Latest / The Romanov Dynasty: Rise, Power, and Bloody End — Fexingo History / Anna Leopoldovna and the Infant Emperor: A Romanov Regency
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the big, dominant Romanovs—Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, the last Nicholas. But between Peter and his daughter Elizabeth, there's this weird, dark interlude that most people have never heard of. It involves an infant emperor, a German regent who just wanted to go home, and a palace coup that ended with a baby thrown into a dungeon for life. Luna: Wait—an actual baby emperor? How does that even happen? Lucas: It starts with Peter the Great's niece, Anna Ioannovna. She was empress from 1730 to 1740, and she had no children. So as she was dying, she named her great-nephew Ivan as her successor—he was only two months old. She also designated Ernst Johann von Biron, her longtime German lover and advisor, as regent. Lucas: Now, Biron was deeply unpopular. He was arrogant, corrupt, and seen as a foreign puppet master. He'd dominated Anna's court, and the Russian nobility hated him. So when Anna died in October 1740, the regency lasted exactly three weeks. Luna: Three weeks? That's almost impressively short. Lucas: Right. Field Marshal Burchard von Münnich, a German soldier in Russian service who had his own ambitions, staged a coup. He arrested Biron in his bedroom in the middle of the night. And just like that, the regency passed to the baby's mother, Anna Leopoldovna. Lucas: Now, Anna Leopoldovna is a fascinating figure—and not in a good way. She was the daughter of a German duke, raised in the duchy of Mecklenburg, and she'd only come to Russia because her aunt Anna Ioannovna forced her into an arranged marriage. She was twenty-two years old, pregnant again, and completely miserable. Luna: So she didn't want to be regent at all? Lucas: Not really. She famously spent most of her time lounging around in her dressing gown, reading French novels, and neglecting state business. She let her German advisors—especially her husband's family and a few favorites—run things. And that created a huge problem, because the Russian court and the guard regiments remembered what Peter the Great had built: a Russia that was powerful and respected, not a German playground. Lucas: So the resentment built. And waiting in the wings was Elizabeth Petrovna, Peter the Great's youngest daughter. She was twenty-nine years old, charismatic, and popular with the Preobrazhensky Regiment—the same guards that had put her father on the throne decades earlier. Luna: She must have been watching the regency fall apart and thinking, 'my turn.' Lucas: Exactly. On the night of November 25, 1741, Elizabeth went to the Preobrazhensky barracks in St. Petersburg and rallied the soldiers. It's said she grabbed a cross and said, 'Whom do you want to serve? Me, the daughter of Peter the Great, or the foreign usurpers?' The guards cheered for her. They marched to the Winter Palace and arrested Anna Leopoldovna, her husband, and the baby emperor Ivan VI. Luna: What happened to them after that? Lucas: Anna Leopoldovna and her husband were exiled to Kholmogory, a remote town in northern Russia. She died there in 1746, only twenty-seven years old. But the really tragic story is little Ivan VI. He was just over a year old when he was deposed. Elizabeth initially intended to send him abroad, but then she changed her mind—probably because he was a potential rival. Lucas: So Ivan was imprisoned in the Shlisselburg Fortress, a grim island fortress on Lake Ladoga. He was kept in solitary confinement, in a cell with no windows, under constant guard. The guards were forbidden to even tell him his own name. He was known only as 'the nameless prisoner.' Luna: That's horrifying. Did he ever know who he was? Lucas: Probably not. He spent his entire childhood and adolescence in that cell. He was educated just enough to read the Bible and do basic arithmetic, but he was never told his royal lineage. In fact, he grew up thinking he was just a common criminal. The guards called him 'Ivanushka' sometimes, but that was it. Lucas: In 1764, when Catherine the Great was on the throne, a disgruntled officer named Vasily Mirovich tried to free Ivan and stage a coup. But the guards had standing orders: if there was any attempt to rescue him, they were to kill him immediately. And they did. Ivan VI was stabbed to death in his cell. He was twenty-three years old. Luna: So he died the same way he lived—as a pawn in someone else's power game. Lucas: Exactly. His story is a dark footnote, but it tells us a lot about how the Romanovs held onto power. The eighteenth century in Russia was an era of palace coups—between Peter the Great's death in 1725 and Catherine the Great's accession in 1762, there were five different rulers or regents. And every time, it was the guard regiments who decided who sat on the throne. Lucas: Elizabeth's coup was actually the first one to really succeed in pushing out a German-dominated court and reasserting Russian control. She was popular because she was Peter's daughter, and she made a point of surrounding herself with Russians and promoting a distinct Russian identity—even if she herself spoke better French and German than Russian. Luna: It's like the pro-Russian backlash started with her. Lucas: Absolutely. And that's a theme that runs through Romanov history—the tension between Westernization and Russian identity. Peter the Great had forced Russia to look west, but under Anna Ioannovna and her German favorites, it felt like the court was being colonized. Elizabeth tapped into that resentment, and it worked. Luna: So what happened to Anna Leopoldovna's other children? She had more than just Ivan, right? Lucas: She had four more children born in exile. They were kept in Kholmogory, too, but later allowed to leave. They were sent to live with an aunt in Denmark, and they basically vanished into obscurity. The last of them, Catherine, died in 1807 without ever having been back to Russia. So the direct line of Ivan's branch just faded away. Lucas: And Ivan's name was literally erased from official records. Coins that had been minted with his image were recalled and melted down. Documents were rewritten to pretend he had never existed. For decades, the government denied that there had ever been an Emperor Ivan VI. Luna: A damnatio memoriae, like in ancient Rome. Lucas: Exactly. And it worked so well that when later historians went looking for his story, they had to piece it together from secret archives and guard reports. It's one of those episodes that really shows how ruthless the Romanovs could be, even with their own blood. Lucas: So when you think of the Romanovs, don't just think of the glittering palaces and the Fabergé eggs. Think of a one-year-old boy locked in a stone cell, not knowing his own name, killed because his existence was a threat. That's the other side of the dynasty. Luna: And all because his mother preferred novels to politics. Lucas: Pretty much. Although, to be fair to Anna Leopoldovna, she was thrust into a role she never wanted. She was a foreigner who didn't understand Russia, and she was surrounded by people who saw her as a puppet. Her apathy was a kind of self-preservation, but it cost her son everything.