Complex Numbers

Ice Empress

At some point, I think it was last year, I finally got around to watching Frozen. What can I say? Without kids, I was never forced to, but it's part of my Disney+ subscription, so at least I didn't have to pay more for it. (Still haven't seen the sequel.)

As usual, though, truth is stranger than fiction.

     The Time a Russian Empress Built an Ice Palace and Forced Her Jester To Get Married In It  
Cruel joke, power move, or both?

Now, the truth is, I don't have much to say about this beyond the Frozen reference above. I just thought it was—to understate things a bit—cool, so here it is, shared.

It was 1740 and one of the coldest winters St. Petersburg, Russia, had ever seen. But few residents mentioned the bitter winter in letters or accounts. They were, understandably, distracted. While the rest of Europe shivered through the deep freeze, Russians were busy—building a palace. On the orders of Empress Anna Ioannovna, numerous craftsmen were charged with constructing an elaborate, fairy tale–esque castle, one made entirely of ice.

On the plus side, I suppose the exertion kept them warm. And the fear of being executed for underperformance, but mostly, the exertion.

Rising 66 feet from the surface of the frozen Neva River and nearly 165 feet long, the Ice Palace was built “according to all the rules of the most current architecture,” noted Russian mathematician Georg Wolfgang Krafft.

I guess one of the rules wasn't "don't build your palace out of ice."

A steam bath, or bania, built from ice sat beside the palace. Decorative ice dolphins blew fire. A life-sized ice elephant’s raised trunk served as a fountain by day and as a stunning torch by night.

Gotta say I'm impressed by the violation of the laws of thermodynamics, which, to be fair, hadn't been formulated yet.

The palace was, by all accounts, a marvel. But the elaborate, temporary palace isn’t the strangest part of the story. That winter, Anna ordered a bizarre wedding to take place at the Ice Palace between the disgraced noble-turned-jester, Prince Mikhail Golitsyn, and a Kalmyk woman, Avdotia Buzheninova.

Okay, I had to look up "Kalmyk." Apparently a Mongol ethnic group in Russia. The article does explain this later, but I hadn't gotten to that part yet. I'm sure their story is fascinating, too, but I'm short on time tonight.

“The nobles choose Anna because, as a woman, they think she’ll be very easily manipulated,” says Russian historian Jacob Bell of the University of Illinois. The nobles imposed a list of conditions (creatively dubbed the “Conditions”) on Anna’s power and made her sign on the dotted line. She signed, but Anna was far smarter than they gave her credit for.

Within a couple of months, Anna solidified support from a group of nobles and the local guards’ regiments. “[She] then, very dramatically tears the conditions in half and declares she will rule in the way she wants to rule,” says Bell.

This is one of the most Russian things outside of depression and vodka.

Continuing many of the efforts begun by Peter the Great, she funded the Russian Academy of Science and encouraged Westernization. She founded the Cadet Corps, a premiere military training school, and maintained a brutal secret police known as the Secret Office of Investigation.

The Russianness intensifies.

Ahead of the nuptials, Anna decreed every Russian province to send a man and woman wearing traditional dress to attend the spectacle.

I suppose at least she didn't make them all wear ice?

With all of this sort of thing going on, it's surprising that it took over 150 years after the Ice Palace incident for Russians to rise up in revolt. I guess they might have started to, but got cold feet.