The Regent Anna Leopoldowna

Anna had succeeded, she was regent; she had shaken off the burden of
the Bironic tutelage, and her word was all-powerful throughout the
immeasurable provinces of the Russian empire. Was she now happy, this
proud and powerful Anna Leopoldowna? No one had ever yet been happy
and free from care upon this Russian throne, and how, then, could Anna
Leopoldowna be so? She had read the books of Russian political history,
and that history was written with blood! Anna was a woman, and she
trembled when thinking of the poison, the dagger, the throttling hands,
and flaying sword, which had constantly beset the throne of Russian, and
in a manner had been the means in the hands of Providence of clearing
it from one tyrant, only, indeed, to make room for another. Anna, as we
have said, trembled before this means of Providence; and when her
eyes fell upon Munnich--upon his dark, angry brow and his secretly
threatening glance--she then with inward terror asked herself: "May not
Providence have chosen him for my murderer? Will he not overthrow me, as
he overthrew his former master and friend Duke Biron?"

Anna now feared him whom she had chiefly to thank for her greatness. At
the time when he had made her regent he had satisfactorily shown that
his arm was sufficiently powerful to displace one regent and hurl him to
the dust! What he had once done, might not he now be able to accomplish
again?

She surrounded this feared field-marshal with spies and listeners;
she caused all his actions to be watched, every one of his words to be
repeated to her, in order to ascertain whether it had not some concealed
sense, some threatening secret; she doubled the guards of her palace,
and, always trembling with fear, she no longer dared to occupy any one
of her apartments continuously. Nomadically wandered they about in their
own palace, this Regent Anna Leopoldowna and her husband Prince Ulrich
of Brunswick; remembering the sleeping-chamber of Biron, she dared not
select any one distinct apartment for constant occupation; every evening
found her in a new room, every night she reposed in a different bed, and
even her most trusted servant often knew not in which wing of the castle
the princely pair were to pass the night.