Peter II was a fine, handsome lad of eleven summers, the fruit of the unhappy union of the miserable Alexis and hardly less miserable Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel. From such a stock Peter the Great had expected no good. He disliked to think of the boy, and, careful as he generally was about education, he allowed the child to pass to the hands of ignorant and incompetent trainers. Catherine, or Menshikoff, who may have early conceived his plan of the future, altered this state of things at the death of Peter the Great. The conscientious German minister Ostermann was charged with the education of the young prince, and we perceive by his scheme of lessons, which survives, that he was prepared even for the duties of a monarch.

Unhappily, the best scheme of education depends for its result upon the co-operation of the pupil, and Peter was a bad pupil. He liked Ostermann, but he disliked lessons; and the consciousness that he was now a monarch did not dispose his lively imagination to submit to prosy toil. There was a strain of nervous instability in nearly the whole of the Romanoffs at this stage, Peter liked sport and riding and play. His sister Natalia, two years older than he, was a good playmate; even better was Aunt Elizabeth, the younger daughter of the late Empress. Elizabeth was now a very sprightly and pretty young lady of sixteen, the exact opposite of what a Russian princess ought to be on the old standards. She shunned books, but took like a boy to riding and hunting and fencing. Her lively tongue and merry blue eyes attracted young officers; and she was the daughter of Catherine and Peter in such matters.

Menshikoff did not like the intimacy and he carried Peter off to one of his palaces and put trusted servants and the sober Ostermann about him. He also introduced the young Tsar to the charm of his own domestic circle, and he presently announced to the Privy Council that Peter had honoured him by asking the hand of his daughter Maria. The ceremony of betrothal was, in fact, publicly celebrated. Inconvenient or critical people were humanely removed by appointments abroad. Even the Duke of Holstein was induced to return to his native land and take his Duchess with him; and they were treated very generously in the matter of provision. Honours and offices were distributed with such generosity as was consistent with the supreme power and increasing wealth of the former premier. Members of old noble families, like the Dolgorukis and Golitzuins, were promoted.

With the aid of Ostermann for foreign affairs Menshikoff ruled the country advantageously. There was, fortunately, no stress at home or abroad, for he had no ability as a statesman, but he passed a number of measures which promoted trade or tranquillity. The Cossacks were more than pacified by the concessions he made to them. Eudoxia was liberated from the rigorous and dismal confinement to which Peter the Great had condemned her; which greatly pleased the orthodox. The tariff was lowered. The ghastly poles and spikes on which it had been customary to fix the heads or limbs of criminals were abolished.

But in the world which the Romanoffs had created, or suffered to develop, the supreme concern was the fortune of the individual. I do not mean, of course, that this selfishness was unknown at the court of Louis XV or of George I, but the sequel will show how far Russia lagged behind even the primitive morality of those elegant courts. There were few who did not look with green eyes upon the princely fortune of the adventurer, and there were some who felt it an outrage upon the nobility. Russia was prosperous; but could a land prosper indefinitely when the national genius was mocked by foreign innovations and the sacred traditions of Moscow were scouted? The nobles gave an idealist complexion to their discontent, and whispers reached the ear of the growing prince.

Menshikoff was imprudent in meeting Peter’s first movements of resentment. One day the young Tsar received what appears to have been a personal payment of nine thousand ducats, and he sent it to his sister Natalia. Menshikoff met the messenger and took away the money. Peter, he said, did not yet understand the value of money. Peter sent for him and gave him, to his amazement, an imperial scolding. He might have recognised a bit of his old master in the stamping and raging boy, but he did not take the lesson. Soon afterwards Peter sent to Natalia a fine service of plate which had been presented to him, and Menshikoff tried to make her restore it. The First Minister was then compelled to take to his bed for some weeks. When he recovered, he found that Peter had gone to the palace at Peterhof, some miles away, and was wildly enjoying himself with Natalia and Aunt Elizabeth. Ostermann and the Dolgorukis also were there. Menshikoff, as an offset, demanded the accounts of the palace, and discharged a servant for some item he found; and the boy-Tsar, in a fiery interview, told him to mind his own business.

This was in August. Menshikoff, now seriously concerned, thought that the influence of Ostermann was mischievous, and he got up a violent quarrel with him and threatened to send him to Siberia. From a loyal colleague Ostermann became one more enemy of the First Minister, and the story of his fall ran rapidly. On September 6th Menshikoff went out to Peterhof to pay respectful homage to the Tsar. Peter not only turned his back upon him, but drew the attention of his smiling courtiers to the fact that he did. The minister prepared a festival, and, when the Tsar scouted his invitation, he nervously begged an interview. The answer was a troop of soldiers such as he himself had sent to darken many a home, and he fell to the ground in a swoon.
Room of the Tsar Mikhailovitch, Moscow

A few days later the fallen man appeared before the Privy Council and received sentence. He was fined, for conspiracy against the throne, 375,000 dollars, stripped of all his honours and offices, and ordered to retire to the dreary waste of the steppes. But his wife Daria—we remember Peter the Great forcing him to marry that merry lady—appealed passionately against the brutal sentence, and he was suffered to retire, instead, to a beautiful estate he had in the Ukraine. Few wept when, one morning in September, a long caravan bore Menshikoff and his wife and daughter out of the life of Russia. But his enemies were not satisfied. The Dolgorukis, who came to power, trumped up a charge of conspiracy in the following year, and, on the miserable word of tortured witnesses, which in Russia was still admitted, banished the broken-hearted adventurer to the frozen shores of the Arctic. There for two years, until death set him free and ended one of the great romances of that stirring period, Menshikoff supported by the labour of his own hands his devoted wife and the unlucky girl who had thought to become an Empress.

Ostermann remained the most important and most useful statesman, but the Golitzuins, Dolgorukis, and other families of the old nobility now came to power and they made an effort to drag Russia back to the ruts from which Peter the Great had violently shifted it. They were of what came to be called in the nineteenth century the “Russophile school”: narrow-minded conservatives who railed at all innovation and foreign influence, and persuaded themselves that the genius of Russia was different from that of other European nations. St. Petersburg was to them the hated symbol of the new order, and they induced Peter to return to Moscow. He was crowned there on February 25th (1728) with all the archaic ceremonies of Russian tradition, and they took care to impress him with the contrast between the comparatively bright and healthy air of Moscow and the dank climate of the northern metropolis. This court remained at Moscow, and the departments of State were presently transferred to it.

To complete the transformation from the ideals of Peter the Great to those of Alexis the aged Eudoxia was appointed Regent, and a court of the old type gathered about her. Ostermann was alarmed, and the reactionaries tried to remove him. Peter, fortunately for Russia, would not hear of the dismissal of his old director, but he allowed the conservative nobles to act much as they pleased and he was encouraged by them to spend his time in hunting and laborious idleness. The fleet was suffered to rot in harbour, and only the steady effect of such internal reforms as Peter the Great had introduced kept the country in some degree of prosperity. The old indolence returned. Since there were now no costly schemes to be realised, and the favourable turn of foreign relations brought no war, the taxes were not enforced, and the country enjoyed a fallacious happiness.

In December Natalia died of consumption. Through her Ostermann had at times got a warning word to the ear of his pupil, and the levity of the Tsar now increased. He spent his days with Elizabeth, and the Dolgorukis feared that what Ostermann had once recommended—the marriage of the aunt and nephew—would come to pass. As it was their aim, in spite of all the warnings of Russian history, to marry him to a girl of their own family, Elizabeth must go; and the frivolity of that precocious lady gave them ample opportunities. She was scarcely out of her teens, yet her amours were notorious, and her lovers were not of noble rank. A word was whispered to Peter, who was a sober and strict-living youth, and Aunt Elizabeth ceased to be his constant companion.

Austria, Russia’s ally, looked with concern upon this reaction and indolence, and its representatives joined with Ostermann in pressing Peter to return to St. Petersburg and attend to his military resources. A tense, if more or less veiled, struggle for the guidance of the Tsar set in. For the moment the ambitious Dolgorukis won. They carried Peter a hundred miles away for a grand and prolonged hunt and series of entertainments. The entire family surrounded him and kept him for weeks in a state of febrile exhilaration. When they returned to Moscow, Alexis Dolgoruki announced that the Tsar was to wed his daughter Catherine, and the ceremony of betrothal was pompously conducted. The Dolgorukis now closed round the youthful Tsar, kept their angry rivals away, and began a premature plunder of the court and treasury as confidently as if such things had never before left their awful monuments in Russian history.

The wedding was fixed for January 30th, 1730. Peter would then be only fourteen years old, but the Dolgorukis were anxious. Already the Tsar was peevish and moody, and he gave at times alarmingly sharp replies. One day as the favoured family gathered round him and amused him with a game of forfeits, it fell to him, as a forfeit, to kiss his betrothed. To their consternation he walked out of the room. About the middle of the month a worse cloud than ever came over their hour of sunshine. Peter fell ill and—it was whispered among the pale-faced family—the malady was the dreaded small-pox. Frantic conferences were held, and some of the family, in their sordid greed and selfishness, actually proposed to wed the semi-conscious boy and put the girl abed with him. But Ostermann guarded the chamber, and on January 30th, the day appointed for the wedding, Peter II ended his brief reign.

The succession to the throne was now so open that Moscow teemed with melodramatic conspiracies. The young bloods of the Dolgoruki party are said to have forged a will in which Peter left the crown to his betrothed, but the older men ridiculed the proposal, and the document does not seem to have been produced. On the other hand, the physician of the Tsarevna Elizabeth, a born conspirator, roused that young lady from her sleep and urged her to seize the throne. Elizabeth fluttered over the romantic proposal, then turned over in bed and deferred it to the morrow. On the morrow it was too late, for the Privy Council had held an all-night sitting and come to a singular decision.

Prince Demetrius Golitzuin, one of the older nobles who had never enjoyed what he regarded as his full share of wealth and power, felt that it was his turn to make a monarch and enjoy the reward. He decked his plan with a plausible air of reform. This recent concentration of power in the hands of an autocrat was the root of all evil, since one monarch usually meant one favourite. Let them choose a ruler who would promise in advance—promise on paper—to resign the power to the Privy Council. He drew up a scheme in which the future sovereign pledged himself or herself to take no important action—to declare war, or levy taxes, or punish a noble, or marry, and so on—without their consent. What candidate would be likely to sign and respect such a promise? Elizabeth could not be relied upon; in fact, Golitzuin, a proud and arrogant noble of the old school, detested Peter the Great and regarded his marriage as void and his daughters as illegitimate. But Peter’s elder brother, the weak-minded Ivan V, had left three daughters, and the second of these, Anne, Duchess of Courland, would, it was thought, agree to almost any conditions if she were offered the crown.

Anne, who was then thirty-seven years old, had had a dull and vexatious life. Peter had made her and her mother, Prascovia, move to St. Petersburg, and he had compelled Anne, in her eighteenth year, to marry the Duke of Courland, for political reasons. The Duke, however, had found Russian hospitality so overpowering that he had died on the way home, and the young princess, childless and isolated, had been compelled to continue the journey and settle at Mitau, the capital of the Duchy. To control her purse and administer her affairs Peter had sent Count Besthuzeff, and he laughed heartily when he heard that Anne had made a lover of him. Presently there came along the familiar type of handsome and unscrupulous adventurer. The grandson of a groom of an earlier Duke, named Biren, had a sister in a modest office at court. She was, however, also a mistress of the Count, and she got a place for her brother. Biren was clever and ambitious, and it was not long before he supplanted Besthuzeff in the affection of the Duchess and got him dismissed. Biren married after a time, and it is claimed that Anne’s very intimate relations to him after his marriage were purely Platonic. In any case he remained master of her court, and he would no doubt be consulted on the strange new problem that confronted her. She had costly tastes and little money, and glittering Moscow suddenly and unexpectedly rose on her horizon.

The Privy Councillors had decided that Anne was the most likely of the surviving Romanoffs—Peter was the last male of the family—to accept the crown at a reduced price. They had sent a deputation to Mitau, and a courier presently came hack with the news that she had signed the conditions. Yaguzhinsky, the drunken and turbulent general who had often given trouble, had tried a little intrigue of his own. He had sent a disguised messenger to Mitau to warn Anne, but his messenger had been caught by Golitzuin’s watchful servants on the return journey. A general meeting of the great officials and nobles was called, and the Privy Councillors announced to them that Anne had accepted, and resigned all power to the Council. It is quaint to read, in letters of the time, that the once democratic Russians now trembled with anger at this surrender of the sacred autocracy. The announcement was received in ominous silence. Golitzuin turned fiercely upon Yaguzhinsky and forced him to avow his plot; and the general and his associates were arrested and disgraced. The malcontents were cowed, and Anne came to Moscow.

There can be very little doubt that Anne, who was intelligent, perfectly understood the situation and was ready, on any pretext, to disavow her oath. Although Golitzuin set a close guard of servants and soldiers about her, she soon learned that there was a powerful party in opposition to the Privy Council, and she entered into correspondence with it. Count Biren’s baby was her godchild, and she insisted that it be brought to her chamber every morning to be fondled. A baby and nurse could do little harm, the sentries thought; but there were notes from the conspirators pinned underneath the baby’s bib. Letters were smuggled in presents to the sovereign. Another of the older nobles, Prince Tcherkasky, was aiming at power, on the approved lines of Russian tradition (the invariable ghastly ends of which no one seemed to study), and was organising the conspiracy.

On the morning of May 8th, ten weeks after Anne’s arrival, about eight hundred of the nobles and gentry assembled in the courtyard of the Kreml, and, with a select body of officers of the guard, trooped to Anne’s apartments and asked a hearing. The comedy was gravely enacted. Anne, surrounded by her court, graciously received the petitioners, and heard with astonishment that there was dissatisfaction at her surrender of the autocracy. The Privy Councillors were summoned, and Tcherkasky and Dolgoruki fought for the lead. Anne hesitated, but her elder sister, the Duchess of Mecklenburg, turned the scale against the Privy Council. She would reconsider her act. In the afternoon the parties returned, and Anne turned severely upon the Councillors. “Were not those articles you submitted to me framed with the consent of my subjects?” she asked. It was boisterously affirmed by the crowd that they were not. “Then you lied,” she said to the great nobles; and the autocracy was restored, and the roll of drums and roar of guns and clangour of bells announced with what joy Moscow took the yoke on its shoulders once more.

For a time it seemed as if the new ruler was too humane to exact the usual penalties. The Privy Council was abolished, but the Senate was reorganised and the Golitzuins and Dolgorukis were, to their surprise, included in the new body. Their wives were welcomed at court, their relatives promoted. But either Anne awaited the advice of Bire............