The Ice Queen

Bitterly lonely and abandoned by her family, Anna Ivanovna grew to hate love. And when she became the unlikely Empress of Russia she used her power to build an ice palace that was both a spectacle and a torture chamber. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Aaron Manky listener discretion is advised. A few years ago,
the Russian tourism industry discovered that they had a problem.
That problem was winter. If you can imagine, the masses

(00:21):
weren't flocking to see Russia's historically significant architecture or world
class art collections when the temperatures dipped below freezing. That's
when even stockpiled provisions of top tier vodka can't manage
to unseat the damp, creeping chill that settles in your
chest in Russia in the winter. And so in two

(00:44):
thousand sis, a group of corporate sponsors and luxury hotel
chains came together with an idea an ice sculpture to
drum up tourism. Not just an ice sculpture, an ice palace,
a palace can structed entirely of ice in downtown St. Petersburg,

(01:05):
one that would weigh over five hundred tons at a
cost of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It was
to be an exact replica of a massive ice palace
that had stood on the shore of the frozen Neva
River two centuries earlier. It would be built exactly to
the specifications laid out by that eighteenth century architect. There

(01:29):
were ice trees filled with carved ice birds, clocks built
from ice with visible ice gears. Guests waited in line
for hours for their chance to walk through the palace,
to marvel at the detail of the carving, to walk
through the ice bedroom and see the ice mattress with
ice blankets and ice pillows and cascading ice curtains down

(01:54):
the four posters, all made of ice. Translucent law dogs
glimmered in the fireplace that would never actually be able
to contain real fire. Ice was dyed green on the
mantelpiece to resemble marble. And then as guests worked their
way through, they came to the throne room, where there

(02:15):
stood this single change that the modern builders had made
from the eighteenth century original, a sculpture of the Empress
Anna Ivanovna, the patroness who had commissioned the original ice palace.
The Empress was a tall woman and broad, and she
was sculpted in all of her courtly splendor, wearing a

(02:37):
heavy airmine cloak and a massive royal crown which ballooned
up from her head, where a pair of dark, tight
ringlets fell past her shoulders. Her face was round in life,
her cheeks had been described as Westphalian ham. Now in ice.
She was here as a ghost, semi trans decent and

(03:00):
impossibly still, watching an endless stream of tourists and locals
gawk at the strange spectacle that had been constructed around them.
If you didn't know who she was, Empress Anna might
seem like a proud or even whimsical figure, only the
second female crowned as the leader of Russia, a woman

(03:21):
with the vision to imagine how miraculous a palace would
look if it was blue and clear and glistening. But
Empress Anna's ice palace wasn't built as a celebration of
Russia or as a way to promote tourism. It was
built out of cruelty and capriciousness. She was a woman

(03:42):
who spent her entire life manipulated, treated as a toy,
and so when she reached power, she treated others like toys,
their lives made malleable for her amusement. Her ice palace
was meant to be both a symbol of her power
were and an execution chamber, but it was also something

(04:04):
to make her laugh, and if you'll forgive the pun,
I find that the most chilling part of all. I'm
Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood. Anna Ivanovna had
almost no memories of her father, Ivan, the older brother

(04:27):
of Peter the Great. Ivan was severely disabled, both physically
and mentally, and so his younger brother was appointed his
co regent. By the time Ivan was an adult, he
was half paralyzed and almost blind, his mind all but
lost to senility. When the Emperor finally died at age seven,

(04:48):
he was unable to remember his own name. His daughter,
Anna was three, and so Peter the Great became the
singular psar of Russia as the niece of the Czar,
and would never have been allowed to marry for love.
But it seems that when her uncle ordered her to
marry Frederick William, the Duke of Courland, to secure a
lucrative alliance, she was genuinely excited. Seventeen year old Anna

(05:14):
wrote to Frederick William, her new fiancee. I cannot but
assure your Highness that nothing could delight me more than
to hear of your declaration of love for me. For
my part, I assure your Highness that I share your
feelings at our next happy meeting, to which I look
forward eagerly, I shall God willing avail myself of the

(05:35):
opportunity of expressing them to you personally. Anna's mother had
been an old school Russian s arena. She had been
selected to marry the infirm Sar to be after parading
in a bride show of potential candidates. Throughout Ivan's declining health,
Anda's mother dutifully cared for him, standing at his side

(05:58):
wiping drool from his chin, and her only failure as
a wife had been berthing only daughters. Those were the
values that she passed on to Anna into her sister.
They were educated at home, taught that their purpose, above
all else was to be wives. Anna was only semiliterate,
but she knew that much by heart. Anna's wedding to

(06:22):
Frederick William was a gorgeous affair, accompanied by the full
pageantry of the Russian court. Her cape was laced with gold,
she wore a tiara. The night ended with a fireworks
display over the palace, and Anna stood side by side
with the boy that she had pledged to devote herself

(06:42):
to for the rest of their lives. Anna watched the fireworks,
completely unaware of the misery that would soon befall her,
where only of the glittering sky and her new husband's
shining eyes. The next night, her uncle bizarre through a

(07:03):
second wedding, this time for a pair of dwarves. Peter
the Great held a fancy of breeding an entire race
of dwarves, and so just as he arranged the wedding
of his niece, he arranged the wedding of two of
the fools he kept in his palace for his amusement.
The dwarf bride was dressed exactly as Anna had been

(07:24):
the previous night, in an exact replica of her embroidered gown,
a fifth of its original size. The guests of the party,
all of the dwarves Peter the Great could summon, were
given excessive amounts of alcohol so the court could watch
them stumbled drunkenly as they jumped out of cakes and
attempted to dance. It was a cruel mockery, cruel to

(07:47):
the dwarves forced into a servile role as entertainment, but
also intended as a cruelty to the court that was
watching them. Peter the Great had designed this second wedding
as a grow Tesk fun house mirror for the Russian
court to watch themselves, and poor Anna, famously unbeautiful even then,

(08:09):
happened to be the centerpiece. The bride doubled in miniature
for everyone to laugh at, and the guests did laugh.
They laughed, and they drank, and they laughed some more,
and then drank some more, and the festivities continued for
another week till it was finally time to send Anna
and her new husband off back to Courland and for

(08:29):
everyone to get on with their lives. To get to
Courland in present day Latvia, it would be a journey
of many days. When Anna and Frederick William entered their
coach the morning of their departure, Frederick William was still
drunk from a drinking competition with Peter the Great the
night before. He was pale and sweating his hair wet

(08:51):
against his forehead, even in the Russian chill. They only
made it twenty kilometers before Frederick William dropped dead. But
just because a husband dies doesn't mean the alliance that
the marriage was meant to cement is any less important.
Anna Ivanovna, only seventeen years old, was forced to ride

(09:12):
the entire way to Coreland with the cooling corpse of
her husband at her side. Her destination was a strange
land that she would be expected to rule alone. Though
she would write hundreds of letters to her uncle in
Saint Petersburg begging him for permission to come home or
to marry again, her please went unheeded. The peace with

(09:35):
Corland was essential, Anna's happiness was not, And besides, if
she got married again, her husband or God forbid, child
could complicate the line of succession. No, it was better
for everyone if Anna stayed put, a teenage widow who
would never be permitted to love again. Anna's letters to

(10:02):
Peter the Great continued, hundreds of them, all desperately pleading
for her uncle to allow her to get married again.
She had only been seventeen and experienced marriage for a
period of days. Why now did she have to be
alone forever? But then, in seventeen, fifteen years after Anna's

(10:22):
all too brief marriage, Peter the Great died, and five
years after that, his grandson and heir, Sir Peter the Second,
died too young and with no heir, which meant Russia
now faced a crisis of succession. Peter the Great had daughters,
but they were born out of wedlock, daughters he had

(10:43):
had with the maid he married only after she gave birth.
But then there was Anna and her sister. Their father,
Ivan had been Peter's older brother after all, and their
mother had been a high born noblewoman who cared for
her infirm husband with all of the virtue that one
could ever ask for. Anna's sister was the elder, but

(11:04):
she was married to a prominent duke, and she already
had a daughter. The Privy Council, in charge of appointing
the next Russian leader, worried that the husband could try
to steal power, and the daughter next in line would
complicate things all over again. But Anna dutiful. Anna was
a childless widow with no husband to try to wield

(11:27):
control and no children that would be next in line
for succession, plus being the younger daughter and not naturally
in line for the throne, She would be grateful to
the Privy Council for choosing her, and deferential to them
and all of her decision making. She would be a figurehead,
and to that end, they journeyed to Courland to make

(11:47):
her sign a declaration of conditions. Anna would become the Empress. Yes,
but she could not declare war or peace, impose new taxes,
or punish the nobility without trial. She signed the papers
to a round of applause in her palace in Coreland,

(12:08):
before embarking on the long journey back to St. Petersburg.
For the first time in twenty years, she returned to
a Russian court of bickering and power hungry noble families.
The Privy council was made of two noble families, which
infuriated a handful of other noble families who wanted their
own chance a manipulating the new empress and so egged

(12:31):
on by the lesser nobles. As soon as she arrived
in the Russian capital and Press, Anna Ivanovna dissolved the
council that had granted her the throne. She publicly repudiated
the conditions she had been forced to sign, ripping them
in half in public and then for good measure. Since
some of the men who had written them to the
scaffold and a few more to Siberia, Anna would be

(12:55):
an autocrat like her predecessors. Perhaps, before the council had
gone through with their selection, they would have been wise
to look up at the sky the night before Anna
was crowned, Empress Aurora Borealist lit up the Russian horizon
in shimmering red. People at the time said that it
looked like blood. Though as Empress she brought with her

(13:21):
a married lover from Corland, Anna Ivanovna never remarried herself.
What had been a youthful idealization of love and marriage
had charred and crystallized over the years into something cold
and sour. One Russian Prince, Michael Alexeyevitch Galatson, made the
mistake of getting married without Anna's permission, and he made

(13:45):
the deadly mistake of marrying a Catholic. Prince Mikhael Galatson
had fallen in love with a beautiful Italian woman and
brought her back to Russia, where their happy marriage represented
everything that the aging power hungry and resented about the world.
Not long after they made it back to Russia, the

(14:05):
beautiful Italian Catholic woman died, and though one might think
Anna would see that as punishment enough for Prince Michael,
it wasn't. The Empress stripped him of his title and
forced him to become a court jester for her amusement
to entertain the privileged aristocrats in court with his humiliation

(14:26):
day after day during the endless Russian winter Bortumn. First,
Michael was forced to pretend to be a chicken, sitting
on a massive nest set up for him in the
throne room, coated in feathers and clucking on command. When
guests came, Anna would make him pretend to lay an egg.

(14:47):
But it was her ultimate act of creative humiliation that
would be her master stroke. If Michael liked getting married
so much, he would get married again, only this time
Anna would choose his bride, and she chose one of
her female jestures, one famous for being the ugliest woman

(15:08):
in Russia, an older woman named Avdotia bouji Nova, her
surname a nasty joke on the Russian word for roast pork.
The wedding would be a spectacle one that would begin
with the parade filled with dwarves and foreigners taken prisoner,
and all of the deformed and disabled people that served

(15:29):
as entertainment for Anna and her court. They rode in
procession all these people presented as curiosities, along with the
low left drunks of the Russian streets in carts pulled
by goats and pigs. The subjects from foreign land were
dressed in clothes from their native countries, forced to do

(15:50):
what I'm sure Anna believed to be authentic native dancing. Finally,
the bride and groom arrived, dressed as clowns, and they
were flaunted down the street in a golden cage together
on the back of an elephant. Eventually they made it
to their destination. Anna's Ice Palace, a palace made entirely

(16:14):
of ice pulled from the Neva River, massive blocks of
it glued together with water so it looked like it
was carved from a single piece of glass. Local villagers
had watched and gathered breathless as the massive edifice had
erected itself over a matter of weeks, a thing both
delicate and monumental, Over thirty feet tall and over one

(16:39):
feet long. It was spectacular, an apparition, a marvel of engineering.
It was a ghost palace, a reflection back at the
twisted Empress and her malice. There were cannons outside, built
entirely of ice, that, when loaded with gunpowder, could actually

(17:00):
fire ice cannonballs at sixty paces. On the ice palaces lawn,
a massive hollow elephant carved out of ice held its
trunk aloft in the sky. Oil lit on fire could
be spewed out of the elephant's trunk, so it looked
like the elephant was spitting flames into the dark night sky,

(17:21):
and inside the hollow elephant sculpture was tucked a man
with a horn so that the ice elephant could really bellow.
Mikale and his clown bride were stripped naked and sent
into the palace to consummate their union on the ice
pillows and ice blankets of the bed carved entirely out

(17:42):
of ice, an exact replica of the Royal bedchamber. Guards
were posted at the doors. You have to keep each
other close if you want to stay warm enough to
survive the night and the laught. It was one of
the coldest winters on record for Russia. The pair only
survived because the bride of Doughtya traded her family's heirloom

(18:05):
pearls for one of the guard's coats. The two kept
warm until dawn, running through the ice palace as many rooms,
breaking what they could and huddling under the coat. When
their extremities began turning blue and their breath started freezing
before their faces, the warmth of it being sucked forth

(18:26):
from their lungs by the greedy colt. The wedding celebrations
ended with a fireworks display over the frozen Neva River.
The entire spectacle was meant as a reminder to all
of the nobles in Russia, so that they could see
the power that Anna wielded with such capriciousness. Look what

(18:47):
I can imagine, the palace said, Look what I can construct,
Look what I can force you to endure. They say
that nine months later Mikhail and ev Dotie became the
parents of twins, and that their marriage, for its brutal origins,
went on to become a long and happy one. I

(19:09):
like that story, the idea that something beautiful and human
emerged from that ice palace. You can believe that if
you want. It was so long ago. No one will
fault you for imagining a pair of bright, cheek to
Russian babies clenching their fists around their father's fingers and
cooing into their mother's curls, Babies who always seemed to

(19:33):
run cold and needed layers of extra blankets before they
could finally fall asleep, peaceful in a warm home with
parents who loved them. But the truth is that Avdotia
caught a chill that night and she never recovered, and
she died a few days later. McHale continued to serve

(19:54):
at Anna's pleasure until the Empress too died within the year.
It was a slow and painful death for her, from
ulcers on her kidney. With her final words, she called
out for her lover, Ernest Brown and proclaimed him regent.
Barron's regency was short lived, a hated figure in Russian court.

(20:19):
Three weeks after the Empress's death, he was banished to
Siberia exile out in the cold. That's the story of
Empress Anna Ivanovna's ice palace and her icy rein. But

(20:40):
stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear more
about what came next in Russia. Princess who married Catholics
weren't the only enemies that in Braziana held. Of her
most hated rivals was her first cousin, Elizabeth, a woman

(21:04):
nearly two decades younger than her and famously beautiful, whereas
Anna had always been diplomatically described as sturdy. A foreign
minister had once come to Anna's court, where Anna had
asked him who the most beautiful woman in Russia, was
not understanding the game of forced flattery. The noble instantly

(21:25):
pointed to Elizabeth. Anna fumed with no marriage setups from
her bitter cousin. On the horizon, Elizabeth took a lover,
a handsome soldier named Alexis Shubin. The Empress took her
revenge when she discovered the affair by having Shubin's tongue
cut out. Years later, after Anna's death, Elizabeth would rise

(21:49):
to power in a coup over Anna's infant nephew. Elizabeth,
who was the daughter of Peter the Great, got the
nobles on her side by pledging that she would never
declare a single death sentence as Empress. Elizabeth reigned as
Empress for over twenty years, and she kept her word.

(22:16):
Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and
Aaron Mankey. The show is written and hosted by Dana
Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams,
and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at
Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the
show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more
podcasts from I Heart radio, visit the I heart Radio app,

(22:39):
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.