A throne with conditions

Louis Caravaque painted Anna Ioannovna in 1730, the year she took the throne. Silver thread, ermine, a crown: the portrait announces an empress, not a negotiator. It cannot show the paper she was asked to accept before she ruled, or the service nobles who decided that paper was more dangerous than a woman from Courland. Use the likeness for rank. Use the year for the argument. A vacant throne after Peter II’s death was a chance to write limits. The chance lasted as long as the men who wanted limits could keep the ordinary nobility from the room.

Peter II died childless on his wedding day. The Supreme Privy Council had to choose again. Under the leadership of Prince Dmitry Golitsyn — scion of an old Muscovite boyar family, himself a prominent official under Peter I — the council elected Anna, dowager duchess of Courland, niece of Peter I, daughter of his co-tsar Ivan V. She was a Romanov by the first marriage’s line, a widow with a German duchy in her past, and, crucially, childless in a way that invited further bargains. Golitsyn tried to circumscribe her power by having her accept a set of conditions that left to the council the decisive voice in all important matters. This was a move toward oligarchy: a few names, a bound autocrat, government as a princely committee.

The move was foiled. Top-level officials — the generalitet, those with the service rank of general or its equivalent — allied with the rank-and-file service nobility. The former wanted inclusion in the ruling oligarchy; Golitsyn seemed ready to concede them that. The latter wanted no limitation on the autocratic power of the sovereign. Ordinary service nobles feared that an oligarchy, however broad, would shut them off from access to the ruler and thus from the chance to rise in the Table of Ranks. A committee of princes was a ceiling. An autocrat, even a foreign-married niece, was still a ladder, or could be. They defended unlimited monarchy not as a philosophy seminar but as a career. The conditions failed. Anna came in as empress, not as a chairwoman of Golitsyn’s council.

The Supreme Privy Council was abolished upon Anna’s accession in 1730. Coordination, supervision and policy planning passed to a cabinet of ministers: three experienced high officials, all Russians. That fact sits badly with later cartoons of a purely German court. The cabinet was Russian. The favourite was not. Anna left most of her authority to be exercised by Ernst Johann Biron, her Baltic German favourite. He acquired a reputation for corruption, cruelty, tyranny and exploitation, and he was felt to have set up a police terror that benefited Germans in Russia at the expense of loyal Russians. Recent scholarship, as Britannica reports it, has modified that image. Biron’s bad name rested on inflexibility in applying the law and collecting taxes, rather than on malevolence. Harsh fiscal regularity is not the same as a national persecution. It is still harsh. Peasants and taxpayers met the state as arrears and punishments, not as a debate about Courland.

The portrait after Caravaque shows Biron as a duke in armour, ermine on the shoulders, a favourite dressed as a sovereign’s neighbour. It is not a ledger of tax cases. It cannot prove terror, and it cannot disprove it. Read it as the face later memory needed: foreign, armoured, close. Then put the face back in the 1730s and remember the cabinet of three Russians that actually sat as a coordinating body. A reign can have both a Baltic darling and a Russian bureaucracy. The black legend flattened that into a single German night.

Anna was childless. She appointed as successor her infant nephew, Ivan Antonovich, Ivan VI, under arrangements that immediately became a struggle among adults. The boy was the son of Prince Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig and of Anna Leopoldovna, the empress’s niece. On 16 October 1740, 27 October New Style, Anna named him heir; the next day he was proclaimed emperor. Biron, who had at first retained his influence, became regent. Three weeks later he was overthrown by Field Marshal Burkhard Christoph, Count von Münnich, together with the vice-chancellor Andrey Osterman. Ivan remained the nominal ruler. His mother was installed as regent. The continuing domination of a few favourites — many of them Germans — displeased high officials, whose position was threatened by personal caprice, and incensed still more the rank-and-file service nobility, who could not obtain rewards without a favourite’s help. Malcontents gathered around Peter I’s daughter Elizabeth.

The Tretyakov’s anonymous 1740s likeness shows the infant Ivan VI with Julia Mengden. It is a child as a dynastic object, a nurse or companion in the same frame, not a witness of the night the frame would be broken. Elizabeth’s easygoing and open ways had gained her friends. She was popular because of a Russian outlook she emphasized, and because she shared the aura of her father. Anna Leopoldovna’s regency threatened her with banishment to a convent. On the night of 24–25 November 1741, 5–6 December New Style, with the help of the guard regiments and high officers, and with the financial support of foreign diplomats — in particular the French envoy — she overthrew the infant, the regent and their chief advisers. After summoning the civil and ecclesiastical notables of St Petersburg, she was proclaimed empress.

Princes offered a bound crown; the service world demanded an unbound one; the Guards, in the end, chose Peter’s daughter.

Ivan VI was deposed, not raised. For years afterward he remained in solitary confinement in various prisons; that imprisonment is the end of his reign, not the beginning of Catherine II’s. The 1741 coup closes this page. It does not open Elizabeth’s twenty years, which have their own article. What 1730–41 together show is the failure of two experiments. Golitsyn’s conditions failed because ordinary nobles would not accept a princely ceiling on the autocrat. Biron’s prominence, Münnich’s blow, an infant’s title and a German-flavoured household failed because the same service world, and the Guards, would not accept a ruling circle that felt closed, foreign and capricious. Elizabeth’s night was not a folk rising. It was the Guards again, with French money in the background, and a daughter who could say her father’s name as a programme.

A throne with conditions had sounded, to a few families, like safety: written limits, a council’s voice, no more Menshikovs, no more accidents of passion. To the men who lived by ranks it had sounded like a locked door. They opened the door to Anna, then found that autocracy unbound still meant favourites, taxes collected without softness, and a baby in the title. The next bargain would be simpler on the surface. Proclaim the daughter. Restore, at least on paper, the Senate her father had used. Wear Russian-ness as a coat. The coat would not abolish intrigue, or serfdom, or the Guards’ memory of how a night can rewrite a reign. It would last twenty years. That is the next story. This one ends in a palace corridor in 1741, with an infant emperor carried out of politics and a woman who had been a minor figure under Peter II and Anna now wearing the crown her mother had worn as a widow.

The paper was the whole of the oligarchic idea. It failed in weeks. What lasted was the lesson the service world took from the failure: better an autocrat you can petition than a council that will not know your name.

Anna’s decade still had to staff a Petrine state. In 1731 the Corps of Cadets was created, the first large answer to the nobility’s demand for schools that would train sons for rank and let them skip the lowest rungs. That school belongs in this reign’s calendar even if later decades expanded the idea. A bound crown had been refused. An unbound one still needed cadets, taxes and a cabinet of three Russians sitting while a Courland favourite took the blame for inflexible collection. The black legend of German terror is easier than a ledger. The ledger is what peasants met.

Ivan VI’s year as a title, 1740–41, was an adult war with a baby’s name on the documents. Named heir on 16 October 1740 and proclaimed the next day, he was never a ruler in any working sense. Biron as regent, Münnich and Osterman as his overthrowers three weeks later, Anna Leopoldovna as the next adult in the room: the sequence is a scramble among people who had already learned that the Guards and the high officers could rewrite a household. Elizabeth had been a minor figure under Peter II and under Anna. She became the available Russian-looking alternative when a convent threatened and a French envoy would pay. The infant’s later prisons are the shadow of that night. They are not yet Catherine II’s story. They are how a coup finishes a child it will not raise.

Biron’s reputation needs one more turn, because later memory still prefers the cartoon. Inflexibility in law and tax is a duller charge than national persecution, and duller charges are usually closer to how a state actually hurts people. Collection does not require a foreign plot. It requires a favourite who will not forgive arrears and a cabinet that will not stop him. The three Russian ministers coordinated; they did not make Biron beloved. When Münnich toppled him after Anna’s death, the issue was not a sudden discovery that taxes existed. It was who would stand beside an infant. Elizabeth’s night, a year later, answered with the Guards. Between Golitsyn’s paper and that night sits the whole of this article: a refused oligarchy, an unbound autocrat, a favourite’s black name, a baby’s title, a daughter’s coup.

Stop on 25 November 1741. The Senate that Elizabeth would restore on paper, the university she would found, the war she would leave unfinished — those are her pages. This page is only the failure of conditions and the cost of refusing them. Service nobles kept the autocrat. They also kept the favourite problem, the tax problem, and the Guards. That was the bargain. It was not written. It did not need to be. Everyone who had watched 1730 already knew it.