Royal Babylon by Karl Shaw

Author:Karl Shaw [Shaw, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780767909396
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2001-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

EMPRESS ANNE

Empress Anne was certifiably insane. Her reign marked one of the darkest chapters in Russian history and, according to the nineteenth-century historian Kliuchevskii, “the darkest stain was the Empress herself.” Anne’s father, Ivan V, had been Czar in name only because he was mentally infirm—what the Russians called a “sad head.” Her mother, the Czarina Praskovya, was mad. She filled her palace with dwarfs, jesters and people who were either mentally ill or suffering from some sort of terrible physical disability or deformity—her own private human freak show.

At the age of eighteen Anne was widowed. Her husband, selected for her by Peter the Great, was Frederick the Duke of Courland, a nephew of the King of Prussia. They were both seventeen years old when they met. Their marriage ceremony, orchestrated by the Czar, was a typically extravagant affair, a marathon drinking session punctuated only by toasts, gun salutes and more toasts. At the height of the festivities two enormous pies were carried in and placed before the couple. Suddenly the crusts broke open and a couple of dwarfs, one male, one female, leapt out and danced around the table. Six weeks later the groom was dead from alcoholic poisoning.

Anne never remarried but she took dozens of lovers, never pausing to worry about the social status, or for that matter the sex, of the people she slept with. She allowed one of her less reputable male lovers to turn one of her spare palaces into a temporary brothel. The Empress surrounded herself with a coterie of young girls. She wrote to one of her Governors ordering him to find her tall, exotic-looking “Persian, Georgian or Lesghian girls” who “must be clean, good, and not stupid.” When one of her favorite long-serving girlfriends fell ill she ordered Saltykov to find a look-alike: “I believe she will soon die,” explained the Empress, “and I want someone to replace her.” She had a passionate lesbian affair with the young daughter of an important Lithuanian official, Mademoiselle Oginska. Anne was so open about this relationship that the wife of an English ambassador was able to remark that the Empress seemed to spend most of her time in bed with her girlfriend.

Her most permanent heterosexual affair was with the brutal and much hated Count Biron. He was already married and Anne insisted on having his wife hang around the palace playing gooseberry while Biron shared the Empress’s bed. Biron was her regular lover for the next twenty years, and he used his influence to become one of the richest and most powerful men in Russia. Within a year of Anne’s death, the Russian Supreme Privy Council ensured that Biron and his family joined the thousands of peasants Anne had sent packing to Siberia.

While she blew the state’s money on luxuries and amusements, Russia starved. She used her power throughout her eleven-year reign to humiliate and oppress. Tens of thousands of her subjects were exiled to Siberia. Thousands more were executed or starved to death, and she had tongues pulled out to prevent her victims from pleading their innocence.

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