ANNA IOANOVNA

Anna Ioannovna

Anna Ioannovna is a Russian empress from the Romanov dynasty. Not having the fame of a reformer like Peter I, it was she who continued his state course and implemented his plans in practice: she contributed to the reduction of the state apparatus, the reduction of taxes of peasants, actively replenished the Russian fleet. Despite the huge spending on fun, which was quite in the taste of the XVIII century, Anna Ioannovna became the only empress who left her successor not debts, but 2 million rubles in cash — a huge amount at that time.

Anna was born on February 7, 1693 in the royal family in the Cross Chamber of the Terem Palace of the Moscow Kremlin. The girl's parents — Tsar Ivan V and Tsarina Praskovya Fedorovna — raised two more daughters: the elder Catherine and the younger Praskovya.

In 1730, Emperor Peter II died, and it became necessary to choose a new ruler. At the meeting of the Supreme Privy Council , six candidates for the Russian throne were nominated: the son of the deceased Duchess Anna Petrovna Peter-Ulrich, the second daughter of Peter I Tsarevna Elizabeth Petrovna, the first wife of Peter I Evdokia Fedorovna Lopukhina and three daughters of Tsar John Alekseevich.

The Empress died on October 28, 1740 in St. Petersburg. The cause of her death was kidney disease. The grave of Anna Ioannovna is located in the Peter and Paul Cathedral. In her will, the Empress named the descendants of her sister Catherine of Mecklenburg as heirs to the throne.

Currently, many things, jewelry, documents, as well as images of the empress have been preserved — these are both paintings and engravings, as well as the monumental sculptural group "Anna Ioannovna with an Arab", completed by the Italian master Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli after her death. The state archive even keeps the original of the "conditions", which the Empress tore up, but did not destroy.