The Ice Queen

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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 were 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 seven, 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 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 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 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 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, where only of the glittering sky and her new husband's shining eyes. The next night, her uncle bizarre through a 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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.

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 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 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

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 thirty feet tall and over one 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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. 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, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.