Peter II’s reign proved as brief and uneventful as Catherine I’s. He hardly ‘reigned’, for actual power rested with the Supreme Privy Council until he suddenly died of smallpox as an unmarried minor on 18/19 January 1730. The general domestic tranquillity was underlined by abolition of the Preobrazhenskii Bureau in 1729. Peter II moved the court and several offices to Moscow, where he spent the last two years of his life mainly hunting in silent protest against the rigours of Petersburg life.
Peter II died without issue and without designating a successor, thereby precipitating renewed political crisis. The Supreme Privy Council, now expanded to eight aristocrat-officials—four Dolgorukiis and two Golitsyns—endeavoured to resolve the dynastic dilemma by secretly offering the throne on restrictive conditions to Anna Ivanovna, the widowed duchess of Courland and childless niece of Peter the Great. This move inadvertently inaugurated a month of intense political manœuvring. Led by the widely experienced Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn, the privy councillors sought to establish an oligarchical constitution that would limit monocratic arbitrary rule (autocracy) by making the council permanent and hedging Anna’s sovereignty with restrictions. Failure to publicize the council’s ‘Conditions’ (Konditsii)—a new term in Russian political discourse—and its other proposals for reform fanned rumours of an aristocratic grab for supreme power, inflaming immediate opposition and alternative platforms backed by several hundred aristocrats and lesser nobles in some cases. When the ‘Conditions’ were finally announced at a meeting of about eighty dignitaries on 2 February 1730, additional projects had been put forward, one signed by 361 persons, and Anna had already arrived in Moscow and become the focus of a loose coalition suspicious of the oligarchs and of the effort to abridge the autocrat’s authority. Osterman and Feofan Prokopovich contacted confederates in the guards and even released broadsides attacking the Supreme Privy Council with the spectre of disunity and chaos. Within a few weeks the competing groups had neutralized each other, so that Anna tore up the ‘Conditions’ and proclaimed herself ‘Empress and Self-upholder of All Russia’. She abolished the Supreme Privy Council and gradually dispatched all the Dolgorukiis into exile. Dmitrii Golitsyn remained free, albeit largely silent, until imprisoned in 1737, a year before his death. He accepted responsibility for the constitutional fiasco, remarking: ‘The banquet was ready, but the guests were unworthy’.
From this tumultuous inception, Anna’s reign exhibited familiar elements of ‘clique government’ along with a confusing mix of conservative restoration, continuity with Petrine policies, and occasional reform. Her reign has endured a generally bad press, mostly Petrine in perspective but also animated by antipathy to female rule and Germans. She has often been viewed as a puppet controlled by her ‘German’ favourite, Ernst Johann Biron, her reign later derided as the notorious time of ‘Bironovshchina’ (‘Biron’s repressive regime’). Such crude indictments have recently receded in favour of renewed attention to important continuities in the ruler’s role, foreign policy and territorial expansion, economic development, and institutional change. Whatever Anna’s intimate relationship with Biron, who was named count and senior chamberlain in 1730 and by whom she may have had a son, he held no significant independent status until elected duke of Courland in 1737 and named regent upon Anna’s death. His fragile regency lasted barely three weeks until overthrown by Field Marshal Burkhard von Münnich. Biron’s presumed role behind the scenes and attempt to marry a son to the empress’s niece provoked accusations of dynastic ambitions, like a new Godunov or Menshikov, whereas his love of horses, cards, and theatrical troupes fostered charges of talking to people as if they were horses and to horses as if they were people. In fact, his influence on high policy appears to have been minimal, and the Chancery of Secret Investigative Affairs, as the secret police was renamed in 1730, handled no more than 2,000 cases as compared to 2,478 during Elizabeth’s first decade of rule and about the same number during her second. Foreigners did not enjoy undue preference during Biron’s alleged hegemony, and he had little to do with the persecution of Old Believers, some twenty thousand of whom are supposed to have been exiled during Anna’s reign (a patently inflated statistic). Besides, Anna’s regime was dominated by Russian aristocrats: Chancellor Gavriil Golovkin, Vice-Chancellor Andrei Osterman, Prince Aleksei Cherkasskii, and later Pavel Iaguzhinskii and his successor Artemii Volynskii. The execution of Volynskii on 27 June 1740 on charges of treasonous conspiracy has often been blamed on Biron, though the court that condemned him consisted solely of Russian magnates.
Like her predecessors, the widowed and (officially) childless Anna confronted succession problems throughout her reign. She kept a sharp eye on the orphaned Karl Peter Ulrich in Holstein, Peter the Great’s sole surviving grandson, and on the vivacious Elizabeth and her small ‘Young Court’. To reinforce the dynastic line of her Miloslavskii relatives, she adopted her half-German, half-Russian niece, daughter of the duke and duchess of Mecklenburg and russified as Anna Leopoldovna, upon the death of the latter’s mother in 1733. This princess was converted to Russian Orthodoxy, given a European-style education, and reluctantly married Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel-Bevern in July 1739. They promptly sired a son, Ivan Antonovich, the future Ivan VI, born on 12 August 1740, just two months before the empress’s own sudden death on 17 October. Regent for her infant son after Biron’s overthrow, Anna Leopoldovna showed little interest in ruling and was easily deposed by the competing dynastic line personified by Elizabeth as the old Miloslavskii-Naryshkin rivalry reappeared.
Anna Ivanovna’s government had adopted several policy changes bruited during the constitutional crisis of her accession. The unpopular Petrine law on single inheritance was abrogated, for instance, and the Noble Cadet Corps was founded in St Petersburg, its graduates entering the military as officers. Officers’ pay was made equal to that of foreigners, and the lifetime service requirement was shortened to twenty-five years with one son entirely exempted. The court returned to St Petersburg in January 1733 amid great ceremony. Links to the interior were improved by completion of the Ladoga Canal, a showpiece supervised by the German military engineer Burkhard von Münnich, whom Anna richly rewarded and promoted to field marshal. He gained a chequered military reputation in leading the Russian armies to victory in the War of the Polish Succession in 1733–5 and the related Russo-Turkish War of 1736–9. Both conflicts involved allied coalitions and gained some success, especially Münnich’s multiple invasions of the Crimea despite substantial Russian losses partly because of a large outbreak of plague. Russia defeated the Turks and the Crimean Tatars, but Austria’s sudden withdrawal limited territorial gains to so-called New Serbia and Azov without the right to fortify the latter. These were Russia’s first triumph over the Turks since Peter the Great’s second Azov campaign and first successful invasion of the Crimea. Another major gain of territory came via the Orenburg expedition, a state-sponsored venture led by Vasilii Tatishchev and others that pushed the Russian frontier into the southern Urals, opening abundant lands to cultivation and mining. The huge Bashkir revolts that greeted this Russian invasion lasted from 1735 to 1740 and resulted in the extermination or resettlement of almost one-third of the Bashkir population. This rich new territory accelerated the economic boom begun in Petrine times and compensated for the loss of the Caspian lands returned to Persia in 1735.