Terrible Tsarinas: Five Russian Women in Power by Henri Troyat Page A

to the throne.
    Meanwhile, however, Elizabeth Petrovna was being kept abreast of the discussions and the stipulations being bandied about at the Supreme Council. Her doctor and confidant, Armand Lestocq, warned her of the machinations going on in Moscow and begged her “to take action.” But she refused to make the least effort to exercise her rights to the succession of Peter II. She had no children and did not wish to have any. In her eyes, her nephew Charles Peter Ulrich, the son of her sister Anna and Duke Charles Frederick of Holstein, was the legitimate heir. But little Charles Peter Ulrich’s mother had died, and the baby was only a few months old. Drowning in sorrow, Elizabeth hesitated to look beyond this mourning. After a number of disappointing adventures, broken engagements, evaporated hopes, she had taken a dislike to the Russian court and preferred the isolation and even the boredom of the countryside to the bustling din and superficial glitter of the palaces.
    While she reflected thus, with a melancholy mixed with bitterness, on an imperial future that no longer concerned her, the emissaries of the Council were hastening to bring word to her cousin Anna Ivanovna. She received them with a mocking benevolence. In truth, her spies and the well-wishers that she still had at the court had already informed her of the contents of the letters which the delegation would bring her. Nevertheless, she did not indicate in any way what her intentions might be; without batting an eye, she read the list of rights that the guardians of the regime dictated she should renounce, and said that she would agree to it all. She did not even seem to mind being required to break with her lover, Johann Bühren.
    Misled by her dignified and docile air, the plenipotentiaries never suspected that she had already made arrangements to have her favorite join her, in Moscow or St. Petersburg, as soon as she signaled to him that the road was clear. This possibility seemed all the more likely since she was getting word from her partisans in Russia that she had considerable support among the minor nobility. This group was eager to move against the upper aristocracy, the verkhovniki as they were popularly called, which they accused of encroaching on the powers of Her Majesty in order to increase their own. Rumors were even circulating that in the event of any conflict, the Imperial Guard, which had always defended the sacred rights of the monarchy, would be disposed to intervene in favor of the descendant of Peter the Great and Catherine I.
    Having worked out the details of her secret plan, and having ensured the delegation of her complete subservience, and making a show of bidding Bühren a final good-bye, Anna set out, followed by a retinue worthy of a princess of her rank. On February 10, 1730, she stopped for the night at the village of Vsyesvyatskoye, at the gates of Moscow. Peter II’s funeral was to take place the following day. She would not make it in time - and this delay suited her very well. Besides, as she soon heard, a scandal marred the day of mourning. At the last moment Catherine Dolgoruky, the late tsar’s fiancée, had demanded that she be given a place in the procession among the members of the imperial family. Those who were truly entitled to this privilege refused to allow her to join them; and after an exchange of invectives, Catherine had gone home, furious. These incidents were reported to Anna Ivanovna in detail; she found it all very amusing. They made the calm and quiet of the village of Vsyesvyatskoye, muffled under a blanket of snow, seem all the more pleasant.
    But now she had to direct her thoughts to making her entrance into the former capital of the tsars. Concerned to ensure her popularity, she offered a round of vodka to the detachments of the Preobrazhensky regiment and the Horse Guards who had come to greet her, and forthwith she promoted to colonel the head of these units, Count Simon Andreyevich Saltykov,