Anna was born in 1693, the daughter of Czar Ivan V, better known as “Ivan the Ignorant.” Anna’s mother was very traditional and that meant she did not get an education and was barely literate. Anna was also not blessed with looks either;

In 1710, she was wedded to Frederick William, the Duke of Courland. Anna was excited and glad to be married. Two days after the marriage, Anna’s uncle, Czar Peter the Great, staged a wedding for two dwarfs as a companion celebration to Anna’s. Peter put the wedding on to express his contempt not only for Anna but for the entire Russian court at the time.

In the two days between his marriage to Anna and attending the weird dwarf wedding, Frederick William drank so much that he became ill right after the dwarf wedding and died two months later. Anna became a widow and the ruler of Courland, which led her to becoming Empress and Autocrat of Russia in 1730.

Anna was desperate to remarry. She wrote hundreds of letters to her family begging for a husband. Peter the Great rejected every suitor until Anna soured on the idea altogether. She grew bitter, wanting to punish those happy in love.

Prince Mikhail, from one of the noblest houses in Russia, married a Catholic Italian woman for love. Mikhail’s Italian wife unfortunately died and Anna decided to turn Mikhail into a court jester. He had to pretend to be a chicken, sitting on a nest of eggs in Anna’s reception room, mimicking laying an egg when Anna had visitors.

She arranged his marriage to one of her maids, an elderly ‘unattractive woman’ called Avdotaya Ivanovna. The couple was presented with a fleet of carriages, each carrying a representative of the different races within the empire, each pulled by a different farm animal. Anna made the couple ride an elephant, dress as clowns, and spend their wedding night naked in a specially constructed ice palace during the exceptionally harsh winter of 1739–40.

According to legend, the couple went on to enjoy a happy marriage and have twins, conceived on that chilly night. But in reality, the woman died a few days after her night in the ice palace.

Not long after, the reign of the cruel Anna Ivanovna came to an end; she died during October 1740 of kidney disease at 47 years old, mercifully leaving no heirs.