In January 1730, the fourteen-year-old Emperor Peter II died of smallpox, extinguishing the male line of the Romanov dynasty. Russia suddenly had no ruler, and the handful of oligarchs who controlled the state saw their chance. The Supreme Privy Council, dominated by the Dolgorukov and Golitsyn families, had no intention of choosing another autocrat. They wanted a puppet, a Romanov who could satisfy the public but who would obey them completely.
They fixed their gaze on an obscure, impoverished widow living in exile in Courland: Anna Ivanovna. She seemed perfect. At thirty-seven, she had spent two decades in a foreign land, writing desperate letters to St. Petersburg begging for firewood and winter coats.
The oligarchs assumed that poverty and isolation had broken her will. They drafted a document called the Conditions, which would have dismantled the Russian autocracy entirely. Under its terms, Anna could not declare war, make peace, impose taxes, spend state revenue, or execute nobles without the council’s explicit permission. She would be a crowned prisoner.
Envoys traveled to Courland, and Anna read the document. She understood at once that these men viewed her exactly as her mother and Peter the Great had done — as a tool to be used and discarded. She signed without hesitation and began the long journey to Moscow. The oligarchs celebrated, believing they had outmaneuvered the monarchy.
But they had failed to account for Anna’s true education. The woman who arrived in Moscow in February 1730 had been forged in a childhood of unrelenting fear and manipulation. She played the part of the compliant widow flawlessly, lulling the council into a false sense of security. Behind their backs, she assessed the political landscape with the cold, calculating eye of someone who had spent years watching her mother survive the Kremlin’s deadly games.
Anna realized that while the elite oligarchs wanted an oligarchy, the lower nobility and, crucially, the Imperial Guard despised the council. The guards were fiercely devoted to the principle of absolute monarchy. Anna quietly signaled her support for the military. On February 25, a large delegation of nobles and military officers demanded an audience with the new empress.
They presented a public petition asking her to reject the Conditions and restore autocratic power. The trap was set. Standing before the alarmed members of the Supreme Privy Council, backed by armed Guard officers, Anna asked for the original document she had signed in Courland. It was handed to her.
In a single, decisive motion, she tore it to pieces. The sound of ripping parchment announced the rebirth of Russian autocracy. The oligarchs were paralyzed. They had assumed Anna was weak because she had suffered.
They failed to understand that suffering, for a woman raised by Praskovia Saltykova, was not weakness — it was tactical training. Anna had learned from her mother that when you are powerless, you submit. You sign whatever paper is placed before you. You bow to the existing authority.
But the moment the balance of power shifts, you destroy the people who tried to control you. Anna’s ten-year reign became known in Russian history as the Bironovshchina, a dark and repressive decade defined by rampant paranoia, secret police, and the dominance of her Baltic German favorites, above all Ernst Johann von Biron. She trusted no Russian noble, and why would she? They had tried to strip her of her power.
She also nursed a deep, unhealed grudge against her own country. Russia was the state that had allowed her mother to abandon her, the state that had ignored her decades of poverty. Now that she held absolute power over the life and death of the entire empire, she ruled with a vengeful, systematic cruelty that mirrored the household terror of Izmailovo and projected it across the largest country on Earth. She revived the Secret Chancellery and expanded its network of informants.
A misplaced word, a drunken joke, even a failure to congratulate the empress, was enough to have a noble dragged from his bed, tortured, his tongue torn out, and exiled to the frozen wastes of Siberia. She shattered the old noble families who had proposed the Conditions, targeting the Dolgorukovs and Golitsyns in particular. She did not simply execute them; she dismantled their families, confiscated their wealth, and humiliated the survivors. To understand the nature of Anna’s cruelty, the notorious Ice Palace incident of 1740 is the defining example.
Often treated as a strange historical curiosity, it was in fact a carefully engineered political execution of human dignity, and the clearest possible embodiment of the psychological damage Praskovia Saltykova inflicted on her daughter. The target was Prince Mikhail Golitsyn, a member of the very family that had tried to limit Anna’s power a decade earlier. Golitsyn had committed the crime of traveling abroad and marrying a Catholic woman. When he returned to Russia, Anna decided to make an example of him.
She did not execute him, for death would have been far too quick and merciful. She stripped him of his title, his wealth, and his humanity. She forced a prince of the Russian Empire to become a court jester, made him serve her at feasts, crawl to her like a dog, and sit in a basket pretending to be a hen hatching eggs. When his Catholic wife died, Anna ordered the disgraced prince to marry a severely disfigured Kalmyk servant named Avdotya Buzheninova.
The empress commanded her engineers to build a massive palace entirely out of ice blocks on the frozen Neva River. Everything inside, the chairs, tables, fireplace, bed, and even pillows, was carved from solid ice. At the height of the brutal Russian winter, the newlyweds were locked inside the ice chamber. Guards were posted at the doors with orders to shoot them if they tried to escape.
They were left to freeze to death for the empress’s entertainment. Miraculously, the couple survived the night because the bride slipped a pearl necklace to a guard in exchange for a sheepskin coat. But the survival of the victims was irrelevant to the display. The Ice Palace was a structural demonstration of absolute power.
Anna was doing to Russia’s nobles exactly what her mother had done to the servant Vasily Derevnin in 1722. She was using human bodies to affirm her dominance, proving that birth, wealth, and history offered no protection whatsoever from her whims. She had learned from Praskovia that power was not a static title but a physical act. Power only became real when it could inflict catastrophic pain and humiliation on another human being without consequence.
Anna Ivanovna died in October 1740, leaving behind a terrified and traumatized empire. She had successfully maintained the throne against all opposition and died in her bed as the absolute ruler of Russia. But the legacy she left was not one of military conquest or enlightened reform. It was a legacy of fear.
When tracing the origins of this dark chapter in Russian history, the ghost of Praskovia Saltykova looms large. Praskovia did not write the laws of the Russian Empire, nor did she create the brutal system of the Muscovite court, nor did she establish the surveillance state built by Peter the Great. She was, initially, a victim of a patriarchal machine that viewed women as biological currency and political security. But her tragedy is the tragedy of institutionalized abuse.
She survived a system that tried to crush her by adopting its most lethal characteristics. Every humiliation she suffered at the hands of the state was systematically passed down to those beneath her. Praskovia never directly taught the future empress how to construct a palace of ice or how to operate the Secret Chancellery. But she equipped Anna with the ultimate, terrifying blueprint for survival in a cruel world.
Within the high wooden walls of Izmailovo, Praskovia built a microcosm of tyranny. She taught her daughters that human relationships were vulnerabilities, that empathy was a weakness to be exploited by those above them. Through decades of domestic horror, she demonstrated that the only way to ensure your own safety was to ensure that everyone around you was drowning in fear. The story of mother and daughter is a vicious cycle of trauma echoing through the corridors of Russian history.
Anna Ivanovna took the cruel lessons she had absorbed in her mother’s household and applied them to the governance of millions. In the end, the 1722 scandal of the missing letter and the tortured servant was not an isolated incident. It was the prologue — the moment the mask slipped, revealing the violent reality of a woman transformed into a tyrant by a world that refused to treat her as human. Praskovia Saltykova survived the Kremlin, but she lost her soul in the process.
And by doing so, she ensured that the Russian Empire would be ruled by a woman who had never been taught how to rule anything at all.
