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»
Terrible Tsarinas strosities. Nothing was funnier to her than the spectacles performed by buffoons and dwarves. The uglier and stupider they were, the more she applauded their jokes and antics. After 19 years of provincial mediocrity and obscurity, she wanted to remove the veneer of propriety and impose on the court a life of unprecedented luxury and chaos. Nothing struck her as too beautiful nor too expensive - when it came to satisfying the whims of the sovereign.
However, this Russia that accident had given her to rule was not, strictly speaking, her fatherland. And she hardly saw the need to make it her own. Certainly, she had some good old Russian families in her pocket including, among the most devoted, old Gabriel Golovkin, the Trubestkoy princes and Ivan Baryatinsky, Paul Yaguzhinsky (that famous hot-head), and the impulsive Alexis Cherkassky, whom she made her chancellor. But the reins were in the hands of the Germans. The empire’s policies were set by a team composed entirely of men of Germanic origin, taking orders from the terrible Buhren.
The old boyars, so proud of their genealogy, were swept from center stage when Her Majesty and her favorite came into power.
Coming from backgrounds in the civil administration as well as the military, the new bigshots of the regime included the Loewenwolde brothers, Baron von Brevern, the Generals Rodolph von Bismarck and Christoph von Manstein, and Field Marshal Burkhard von Munnich. A four-man cabinet replaced the Supreme Privy Council and Ostermann, in spite of his ambiguous past, still served as Prime Minister; but it was Ernst Johann Buhren, the Empress’s favorite, who chaired the meetings and made the final decisions.
Impervious to the concept of pity, never hesitating to send a troublemaker to the dungeon, to Siberia or to the torture chambers for a good thrashing, Buhren did not even need to ask Anna
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The Extravagant Anna Ivanovna’s opinion before dictating these punishments, for he knew in advance that she would approve them. Was if because she actually had the same opinion as her lover, in so many instances, that she left him such a free hand - or was it simply because s he was too lazy to oppose him? The people who had to deal with Buhren unanimously commented on the hardness of his face, which seemed to be carved from stone, and the look in his eye - like a bird of prey. One word from him could make all of Russia happy or desperate. His mistress did nothing more than lend her imprimatur to all that he did. And, like her, he was avid for luxury, and he took full advantage of his almost-kingly position to accept bribes right and left. He expected payment for the least service rendered.
His contemporaries found his cupidity to exceed even that of Menshikov, but it was not this systematic misappropriation that bothered them most. The preceding reigns had accustomed them to greasing the wheels. No, it was the excessive Germanization that Buhren was introducing into their fatherland that irritated them more each day. Admittedly, Anna Ivanovna had always spoken and written German better than Russian, but since Buhren took over the highest level in the hierarchy, it seemed that in fact the entire State apparatus had changed. If someone of Russian stock had been committing these crimes, thefts, and abuses or granting favors the way this arrogant parvenu was doing, Her Majesty’s subjects would have found it easier to swallow. But the fact that these liberties
