July 26, 2010 • 13 mins
Ivan VI was still an infant when he was proclaimed the Emperor of Russia. In this episode, Katie and Sarah explain how this strange ascension occurred -- and how Anna Leopoldovna became the power behind the throne.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm fair Dowdy, and I am
one of those people who really really loves babies. Molly
(00:21):
of stuff. Mom never told you said that. Whenever we
go out to lunch or dinner and I get really
distracted and start smiling at someone behind her, she knows
it's a baby and not a guy. So of course
I would love a baby king. And we're not talking
about the kind do you find in your kingcake either,
And our topic is sandwich somewhere in between Peter the
(00:42):
Great and Catherine the Great, and we have this infant
who has been chosen to rule Russia. But if you
are starting to get a growing sense of unease here
because our royal children so often have terrible faith, you
are right on track. So who is this ab He
is Ivan the sixth, also known as Ivan Antonovich, born
(01:04):
in August seventeen forty. His parents are Prince anton Ulrich,
who's a nephew of Holy Roman Emperor Charles the sixth,
and Anna Leopoldovna. So he has rather illustrious beginnings and
that's because Anna, his mother, is also the niece of
Empress Anna Ivanovna, who is one of four very important
(01:24):
women in our story, and that is Anna Leopoldovna, Anna Ivanovna,
and Elizabeth Petrovna by Katherine the second, the one who
everybody knows, I'm sure, And so this is just our
major group of Russian political women in this story, and
try to keep track of all of their very similar names.
(01:45):
He's born into Anna's court, and she was Ivan the
fifth daughter and Peter the great niece. And as a
side note, Ivan the fifth is an interesting man in
his own right. He was ruler only in name because
he was plagued by several illnesses, and his sister Sophia
was the real power behind the throne. But in our story,
Anna had become ruler in seventeen thirty. She was elected
(02:08):
by the Supreme Privy Council, but the council tried to
limit her power and take more of it for their own.
But there were three entities opposing this Anna herself, of course,
the Imperial guards and the lesser nobility, because changing power
from an autocracy to an oligarchy disadvantage them. If you
(02:30):
know the power is spread out. That means there are
more obstacles to the ruler, more people who you have
to bribe and court their favor. You can't just go
to the queen's main folks, and that means you may
have trouble ascending to the position of power you so
dearly desire. So Anna gets rid of the Privy Council altogether.
That's one way to do away with that problem. And
(02:51):
she banishes and executes a few of them, I don't
a few of her detractors. So she gives most of
the power of her court to Earnst Johann Burne, who
is her favorite guy, and restores the secret police under
his command. So he's her her number two. Essentially. He
may have been Anna's favorite, but he was not a
(03:11):
favorite with anyone else. He was Baltic German instead of
Russian Russian, and he has a reputation for being very
cruel and corrupt. Enemies of the administration were banished, beheaded,
and tortured, and the general impression was that his police
force watched out for the Germans and punished the Russians,
(03:33):
which did not endear him to the Russian And most
of Anna's favorites are Baltic Germans anyway, so it's doubly
bad almost because you have so many of these people
in positions of power. It serves as an obstacle for
anyone else to get access to the empress too, and
her rule was not particularly popular for some other reasons.
(03:55):
She levied very heavy taxes, she liked humiliating nobles in
front of the court, and she was rather an extravagant
spender on as far as clothes and gambling goes, which
again they the poorer people don't enjoy if you remember
the story of Marie and well, aside for her for
clothes and humiliating nobles to she does get involved in
(04:17):
the War of Polish succession and she attacks Turkey, so
other less endearing quality. So in short, people are very disgruntled.
They don't much like their empress, and some of course
blame the fact that she's a woman on the country's problem.
So there's a sense of growing troubles for our empress here.
(04:39):
So she must decide on a successor, and she didn't
have children, But what about her great nephew, Ivan Antonovich
Baron or Ivan's mother could serve as regent And it's
a good thing that she picks him when she does
because she dies in October seventeen forty, Ivan the sixth
is two months old and he has the throne. So
(05:00):
Burren is initially a pointed regent, but he's very quickly
overthrown by other members of the German clique and sent
off to Siberia, as so often happens. And the men
who overthrow him aren't that much better though. They're just
as unpopular with everybody else, and they don't even stick together.
Their German click is not very much a click because
(05:21):
there's a lot of infighting and it here have we
learned about in fighting it weakens your government, Yeah, definitely.
So Anna Leopoldovna takes the reins and she's Evan's mother again. Yes,
So to keep all these gandas straight, she takes the power,
the power of the regent. But she's actually pretty out
of touch with her people as well, and her foreign
(05:44):
policies are unpopular. She too favors the Baltic Germans, so
it just seems like more of the same. So we
have an unhappy people, a baby ruler, his mother, the
unpopular regent, and in infighting type of government. It's time
for an uprising, So how about Elizabeth petrovnaw So, Elizabeth
(06:07):
has an even more illustrious background than our young Ivan.
Here she's Peter the Great's daughter with Catherine the First,
and people like her so much. She's really smart, she's lovely,
she's very Russian, as Katie would say, she's Russian Russian,
and she's Peter the Great's daughter, So I mean, what
more can you ask for? And she wasn't very politically
(06:29):
involved until this rule of Annelia Puldovna and then her
eyes on the prize. This is her chance, if she's
ever to have one. The high officials support her, as
do the guards and plenty of foreign diplomats. So we
begin a palace conspiracy and there is a coupdita in
seventeen forty one in which she overthrows Ivan the sixth
(06:51):
and Annaliah Puldovna with the help of the guards after
less than a year of rule, waking them up in
the middle of the night and arresting them. Elizabeth is
now the empress. So after the coup, the family and
their advisors are arrested and the family is imprisoned at
the fortress of Riga. They're actually exiled to Koma Gory.
But just because they're far away, it doesn't mean that
(07:13):
they've been forgotten. And in December set one, the new
government demands the return of coins minted with Ivan the
Six is the figurehead, promising new coins in return. But
what would you do if your government told you, maybe
sending all of your coins, and sure, we'll give you
new ones once we get yours. Understandably, a lot of
(07:34):
people hold on to their money, about two thousand roubles
worth of coins according to historians. Well and and they
a lot of them liked Ivan the Six. They liked
the idea, the promise of who he was supposed to be,
and they wanted to hold on to that. They continue
to hold on to this idea that perhaps he will
come back and he will take over this throne. As
(07:54):
as popular as Elizabeth grew to be, he was still
in the hearts as many Russians right in the heat
of things too. Of course, so life goes on for
the exiled royal family too, and Anna actually has more
children in exile before she dies in March of seventeen
forty six, and these kids are eventually released because of
(08:15):
course they're not so closely tied to the throne as
Ivan is. Although they always stayed not secluded, but in
their own kind of private a bit reclusive court. Because
they grew up in exile, he's never quite had that
uh socialization that they should have when they were little.
(08:37):
Life doesn't exactly go on for Ivan. He's taken from
his family at four years old and he never saw
them again. For most of his life, he was entirely
isolated in solitary confinement under very strict guard. He was
sent to Schlisselburg Fortress in seventeen fifty six and there
he would remain for the rest of his life. His
jailers weren't even allowed to talk to him. It was
(08:59):
said he only saw sunlight twice in his time there.
Although it maybe a bit of a dramatic flourish to
our story. So imagine what he must have been like,
raised for twentysomething years in prison, from the time he
was a little boy, without his family, without communication, without
anything to do. I imagine him being a bit of
(09:20):
a of a shell of a human being. He never
got to that development. Yeah, well, we have a kind
of a historical idea of what it could be like
from our Katherine de Medici podcast and her husband. At
least he has his brother, though, but the two of
them emerged from prison totally shattered, really sullen boys, and
(09:42):
they don't even spend their whole lives growing up in
prison like Ivan. And in the meantime, Elizabeth has died,
Peter the Third has taken over and then was mysteriously killed,
and then Catherine the Great has become the ruler, and
Elizabeth kept him in prison so long because of course
(10:02):
he was this this symbol, a possibility of a return
to something else, an idea that people held onto, and
Catherine the Great feels the same way. He's He's always
been a threat, even when he's locked up. In July
seventeen sixty four, Ivan is killed by his guards with
sabers and bannets, something we probably could have seen coming
(10:23):
this whole podcast, and they had been ordered to slay
him if there was ever an escape attempt at the prison,
and someone, a lieutenant Mirovich, tries to free him, and
so this plan goes into action, and there are two
theories about Mirovich's attempt, though. One is he thought that
if he could get Ivan out, they could unseat Katherine
the second, who had gotten the throne in seventeen sixty two,
(10:45):
so it would be starting a mutiny, starting a a
second coup. The second theory, though, is that Ivan was
murdered on Katherine the Great's orders. She knew full well
the orders of the prison that if anyone tried to
free the young prince, anything like that happened when she
reinforced them. She made it sure that again, if there
(11:05):
was any sort of escape attempt any kind, you're supposed
to kill him. So in that case, this would be
a politically motivated assassination. With Mirovich under Katherine's control. People
had already thought that perhaps Catherine had had Peter the
Third killed, and there were many who thought she was
also responsible for Ivan's death. It made her very unpopular
(11:26):
in parts of Europe, and she was even called the
devil in a diadem by a prime minister. Ivan the
sixth was buried in a secret place and then his
grave destroyed, but his legend lived on because the story
of the sad little ruler locked away for life on
the orders of two powerful women, And how could that
(11:47):
not mean something? It sounds like a really scary fairy tale,
And of course people persist in believing that he's really
alive and would return sometime. Again reminds us of our
Romanov's episode This This podcast keeps on throwing back to
earlier ones, but the Romanov keep on people keep on
believing in them. And of course i'vean the sixth was
(12:09):
just this political pawn again with our theme of how
unfortunate it is to be born a royal child. He
spends his infancy in a crown and the rest of
his whole short life in a prison, and all because
of what he symbolized and how many times we explore
this idea in the podcast. And while we were researching
(12:33):
this podcast, we did get much more intrigued by the
story of our possibly murderous Catherine the Great, so get
ready for a podcast on her. If you have any
great ideas like Lawrence that you would like to send
to us, our email is History Podcast at how stuff
works dot com. You can also follow us on Twitter
(12:54):
at mist in history or join our Facebook fan page
to see what we're up to, and please check out
our own page at www dot how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Does it how stuff works dot com and be sure
to check out the stuff you missed in History Class
blog on the How Stuff Works dot Com on page
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm fair Dowdy, and I am
one of those people who really really loves babies. Molly
(00:21):
of stuff. Mom never told you said that. Whenever we
go out to lunch or dinner and I get really
distracted and start smiling at someone behind her, she knows
it's a baby and not a guy. So of course
I would love a baby king. And we're not talking
about the kind do you find in your kingcake either,
And our topic is sandwich somewhere in between Peter the
(00:42):
Great and Catherine the Great, and we have this infant
who has been chosen to rule Russia. But if you
are starting to get a growing sense of unease here
because our royal children so often have terrible faith, you
are right on track. So who is this ab He
is Ivan the sixth, also known as Ivan Antonovich, born
(01:04):
in August seventeen forty. His parents are Prince anton Ulrich,
who's a nephew of Holy Roman Emperor Charles the sixth,
and Anna Leopoldovna. So he has rather illustrious beginnings and
that's because Anna, his mother, is also the niece of
Empress Anna Ivanovna, who is one of four very important
(01:24):
women in our story, and that is Anna Leopoldovna, Anna Ivanovna,
and Elizabeth Petrovna by Katherine the second, the one who
everybody knows, I'm sure, And so this is just our
major group of Russian political women in this story, and
try to keep track of all of their very similar names.
(01:45):
He's born into Anna's court, and she was Ivan the
fifth daughter and Peter the great niece. And as a
side note, Ivan the fifth is an interesting man in
his own right. He was ruler only in name because
he was plagued by several illnesses, and his sister Sophia
was the real power behind the throne. But in our story,
Anna had become ruler in seventeen thirty. She was elected
(02:08):
by the Supreme Privy Council, but the council tried to
limit her power and take more of it for their own.
But there were three entities opposing this Anna herself, of course,
the Imperial guards and the lesser nobility, because changing power
from an autocracy to an oligarchy disadvantage them. If you
(02:30):
know the power is spread out. That means there are
more obstacles to the ruler, more people who you have
to bribe and court their favor. You can't just go
to the queen's main folks, and that means you may
have trouble ascending to the position of power you so
dearly desire. So Anna gets rid of the Privy Council altogether.
That's one way to do away with that problem. And
(02:51):
she banishes and executes a few of them, I don't
a few of her detractors. So she gives most of
the power of her court to Earnst Johann Burne, who
is her favorite guy, and restores the secret police under
his command. So he's her her number two. Essentially. He
may have been Anna's favorite, but he was not a
(03:11):
favorite with anyone else. He was Baltic German instead of
Russian Russian, and he has a reputation for being very
cruel and corrupt. Enemies of the administration were banished, beheaded,
and tortured, and the general impression was that his police
force watched out for the Germans and punished the Russians,
(03:33):
which did not endear him to the Russian And most
of Anna's favorites are Baltic Germans anyway, so it's doubly
bad almost because you have so many of these people
in positions of power. It serves as an obstacle for
anyone else to get access to the empress too, and
her rule was not particularly popular for some other reasons.
(03:55):
She levied very heavy taxes, she liked humiliating nobles in
front of the court, and she was rather an extravagant
spender on as far as clothes and gambling goes, which
again they the poorer people don't enjoy if you remember
the story of Marie and well, aside for her for
clothes and humiliating nobles to she does get involved in
(04:17):
the War of Polish succession and she attacks Turkey, so
other less endearing quality. So in short, people are very disgruntled.
They don't much like their empress, and some of course
blame the fact that she's a woman on the country's problem.
So there's a sense of growing troubles for our empress here.
(04:39):
So she must decide on a successor, and she didn't
have children, But what about her great nephew, Ivan Antonovich
Baron or Ivan's mother could serve as regent And it's
a good thing that she picks him when she does
because she dies in October seventeen forty, Ivan the sixth
is two months old and he has the throne. So
(05:00):
Burren is initially a pointed regent, but he's very quickly
overthrown by other members of the German clique and sent
off to Siberia, as so often happens. And the men
who overthrow him aren't that much better though. They're just
as unpopular with everybody else, and they don't even stick together.
Their German click is not very much a click because
(05:21):
there's a lot of infighting and it here have we
learned about in fighting it weakens your government, Yeah, definitely.
So Anna Leopoldovna takes the reins and she's Evan's mother again. Yes,
So to keep all these gandas straight, she takes the power,
the power of the regent. But she's actually pretty out
of touch with her people as well, and her foreign
(05:44):
policies are unpopular. She too favors the Baltic Germans, so
it just seems like more of the same. So we
have an unhappy people, a baby ruler, his mother, the
unpopular regent, and in infighting type of government. It's time
for an uprising, So how about Elizabeth petrovnaw So, Elizabeth
(06:07):
has an even more illustrious background than our young Ivan.
Here she's Peter the Great's daughter with Catherine the First,
and people like her so much. She's really smart, she's lovely,
she's very Russian, as Katie would say, she's Russian Russian,
and she's Peter the Great's daughter, So I mean, what
more can you ask for? And she wasn't very politically
(06:29):
involved until this rule of Annelia Puldovna and then her
eyes on the prize. This is her chance, if she's
ever to have one. The high officials support her, as
do the guards and plenty of foreign diplomats. So we
begin a palace conspiracy and there is a coupdita in
seventeen forty one in which she overthrows Ivan the sixth
(06:51):
and Annaliah Puldovna with the help of the guards after
less than a year of rule, waking them up in
the middle of the night and arresting them. Elizabeth is
now the empress. So after the coup, the family and
their advisors are arrested and the family is imprisoned at
the fortress of Riga. They're actually exiled to Koma Gory.
But just because they're far away, it doesn't mean that
(07:13):
they've been forgotten. And in December set one, the new
government demands the return of coins minted with Ivan the
Six is the figurehead, promising new coins in return. But
what would you do if your government told you, maybe
sending all of your coins, and sure, we'll give you
new ones once we get yours. Understandably, a lot of
(07:34):
people hold on to their money, about two thousand roubles
worth of coins according to historians. Well and and they
a lot of them liked Ivan the Six. They liked
the idea, the promise of who he was supposed to be,
and they wanted to hold on to that. They continue
to hold on to this idea that perhaps he will
come back and he will take over this throne. As
(07:54):
as popular as Elizabeth grew to be, he was still
in the hearts as many Russians right in the heat
of things too. Of course, so life goes on for
the exiled royal family too, and Anna actually has more
children in exile before she dies in March of seventeen
forty six, and these kids are eventually released because of
(08:15):
course they're not so closely tied to the throne as
Ivan is. Although they always stayed not secluded, but in
their own kind of private a bit reclusive court. Because
they grew up in exile, he's never quite had that
uh socialization that they should have when they were little.
(08:37):
Life doesn't exactly go on for Ivan. He's taken from
his family at four years old and he never saw
them again. For most of his life, he was entirely
isolated in solitary confinement under very strict guard. He was
sent to Schlisselburg Fortress in seventeen fifty six and there
he would remain for the rest of his life. His
jailers weren't even allowed to talk to him. It was
(08:59):
said he only saw sunlight twice in his time there.
Although it maybe a bit of a dramatic flourish to
our story. So imagine what he must have been like,
raised for twentysomething years in prison, from the time he
was a little boy, without his family, without communication, without
anything to do. I imagine him being a bit of
(09:20):
a of a shell of a human being. He never
got to that development. Yeah, well, we have a kind
of a historical idea of what it could be like
from our Katherine de Medici podcast and her husband. At
least he has his brother, though, but the two of
them emerged from prison totally shattered, really sullen boys, and
(09:42):
they don't even spend their whole lives growing up in
prison like Ivan. And in the meantime, Elizabeth has died,
Peter the Third has taken over and then was mysteriously killed,
and then Catherine the Great has become the ruler, and
Elizabeth kept him in prison so long because of course
(10:02):
he was this this symbol, a possibility of a return
to something else, an idea that people held onto, and
Catherine the Great feels the same way. He's He's always
been a threat, even when he's locked up. In July
seventeen sixty four, Ivan is killed by his guards with
sabers and bannets, something we probably could have seen coming
(10:23):
this whole podcast, and they had been ordered to slay
him if there was ever an escape attempt at the prison,
and someone, a lieutenant Mirovich, tries to free him, and
so this plan goes into action, and there are two
theories about Mirovich's attempt, though. One is he thought that
if he could get Ivan out, they could unseat Katherine
the second, who had gotten the throne in seventeen sixty two,
(10:45):
so it would be starting a mutiny, starting a a
second coup. The second theory, though, is that Ivan was
murdered on Katherine the Great's orders. She knew full well
the orders of the prison that if anyone tried to
free the young prince, anything like that happened when she
reinforced them. She made it sure that again, if there
(11:05):
was any sort of escape attempt any kind, you're supposed
to kill him. So in that case, this would be
a politically motivated assassination. With Mirovich under Katherine's control. People
had already thought that perhaps Catherine had had Peter the
Third killed, and there were many who thought she was
also responsible for Ivan's death. It made her very unpopular
(11:26):
in parts of Europe, and she was even called the
devil in a diadem by a prime minister. Ivan the
sixth was buried in a secret place and then his
grave destroyed, but his legend lived on because the story
of the sad little ruler locked away for life on
the orders of two powerful women, And how could that
(11:47):
not mean something? It sounds like a really scary fairy tale,
And of course people persist in believing that he's really
alive and would return sometime. Again reminds us of our
Romanov's episode This This podcast keeps on throwing back to
earlier ones, but the Romanov keep on people keep on
believing in them. And of course i'vean the sixth was
(12:09):
just this political pawn again with our theme of how
unfortunate it is to be born a royal child. He
spends his infancy in a crown and the rest of
his whole short life in a prison, and all because
of what he symbolized and how many times we explore
this idea in the podcast. And while we were researching
(12:33):
this podcast, we did get much more intrigued by the
story of our possibly murderous Catherine the Great, so get
ready for a podcast on her. If you have any
great ideas like Lawrence that you would like to send
to us, our email is History Podcast at how stuff
works dot com. You can also follow us on Twitter
(12:54):
at mist in history or join our Facebook fan page
to see what we're up to, and please check out
our own page at www dot how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Does it how stuff works dot com and be sure
to check out the stuff you missed in History Class
blog on the How Stuff Works dot Com on page
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