Noble Blood - The Ice Queen

Episode Date: December 10, 2019

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.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart 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 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 2006, 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 constructed entirely of ice in downtown St. Petersburg, one that would weigh over 500 tons at a cost of $150,000. It was to be an exact replica of a massive ice palace that had stood on the shore of the first place. frozen Neva River two centuries earlier. It would be built exactly to the specifications

laid out by that 18th century architect. There were ice trees filled with carved ice birds, clocks spilt 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 the four posters, all made of ice. Translucent logs 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 stood the single change that the modern builders had made from the 18th 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 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-translucent and 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 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 comfort. capriciousness. She was a woman 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 and an execution chamber. But it was also something 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 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 27, he was unable to remember his own name. His daughter Anna was three.

And so Peter the Great became the singular Tsar of Russia. As the niece of the Tsar, Anna 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 Corland, to secure a lucrative alliance, she was genuinely excited. 17-year-old Anna wrote to Frederick William, her new fiancé, 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 opportunity of expressing them to you personally. Anna's mother had been an old-school Russian serena. She had been selected to marry the infirm Sartre to be after parading in a bride show of potential candidates. Throughout Ivan's declining health, Anna's mother dutifully cared for him, standing at his side, wiping drool from his chin. Her only failure as a wife had been birthing only daughters.

Those were the values that she passed on to Anna and to her sister. They were educated at home, taught that their purpose, above all else, was to be wives. Anna was only semi-literate, but she knew that much by heart. Anna's wedding to 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 to for the rest of their lives.

Anna watched the fireworks, completely unaware of the misery that would soon befall her, aware only of the glittering sky and her new husband's shining eyes. The next night, her uncle, the Tsar, threw a second wedding, this time for a pair of dwarves. Peter the Great held a fancy of breeding an entire world,

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 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 stumble drunkenly as they jumped out of cakes and attempted to dance. It was a cruel mockery, cruel to 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 grotesque funhouse mirror for the

Russian court to watch themselves. And poor Anna, famously unbeautil, and poor Anna, famously unbeautil, even then, 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 until it was finally time to send Anna and her new husband off back to Corland and for everyone to get on with their lives.

To get to Corland 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 against his forehead, even in the Russian chill. They only made it 20 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 17 years old,

was forced to ride the entire way to Corland 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 St. Petersburg, begging him for permission to come home or to marry again,

her pleas went unheeded. The peace with 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 Peter the Great continued, hundreds of them, all desperately pleading for her uncle to allow her to get married again. She had only been 17 and experienced marriage for a period of days, why now did she have to be alone forever? But then, in 1725, 15 years after Anna's all too brief marriage, Peter the Great died, and five years after that, his grandson and heir, Sir Peter II, 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 wedlocked. daughters he had 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 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 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 country. She would be grateful to the privy counsel for choosing her, and deferential to them in all of her decision-making. She would be a figurehead, and to that end, they journeyed to Corland to make 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 Corland, before embarking on the long journey back to St. Petersburg for the first time in 20 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 at manipulating the new Empress. And so, egged on by the lesser nobles, as soon as she arrived in the Russian capital, Empress 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, sent some of the men who had written them to the scaffold and a few more to Siberia. Anna would be 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 Borealis 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 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, Mikhail Alexievich Golitsin, made the mistake of

getting married without Anna's permission. And he made the deadly mistake of marrying a Catholic. Prince Mikhail Galitzen 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 empress resented about the world. Not long after they made it back to Russia, the beautiful Italian Catholic woman died, and no one might think Anna would see that as punishing. enough for Prince Mikhail. 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 day after day during the endless Russian winter boredom. First, Mikhail 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. But it was her ultimate act of creative humiliation that would be her master stroke. If Mikhail 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 gestures, one famous for being the ugliest woman in Russia, An older woman named Abdotia Buzaninova, her surname a nasty joke on the Russian word for roast pork. The wedding would be a spectacle, one that would begin with a parade filled with dwarves and foreigners taken prisoner, and all of the deformed and disabled people that served as entertainment for Anna and her court. They rode in procession. All these people presented as curiosities, along with the low,

life 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 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 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 30 feet tall and over 100 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 fire ice cannonballs at 60 paces. On the ice palace's 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. And inside the hollow elephant sculpture was tucked a man with a horn so that the ice elephant could really bellow.

Mikhail 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 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, Anna laughed. It was one of the coldest winters on record for Russia. The pair only survived because the bride of Dothia traded her family's heirloom pearls for one of the guards' 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 from their lungs by the greedy cold. 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 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 Evdard, Dota became the parents of twins, and that their marriage, for its brutal origins, went on to become a long and happy one. I 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-cheeked Russian babies,

clenching their fists around their father's fingers and cooing into their mother's curls. Babies who always seemed to 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 Avdotya caught a chill that night, and she never recovered, and she died a few days later. McHale continued to serve at Anna's pleasure until the Empress too died within the ear. It was a slow and painful death for her

from ulcers on her kidney. With her final words, she called out for her lover, Ernst Beron, and proclaimed him regent. Barone's regency was short-lived, a hated figure in Russian court. 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 rain. But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear more about what came next in Russia. And I'm Ego Wode. My next guest, you know from Stepbrothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and The Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo-woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever.

I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot.

He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to thanks dad on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is called Against All Odds and that's exactly what the show is about doing whatever it takes to be the odds. Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers and breaking generational patterns. I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Eva Longoria. I think I had like $200 in my savings account and my mom goes, what are you going to do?

And I was like, I'll figure it out. We got a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford. Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month? I'm opening up like I've never before. For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me. Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the My Cultura podcast network,

available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Princess You Married Catholics weren't the only enemies that Imprisana held. One of her most hated rivals was her first cousin, Elizabeth, a woman 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 pointed to Elizabeth. Anna, With no marriage setups from her bitter cousin on the horizon, Elizabeth took a lover,

a handsome soldier named Alexis Schubin. The Empress took her revenge when she discovered the affair by having Schubin's tongue cut out. Years later, after Anna's death, Elizabeth would rise 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 20 years, and she kept her word. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Aaron Manky.

The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz, and produced by Aaron Manky, 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 noblebloodtales.com. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodom.

My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.

Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.