Empress Anna of Russia forced Prince Mikhail Alekseevich Golitsyn to marry a Kalmyk servant and spend his wedding night in the infamous ice palace she had commissioned on the frozen Neva River in St. Petersburg.
Anna was the daughter of Czar Ivan V, known as ‘Ivan the Ignorant’ due to severe health issues, including partial paralysis and a vacant stare. His condition allowed his half-brother, Peter the Great, to rule in his stead. Anna herself was uneducated and, according to her uncle, resembled a ‘Westphalian ham’.
At 17, Anna married the dashing Duke of Courland, nephew of the King of Prussia, but Peter humiliated her by staging a mock wedding with dwarfs. Two months later, her husband died of alcohol poisoning after a drinking contest with Peter. Devastated, Anna begged for a new marriage—writing 300 letters—but none materialised, leaving her increasingly bitter, especially toward happy couples.
Unexpectedly ascending the throne following the death of Peter and his male heirs in 1730, she indulged in a reign of malice. When Prince Golitsyn married an Italian Catholic, she degraded him to court jester, forcing him to cluck like a chicken and sit on a nest of eggs. In 1739, her cruelty peaked with the ice palace—a spectacular 80-foot structure complete with an ice bed, ice pillows and even an ice clock. For his punishment, Mikhail was wed to a maid specially chosen for her ugliness, paraded atop an elephant, and locked naked in the ice palace overnight. He and his unfortunate bride survived only by bribing a guard for a winter coat.
The palace melted in spring, but Anna’s reputation for spite endured. She died in 1740, aged 47, of a kidney stone—her reign remembered as a particularly frosty chapter in Russian history.
