ith
leaders striving for that cause which would best protect and elevate
themselves. Menschikof, Apraxin, Tolstoi promoting the cause of
Catherine that they may not suffer for the death sentence passed upon
Alexis; Galitsuin and others seeing their interests in the succession
of Peter, son of Alexis and grandson of the Emperor.
Catherine's harmless reign was over in two years (1727) and was
followed by another, equally brief and harmless, by the young Peter II.
The wily Menschikof succeeded in betrothing his daughter to the young
Emperor, but not in retaining his ascendency over the self-willed boy.
We wonder if Peter saw his great minister scheming for wealth and for
power, and then his fall, like Wolsey's, from his pinnacle. We wonder
if he saw him with his own hands building his hut on the frozen plains
of Siberia, clothed, not in rich furs and jewels, but bearded and in
long, coarse, gray smock-frock; his daughter, the betrothed of an
Emperor, clad, not in ermine, but in sheep-skin. Perhaps the lesson
with his master the Carpenter of Saardam served him in building his own
shelter in that dread abode. Nor was he alone. He had the best of
society, and at every turn of the wheel at St. Petersburg it had
aristocratic recruits. The Galitsuins and the Dolgorukis would have
joined him soon had they not died in prison, and many others had they
not been broken on the wheel or beheaded by Anna, the coarse and vulgar
woman who succeeded Peter II., when he suddenly died in 1730.
Anna Ivanovna was the daughter of Peter's brother Ivan V., who was
associated with him upon the throne. She had the force to defeat an
oligarchic attempt to tie her hands. The plan had originated with the
Galitsuins and Dolgorukis, and was really calculated to benefit the
state in a period of incompetent or vicious rulers by having the
authority of the Crown limited by a council of eight ministers. But it
was reactionary. It was introducing a principle which had been
condemned, and was a veiled attempt to undo the work of the Ivans and
the Romanoffs, and to place the real power as of old in the hands of
ruling families. The plan fell, and the leaders fell with it, and a
host of their followers. The executioners were busy at St. Petersburg,
and the aristocratic colony in Siberia grew larger.
Anna's reign was the period of a preponderating German influence in
politics and at court. Germans held high positions; one of them,
Gustav Biro
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