia an empire in 1721 and he became emperor (a title henceforth interchangeable with tsar). Catherine thus received the title of empress.

  *7 This “mock” universe pervaded much of Peter the Great’s reign, where, for example, the autocratic tsar often took a lower rank to his subjects in arenas such as the military and in the “Drunken Synod, where instead of being Prince-Pope, he served as deacon (see previous chapter).

  Anna (1730–1740): “A Bored Estate Mistress”

  Our sovereign is a fool; you cannot get a decision from her on any matter.

  —ARTEMY VOLYNSKY

  Catherine I was succeeded not by either of her two surviving children, Anne or Elizabeth, but by her eleven-year-old stepgrandson, Peter—a boy whose legacy was blackened by the dissipated antics and cruel demise of his father, the Tsarevitch Alexis (see Chapter 2). Orphaned at the age of three and virtually ignored by his grandfather, Peter the Great, the child lived in the shadows for most of his life—no matter that he had emerged as the last Romanov of the male line. When the crown suddenly became his in 1727, Peter II was ready to play. But, after a brief reign of less than three years, marked by indolence and sexual shenanigans that belied his tender age, the boy tsar was dead at age fourteen.

  With the throne now vacant, members of the Supreme Privy Council—a regency of nobles that oversaw the affairs of the realm—plotted to make themselves truly supreme. For that, they turned not to the descendants of Peter the Great, but to those of Ivan V, his feeble, mentally challenged half-brother and co-tsar, who, though not capable of much, did at least manage to father three daughters. The Supreme Privy Council arranged for the accession of Ivan’s middle daughter, Anna, with the understanding that she would be entirely ruled by them. They were wrong. Anna retained all her autocratic powers and wielded them in some of the most bizarre ways imaginable.

  The wedding was gleefully planned by the empress who just loved her warped amusements. She had paired Prince Michael Golitsyn, a nobleman she had reduced to one of her court jesters, with a hideous-looking serving wench. Now it was time for the honeymoon. For that occasion, Anna arranged for a magnificent palace to be built entirely of ice on the frozen Neva River. Even the minutest details were given meticulous attention, right down to the ice playing cards that sat atop an ice table. There were ice trees and shrubs outside, with an ice elephant guarding the entrance, while inside the honeymoon suite the couple was provided with a canopied bed made entirely of ice, along with ice sheets, pillows, and blankets. A huge crowd joined the grand procession to this frozen retreat where the unfortunate couple was condemned to spend the night consummating the marriage neither had wanted. They emerged the next morning frostbitten and sniffling, while the capricious Empress Anna was left howling with laughter.

  Such uproarious fun would have once been unimaginable to Anna, even a few years previously. Born into a branch of the Romanov clan with few prospects after the death of her father, Ivan V, she became a political pawn of her uncle Peter the Great—married as a matter of state to Frederick William, Duke of Courland, when she was seventeen. While the wedding ceremony did offer a preview of the delights to come when she was Russia’s sovereign—complete with seventy-two dwarfs provided by uncle Peter to amuse the guests (see account in Chapter 2)—Anna was widowed within two months. Rather than allow his young niece to stay home in Russia after her husband’s death, Peter forced her to reside in Courland (now part of modern-day Latvia), a region he coveted. It was a bleak existence indeed.

  Though Anna was Courland’s nominal duchess, her uncle the emperor provided little for her maintenance. Pitifully, she wrote to Peter’s successor, Catherine I, begging for assistance: “You, my dear Sovereign, know that I have nothing other than the damask which you had ordered, and if the opportunity were to rise, I have neither suitable diamonds nor laces, neither linens nor a fine dress, and with the revenues from the village I can hardly maintain my home and put food on the table during the course of the year.”

  Compounding her financial woes, the young widow was lonely and desperately wanted a husband to protect and comfort her. She was thwarted at every turn. The king of Prussia’s nephew seemed to be a real possibility and a marriage contract was drafted in 1723, but Peter the Great quickly nixed this match, fearing the influence Prussia would gain in Courland. Then there was Count Maurice of Saxony. Sure he was a wanton philanderer, but he would be Anna’s—even if she had to share him. In anticipation of the wedding, Count Maurice was made duke of Courland
by the local noblemen. But, alas, someone else had his eye on the ducal seat, and he was a formidable contender indeed: Alexander Menshikov.*1

  “The choice of Maurice is at variance with the interests of Russia,” Catherine I wrote sternly, and no amount of pleading on Anna’s part would move the empress. Count Maurice was forcibly expelled from Courland, leaving his would-be mate crushed. Lacking a husband, Anna took solace in her lover, Peter Bestuzhev-Ryumin, a skilled diplomat installed in Courland by Peter the Great. The lonely widow subjected herself entirely to this dynamic character, nineteen years her senior, although, like Count Maurice, he was not exactly monogamous. “He lures the ladies-in-waiting outside the court and makes children [with them],” reported one anonymous informer. Needy as she was, Anna overlooked these infidelities, but, in the end, Menshikov ruined that relationship, too. He blamed Bestuzhev-Ryumin for his failure to obtain Courland’s throne and the duchess’s lover was eventually recalled to St. Petersburg. Anna was inconsolable.

  “I humbly request of you, Your Excellency, to intervene for me, a poor woman, before His Serene Highness [Menshikov],” Anna wrote in one of dozens of desperate letters to various court officials. “Be merciful … kindly heed the humble appeal of an orphan, give me cause for joy and save me from tears. Have mercy on me, as would God himself.… Truly, I live in great sorrow, emptiness, and fear! Do not let me spend the rest of my life in tears! I have grown accustomed to him!”

  Grieved though she was over the loss of Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Anna quickly filled the vacancy in her bed with a new lover, Ernst Johann von Biron—the man who would virtually dominate her ten-year reign when she became empress of Russia in 1730. So what if he was married, with three children. Anna simply made his family her own. In fact, some historians believe that the youngest of Biron’s offspring, a little boy named Karl Ernst, was actually Anna’s son as well. She certainly kept the child close to her, and awarded him the highest titles and honors when she obtained the crown.

  While Anna contented herself with Biron in Courland, the Supreme Privy Council was busy plotting her future in Russia. Peter II was dead and the council—dominated by the powerful Dolgoruky and Golitsyn clans—wanted a compliant successor they could control.*2 They thought they had the perfect candidate in the late Ivan V’s destitute middle daughter, who had shown herself to be entirely submissive in so many matters. Accordingly, they offered her the crown—a glittering prize, to be sure, but one without even a dollop of power, for the council intended to make the sovereign their puppet by assuming all her traditional rights. Feebly, Anna signed the document that sucked the vital essence right out of the autocracy.

  But the designated empress would not remain a glorified figurehead for long. A frenzy of discontent arose among the lesser nobility when they learned of the Supreme Privy Council’s brazen grasp for power. With an insurrection brewing, once again it fell to the Imperial Guard to determine the fate of the throne—just as it had after the death of Peter the Great. And the Guard liked its sovereign strong. Backed by this insurmountable force, Anna ordered the document in which she had signed away her rights and privileges be brought to her. Then she tore it to bits.

  The night after Anna received the mandate to rule as she pleased, the sky blazed with scarlet northern lights of unusual intensity, “overspreading the whole horizon,” according to one account, “[that] made it appear as if all were drenched in blood.” Some saw it as an ill-omen, and the next decade would validate all their fears.

  Russia was now in the hands of a petty, suspicious woman with a decided mean streak. And her appearance seemed to match her personality. Burly, with manly features, the empress was by no means a beauty. “Such a cheek the pictures give her,” the historian Thomas Carlyle wrote, “in size and somewhat in expression like a Westphalia ham!”

  Anna was not particularly interested in actually governing Russia, but rather in pursuing her often peculiar pleasures. Like her uncle Peter the Great, the empress delighted in human oddities and surrounded herself with the malformed, disabled, and grotesquely ugly. Even those lacking natural impediments had a place in court, reduced to fools and jesters for Anna’s amusement. That’s how some noblemen found themselves covered with feathers and forced to sit in a nest clucking like chickens, or spending the night in an ice palace.

  An avid hunter like Peter II, Anna brought a unique bloodthirstiness to the sport. Wild beasts from all over Russia were imported to the empress’s estates so she could pick them off at her leisure. The animal trophies mounted into the thousands. She even kept guns near the windows inside her palaces so that if a bird happened to fly by she could conveniently shoot it from the sky.

  Because of Anna’s affinity for it, shooting became all the rage in fashionable society. “The fawning nobility schooled their young daughters by having them shoot at doves,” wrote Anisimov. “What else could one expect? If Her Majesty were to take to bathing in a hole cut in an iced-over stream, then all the young and not-so-young countesses and princesses would be obliged to climb into the ice-cold water only to please the crowned naiad.”

  When she wasn’t busy slaughtering animals, Anna kept a keen eye on her subjects—not for their welfare, of course, but to ensure they behaved the way she wanted. Her spies were everywhere, and the torture chambers were packed with those who displeased her. No detail of her subjects’ lives—no matter how trivial—escaped the empress’s attention. “A bored estate mistress,” Anisimov called her. “A superstitious, petty, and capricious mistress, she stood by her Petersburg ‘window’ and examined her vast yard [Russia] with partiality and keen attention, duly punishing any servants and slaves responsible for any disorder she might happen to see.”

  Anna sent her agents—particularly her kinsman, Count Semen Saltykov, governor-general of Moscow—to pry into astonishingly inconsequential matters, far more worthy of the neighborhood busybody than the autocratic empress of Russia. Among her many orders to Saltykov:

  —“Go to Apraksin’s and personally examine his storeroom; look for a portrait in which his father is depicted on horseback, and send it to us; he [Apraksin] is in Moscow, of course, and if he hides it, they, the Apraksins, will be sorry.”

  —“Let me know if my chamberlain … is still married. Here [in St. Petersburg] it is rumored that he is divorced.… I am writing to you about this in absolute secrecy so that he will not know about my inquiry.”

  —“When you receive this memorandum, look for a bride for Davydov. Send her here escorted by a soldier, but do not send any of her relatives, not even her mother.”

  —“Find out whether Golitsyn’s father was really ill, as his son has told us here, or whether he was in good health; if he was ill, then write what kind of illness he had and how long he had been ill.”

  With such weighty matters to attend to, Anna had little time—and even less inclination—to oversee her real responsibilities. “Our sovereign is a fool,” complained Artemi Volynsky; “you cannot get a decision from her on any matter.” To actually run Russia, well, the empress left that almost entirely to her Courland lover, Biron, described by one contemporary as “haughty, and ambitious beyond all bounds, abrupt, brutal, avaricious, an implacable enemy, and cruel in his revenge.” Anna adored him. The couple was almost a single entity, with the empress attuned to her constant companion’s every mood and responsive to all his needs.

  “Neither one of them could ever completely conceal their feelings,” Ernst von Münnich recalled in his memoirs. “If the duke came frowning, the empress immediately took on a worried air. If he was gay, the monarch’s face showed obvious pleasure. If someone failed to please the duke, then that someone would immediately detect a marked change in the eyes of the monarch and in the way she received him. All favors were to be sought from the duke, and only after his approval would the empress make her decision.”

  Made the virtual master of Russia by his mistress Anna, Biron proceeded to make himself thoroughly hated. And so it went for the duration of Empress Anna’
s decade-long reign. Only her death on October 28, 1740, at age forty-seven, separated the couple at last. The English envoy reported Anna and Biron’s final moments together: “Her Majesty, looking up, said to him: Nie Bois!—the ordinary expression of this country, and the import of it is: ‘Never fear.’ ”

  Yet as it turned out, Biron had much to fear indeed.*3

  * * *

  *1 Peter the Great’s favorite (see footnote on this page) had reached near-royal status during the booze-soaked reign of Catherine I. He “was exercising a perfect despotism,” observed General Christoph von Manstein. But the mighty Menshikov eventually met his match with young Peter II, Catherine’s successor. If he did nothing else during his brief, lethargic reign, Peter crushed the so-called half-tsar who dared try to control him. (Menshikov had held the new emperor as a virtual captive in his gilded palace, and even tried to perpetuate a personal royal dynasty by betrothing the tsar to his daughter Maria.) “I will show you who is Emperor: Menshikov or me,” Peter II angrily exclaimed, right before shipping his nemesis off to Siberia.

  *2 Peter the Great’s surviving daughter, Elizabeth, was once again rejected as candidate, as were Ivan V’s eldest and youngest daughters.

  *3 Biron briefly ruled as regent during the reign of Anna’s infant nephew, Ivan VI, before he was ambushed in his bed at the Winter Palace and dragged away—naked as the day he was born. “The noise, shouting, and turmoil of this classic palace coup scene awakened the entire court,” wrote Evgenii V. Anisimov, “and only the deceased empress [Anna] showed no sign of interest in what was happening as she lay quietly in her coffin in the palace’s state hall [as] Biron was carried out past her bellowing and kicking.”