Again, the crowd burst into cheers. “The Day of Dupes” was over. When it was no longer risky to take sides, Ostermann suddenly emerged. He had pretended to be seriously ill, confined to his room by his doctors; now, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, he congratulated Anna Ivanovna, swore his unfailing devotion to her and announced, privately, that he was preparing to bring a lawsuit in the name of Her Majesty against the Dolgorukys and the Golitsyns. Anna Ivanovna smiled with a scornful joy. Who thus dared to claim that she was not of the same blood as Peter the Great? She had just proven the opposite. And this idea alone
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The Surprise Accession of Anna Ivanovna filled her with ride.
The hardest part was over; she could prepare for the coronation without any unnecessary emotion. Striking while the iron was hot, she set the coronation ceremony to take place just two weeks later, on March 15, 1730, with all the usual pomp, in the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin. Catherine I, Peter II, Anna Ivanovna: the sovereigns of Russia followed one another at such short intervals that the waltz of “Their Majesties” made everyone dizzy. This empress was the third one in six years to proceed through the streets of Moscow. The novelty was wearing thin, but the crowds still came out to cheer enthusiastically and to proclaim their veneration of their “little mother.”
Meanwhile, Anna Ivanovna was not sitting idly by. She started by naming Simon Andreyevich Saltykov, who had served her cause so well, to the post of General-in-Chief and Grand Master of the court; and she relegated to his own domains the far too busy Dmitri Mikhailovich Golitsyn, to do penance there. But most important of all, she hurried to send an emissary to Mitau, where Buhren was impatiently awaiting the good word. He immediately set out for Russia.
In the old capital, meanwhile, the celebrations surrounding the coronation went on, accompanied by gigantic light shows.
The scintillating fireworks were soon rivaled by an unusually brilliant aurora borealis. Suddenly, the horizon blazed up. The sky turned radiant, as though it had been injected with blood. Among the people, some dared to call it an ill omen.
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Terrible Tsarinas
Footnotes 1. Memoires du prince Dolgoruky, cited by K. Waliszewski, L’Heritage de Pierre le Grand.
2. Details and comments reported in L’Avenement d’Anna Ire, by Korsakov; citations quoted in Waliszewski, op. cit.
V
Married at the age of 17 to Duke Frederick William (who had developed a reputation as a quarrelsome and drunken prince), Anna Ivanovna had retired with her husband to Annenhof, in Courland (today’s Lithuania, more or less). A few months after leaving Russia, she found herself widowed. She then moved to Mitau, where she lived in dereliction and embarrassment. During these years when the whole world seemed to have forgotten her very existence, she had a constant companion in Ernst Johann Buhren, a petty nobleman from Westphalia. A man of little education but unlimited ambition, Buhren replaced her first lover, Peter Bestuzhev. He proved to be very effective at the day’s work, in the office, and at night, in Anna’s bed. She accepted his guidance as readily as his caresses; and he relieved her of all her worries and provided all the pleasure she could wish for. Although his real name was Buhren, and although his family and friends had Russianized it to Biren, he preferred a “Frenchified” version - Biron. He was a grandson of one of Jacques de Courland’s stable«75»
Terrible Tsarinas men, but that did not stop him from pretending to a very honorable heritage; he claimed to be related to the noble French family, de Biron.
Anna Ivanovna took him at his word. Moreover, she was s o attached to him that she discovered hundreds of similarities in the way they both approached life; this harmony of tastes went as far as the details of their intimate behavior. Like his imperial mistress, Buhren adored luxury but was none too scrupulous when it came to moral or bodily purity. A woman of horse sense and robust health, Anna was not offended by anything and even appreciated Buhren’s odor of sweat and cattle sheds, and the Teutonic roughness of his language. At the table as in bed, she preferred substantial satisfactions and strong scents. She liked to eat, she liked to drink, she liked to laugh. A very large woman with a well-rounded belly and an ample bust, her body, weighed down with fat, was topped by a bloated, puffy face crowned by abundant brown hair and lit up by eyes of a sharp blue, whose boldness disarmed people before she even spoke. She was mad for brilliantly-colored dresses trimmed with gilt thread and embroidery; and she had little use for the aromatic toilette waters in use at the court. Among her entourage, it was said that she insisted on cleansing her skin with melted butter.
She took pride in having as many horses as there are days in the year. Every morning, she would inspect her stables and kennels with all the satisfaction of a miser inventorying his treasure - but she was full of contradictions. While she adored animals, she also took a sadistic pleasure in killing them and even torturing them. Soon after accepting the crown and being installed in St. Petersburg, she ordered that loaded rifles be kept in every room of the Winter Palace. Sometimes she would be struck by an irresistible impulse - cracking open a window, she would snap up her weapon and shoot a bird out of the sky. As the salons
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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»