Anna of Russia

Anna Ioannovna served as regent of the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia from 1711 until 1730, a widowed duchess presiding over a minor Baltic territory. In 1730, she became Empress of Russia, her reign shaped heavily by the reforms her uncle Peter the Great had set in motion before his death in 1725. She continued his lavish building projects in St. Petersburg, funded the Russian Academy of Science, and repealed a primogeniture law that year, tilting policy toward the nobility. The West saw her decade as another step in Peter's Europeanization of the old Muscovy court. Inside Russia, the years from 1730 to her death in 1740 earned a different name: a dark era.