Tsar Peter is betrothed to his new mentor's niece, Princess Yekaterina Dolgorukova, and the wedding is actually fixed for January 30, 1730, but the emperor dies of smallpox on this very day.
While he lay dying, his new wife had been pushed into his deathbed in a desperate attempt to make her pregnant.
With Peter's death, the direct male line of the Romanov Dynasty ends.
The Supreme Privy Council under Prince Dmitry Galitzine elevates to the imperial throne an improbable successor: Anna Ivanovna, Duchess of Courland, and daughter of Peter the Great's half-brother and co-ruler, Ivan V. The council members, deeming her to be easily amenable to manipulation and too conservative to restore Peter I's reforms, hope that she will feel indebted to the nobles for her unexpected fortune and remain a figurehead at best, and malleable at worst.
In the hope of establishing a constitutional monarchy in Russia, they persuade her to sign articles that limit her power, which confer on the Council the powers of war and peace and of taxation.
According to the conditions, Anna cannot promote officers to ranks higher than colonel and interfere into military affairs.
She promises not to marry and not to choose herself a successor.
The conditions are modeled on the form of government recently instituted in Great Britain.
In case Anna violates the conditions, she is to be dethroned.
On the elevation of Anna to the Russian throne, her former lover, the handsome, insinuating adventurer Ernst Johann von Biron, who had in the meantime married a Fräulein von Treiden, had come to Moscow and received many honors and riches.
A month after signing the document, Anna, on the advice of Biron, wins the sympathies of the Leib Guard and on February 25 tears up the terms of her accession, which, if implemented, would have led to Russia's transformation into a constitutional monarchy.
Within days, the Council is abolished and many of its members exiled to Siberia.
Dolgoruky's involvement in intrigues concerning the succession—including the manufacture of a letter purporting to be the tsar's last will, in which he had appointed Yekaterina his successor—resulted in his banishment, first to Siberia and then to the Solovetsky monastery.
As one of her first acts to consolidate this power, she restores the security police, which she uses to intimidate and terrorize those who oppose her and her policies.
Although she does not move the capital back to Moscow, she spends most of her time at this city in the company of her foolish and ignorant maids.
At Anna's coronation on May 19, Biron becomes grand-chamberlain, a count of the Empire, on which occasion he is said to have adopted the arms of the French ducal house of Biron, and is presented with an estate at Wenden with fifty thousand crowns a year.
