were taken or tolerated by a foreigner made them seem twice as bad to the victims. Boiling with rage over the conduct of this tyrant who was not even one of their own, the Russians invented a word for the regime of terror that he imposed on them - behind his back, they talked about the “Bironovschina”1 as is it were a killer epidemic that was plaguing the country. Records of illicit payments exist that prove this
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Terrible Tsarinas name was justified.
For daring to stand up to the tsarina and her favorite, Prince Ivan Dolgoruky was drawn and quartered; his two uncles, Sergei and Ivan, were decapitated, and another member of the family, Vasily Lukich, a former participant in the Supreme Privy Council, met the same fate, while Catherine Dolgoruky, former fiancee of Peter, was shut away in a convent for life.
While eliminating his former rivals and those who might be tempted to take over where they had left off, Buhren worked to add to his personal titles, which he felt should keep pace with his increasing wealth. When Duke Ferdinand of Courland died on April 23, 1737, he sent Russian regiments under the command of General Bismarck2 to Mitau, “to intimidate” the Courland Diet and encourage it to elect him, disregarding any other candidate that might exist. Over the protests of the Teutonic Order, Ernst Johann Buhren was proclaimed, as he demanded, Duke of Courland. He intended to run this Russian province by remote control, from St. Petersburg. Moreover, Charles VI, emperor of Germany, gave him the title of count of the Holy Empire; and he managed to have himself designated a knight of St. Alexander and St. Alexis.
There was no honor or princely prerogative to which he did not lay claim. Anyone in Russia who wanted to get ahead, in any endeavor whatsoever, had to go through him.
Courtiers have always regarded it as an honor and a privilege to be admitted to the ruler’s private rooms. Now, stepping into the Empress’s bedroom, visitors would find Her Majesty still in her nightgown, with the inevitable Buhren lying at her side. Protocol required that the new arrival, even if he was a high-ranking official, kiss the hand that the sovereign held out to him above the bedcovers. To secure the good graces of her lover, as well, some took the opportunity to kiss his hand with same respectful air.
And there were even some flatterers who extended the standards
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The Extravagant Anna of etiquette to the point of kissing Her Majesty’s bare foot. And it has been alleged that, deep in the recesses of the imperial apartments, one Alexis Miliutin, a simple coal shoveler (istopnik) who, tending the stove in Anna Ivanovna’s room every morning, felt compelled to devoutly brush the tsarina’s and her companion’s feet with his lips. In reward for this daily homage, the istopnik was given a nobleman’s title. However, to preserve a trace of his modest origins, he was constrained use fireplace tools as the blazon on his coat of arms.3 On Sundays, Anna Ivanovna’s six favorite clowns had orders to line up outside the great dining room at the end of the dinner that was attended by all the members of the court. When the Empress and her retinue walked out, on their way back to church, the buffoons would squat side by side, imitating hens laying eggs and making comical noises. To make things even funnier, they had their faces smeared with coal and were ordered to roughhouse, and to scratch and fight until they drew blood. At the sight of these capers, the inspirer of the game and her faithful followers howled with laughter. And Her Majesty’s buffoons were too well paid to complain.
The descendants of the great families, including Alexis Petrovich Apraxin, Nikita Fyodorovich Volkonsky and even Mikhail Alexeyevich Golitsyn joined in. The tone was set by the professional jester, Balakirev, but whenever he was slow to come up with new tricks, the Empress would have him beaten to revive his inspiration. Then there was the violonist Peter Mira Pedrillo, who would scratch at his squeaky fiddle while prancing around like a monkey; and D’Acosta, the Jewish Portuguese polyglot who would egg on his accomplices by whipping them. The poor poet Trediakovsky, having composed an erotic and burlesque poem, was invited to read it before Her Majesty. He describes this literary event in a letter: “I had the pleasure of reading my verses be«81»
Terrible Tsarinas fore Her Imperial Majesty and, after the reading, I had the distinguished favor of receiving a gracious slap from Her Imperial Majesty’s own hand.”4 However, the mainstays of the comic troop around Balakirev were the freaks and dwarves of both genders; they were known by their nicknames: Beznozhka (the woman with no legs), Gorbushka (the hunchback). The tsarina’s fascination with physical hideousness and mental aberration was, she maintained, her way of showing interest in the mysteries of nature. Following the example of her grandfather Peter the Great, she claimed that studying the malformations of human beings helped her to understand the structure and the operation of normal bodies and minds. Surrounding herself with monsters was just another way of serving science. Moreover, according to Anna Ivanovna, the spectacle of other people’s misfortunes would reinforce everyone’s desire to look after his health.
Among the gallery of human monstrosities of which the empress was so proud, one of her favorites was a stunted old Kalmyk woman who was so ugly that even the priests were afraid of her.
No one could make funnier faces. One day the Kalmyk exclaimed, as a joke, that she would like to marry. In a flash of inspiration, the tsarina thought of a wonderful trick. While all the members of the small troop of court buffoons were experts at clowning around, not all of them were, strictly s peaking, deformed - for instance, the old nobleman, Mikhail Alexeyevich Golitsyn, who held a sinecure as “imperial jester.” He had been a widower for a few years. Suddenly he was informed that Her Majesty had found a new wife for him and that, in her extreme kindness, she was ready to take care of all the arrangements and to cover all the expenses of the wedding. The Empress was famous as an “indefatigable matchmaker,” so that no further explanation was needed. However, the preparations for this union looked to be
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The Extravagant Anna unusual at the very least. According to the tsarina’s instructions, the Cabinet Minister, Artyom Volynsky, had a vast house hastily built on the Neva embankment between the Winter Palace and the Admiralty, out of blocks of ice that were welded together by dribbling water in between them. The house was 60 feet long, over 20 feet wide, and 30 feet high, and was topped by a gallery with colonnade and statues. A staircase with a balustrade led to a vestibule, behind which the apartment reserved for the couple was located. It held a room furnished with a great white bed, whose curtains, pillows and mattress were carved of ice. To the side was a bathroom, also cut from ice, as evidence of Her Majesty’s concern for the intimate necessities on behalf of her “proteges.” Further on was a dining room, of similarly polar aspect but richly furnished in formal china and tableware, ready to welcome the guests for a superb and shivery and feast. In front of the house stood ice cannons, with a stack of cannonballs of the same material, and an ice elephant that was said to be able to spit a stream of frosty water 24 feet into the air, plus two ice pyramids inside of which were exhibited, to warm up the visitors, some humorous and obscene images. 5 Her Majesty expressly invited representatives of all the races of the empire, dressed in their native costumes, to participate in the great festival given in honor of the marriage of the buffoons.
On February 6, 1740, after the unfortunate Mikhail Golitsyn and the counterfeit old Kalmyk woman had their ritual blessing at the church, a carnival procession similar to those that had so amused Peter the Great set forth to the clanging of bells. Ostiak, Kirghiz, Finn, Samoyed, Yakut - they all filed along, proud in their traditional clothes, parading down the street. The crowds who had come running from every part of the city to enjoy this free spectacle were flabbergasted. Some of the participants rode horses of a species never before seen in St. Petersburg, others rode in rein«83»
