The island at the very source of the cold and dark Neva River from Lake Ladoga was the first piece of enemy Swedish land on which Peter I set foot at the very beginning of the Northern War. It was no coincidence that he renamed the fortress Noteburg, captured from the Swedes in 1702, to Shlisselburg — the "Key City." With this key, he later opened the entire Baltic region. And almost immediately, the fortress became a political prison. This secluded island was very convenient as a place of confinement. One could enter only through a single gate, having to circle almost the entire island by water under the watchful eyes of the guards. And escaping from there was impossible. Throughout its history, there were no successful escapes from the Shlisselburg prison. Only once was there a daring attempt to free one of its prisoners.

The event took place during the White Nights from July 5 to 6, 1764. The attempt was made by one of the fortress’s guards, Lieutenant Vasily Yakovlevich Mirovich of the Smolensk Infantry Regiment. With a detachment of soldiers whom he incited to rebellion, Mirovich tried to seize the special prison where a highly secret prisoner was held. Bursting into the barracks where the prisoner lived, Mirovich saw him motionless, lying in a pool of blood. Signs of a fierce struggle were all around. During the fight that broke out between the mutineers and the secret prisoner’s guards, several soldiers died. The guards’ officers, Vlasyev and Chekin, killed the prisoner. Upon learning of the prisoner’s death, Mirovich surrendered to the authorities and was immediately arrested. All the soldiers he had incited to rebellion were also captured. The investigation of this terrible crime began…

But who was this prisoner? It was a terrible state secret, but everyone in Russia knew that the secret prisoner was the Russian Emperor Ivan Antonovich, who had spent almost a quarter of a century in captivity. In the early 1730s, the Romanov dynasty was undergoing a serious crisis — there was no one to inherit the throne. Empress Anna Ioannovna, a childless widow, sat on the throne. Living with her was her sister, Catherine Ivanovna, with her young daughter Anna Leopoldovna. Those were the only relatives of the Empress. However, the Tsarevna Elizabeth Petrovna, who was not yet thirty, was still alive. In Kiel lived Elizabeth’s nephew, the son of her late elder sister Anna Petrovna, Karl Peter Ulrich (the future Emperor Peter III). However, Anna Ioannovna did not want the offspring of Peter I and the "Lifland laundress" — Catherine I — to ascend the throne of the Russian Empire.

That is why, when in 1731 an imperial decree was announced, the subjects could hardly believe their ears: according to it, they were to swear allegiance to the peculiar will of Anna Ioannovna. She declared her heir to be the boy who would be born from the future marriage of the Empress’s niece Anna Leopoldovna to an as-yet-unknown foreign prince. Remarkably, as the Empress planned, so it happened: Anna Leopoldovna was married to the German prince Anton Ulrich and in August 1740 gave birth to a boy named Ivan. When Anna Ioannovna died in October of the same year, she bequeathed the throne to her two-month-old grandnephew. Thus, Emperor Ivan Antonovich appeared on the Russian throne.

What can be said about a boy who became an autocrat at two months and five days old and was deposed when he was one year, three months, and thirteen days old? Neither the verbose decrees "signed" by him nor the military victories won by his army can say anything about him. A baby is a baby: lying in a cradle, sleeping or crying, sucking milk and soiling diapers.

There is a preserved engraving showing the cradle of Emperor Ivan VI Antonovich, surrounded by allegorical figures of Justice, Prosperity, and Science. Covered with a sumptuous blanket, the chubby-cheeked baby looks sternly at us. Around his neck is wrapped a heavy golden chain of the Order of St. Andrew the First-Called — having just been born, the emperor became a knight of Russia’s highest order. Such was the fate of Ivan Antonovich: he spent his entire life, from his first breath to his last, in chains. But he "wore" the golden chains for only a short time. On November 25, 1741, Tsarevna Elizabeth Petrovna staged a coup d’état. She burst into the Winter Palace with rebels late at night and arrested the emperor’s mother and father. The soldiers were strictly ordered not to make noise in the emperor’s chamber and to take the child-emperor only when he woke up. So for about an hour they silently stood by the cradle until the boy opened his eyes and screamed in fear at the sight of the fierce grenadier faces. Emperor Ivan was pulled from the cradle and brought to Elizabeth. "Ah, child! You are guilty of nothing!" exclaimed the usurper and tightly grasped the child so that — God forbid — he would not fall into other hands.

Then began the long ordeal of Ivan Antonovich’s family through prisons. First, the prisoners were held near Riga, then in the Voronezh province, in Oranienburg. Here, the parents were separated from their four-year-old son. He, under the name Grigory, was taken to the Solovki Islands, but due to autumn bad weather, they only reached Kholmogory, where Ivan Antonovich was placed in the former house of the local archbishop. It should be said that the name Grigory is not the luckiest in Russian history — one involuntarily recalls Grigory Otrepiev and Grigory Rasputin. Here, in Kholmogory, the child was placed in a solitary cell, and from then on he saw only servants and guards. The lively and cheerful boy was continuously kept in a tightly closed room without windows — all his childhood, all his youth. He had no toys, never saw flowers, birds, animals, or trees. He did not know what daylight was. Once a week, under the cover of night darkness, he was taken to the bathhouse in the archbishop’s yard, and he probably thought it was always night outside. Behind the walls of Ivan’s cell, in another part of the house, his parents, brothers, and sisters who were born after him and whom he never saw either, were housed.

Elizabeth never gave the order to kill Ivan but did everything to make him die. The Empress forbade teaching him literacy, forbade him to go for walks. When he, at eight years old, fell ill with smallpox and measles, the guards asked St. Petersburg whether a doctor could be called to the seriously ill boy. The order came back: no doctor allowed to the prisoner! But Ivan recovered, unfortunately for him… In 1756, the sixteen-year-old prisoner was suddenly transferred from Kholmogory to Shlisselburg and settled in a separate, strictly guarded barracks. The guards were given the strictest instructions not to allow strangers to prisoner Grigory. The windows of the room were thickly painted over to block daylight; candles burned constantly in the cell; a duty officer continuously watched the prisoner. When servants came to clean the room, Grigory was taken behind a screen. This was complete isolation from the world…

The very existence of Ivan Antonovich was a state secret. In the struggle against his young predecessor on the throne, Empress Elizabeth Petrovna resorted to a surprising but familiar method of erasing his memory. His name was forbidden to be mentioned in official documents and private conversations. Anyone who uttered the name Ivanushka (as he was called by the people) faced arrest, torture in the Secret Chancellery, exile to Siberia. By imperial decree, all portraits of Ivan VI were to be destroyed, all coins bearing his image withdrawn from circulation. Every time an investigation began if among thousands of coins brought to the treasury in barrels a ruble coin with the image of the disgraced emperor was found. It was ordered to tear out title pages from books dedicated to the infant emperor, collect all decrees, protocols, and reports mentioning Ivan VI Antonovich. These papers were carefully sealed and hidden in the Secret Chancellery. Thus, a huge "gap" appeared in Russian history from October 19, 1740, when he ascended the throne, until November 25, 1741. According to all documents, it appeared that after the reign of Empress Anna Ioannovna ended, the glorious reign of Elizabeth Petrovna began immediately. If it was impossible to avoid mentioning Ivan VI’s reign, a euphemism was used: "During the reign of a certain person." Only more than a century later, in 1888, were two huge volumes of documents from Ivan Antonovich’s reign published. Thus, finally, the secret became known…

But, as often happened in Russia, the greatest state secret was known to everyone. And those who did not know only had to visit the Kholmogory or Shlisselburg market. There or in the nearest tavern, over a half-bottle of vodka, the curious would be told who was so carefully guarded in prison and why. Everyone had long known that Ivanushka was imprisoned for loyalty to the "old faith" and that he suffered, naturally, for the people. It was well known — otherwise, why would a person be tortured so?

It must be said that this dynastic sin troubled neither Elizabeth Petrovna, nor Peter III, who ascended the throne in December 1761, nor Catherine II, who seized power in June 1762. All these autocrats inevitably wanted to see the mysterious prisoner. It so happened that in his life Ivan Antonovich saw only three women: his mother — the regent Anna Leopoldovna — and two empresses! Even then, when Elizabeth met him in 1757 (Ivan was brought to St. Petersburg in a closed carriage), she was dressed in men’s clothes. In March 1762, Emperor Peter III himself went to Shlisselburg, entered the prisoner’s cell disguised as an inspector, and even spoke with him. From this conversation, it became clear that the prisoner remembered that he was not Grigory at all, but a prince or emperor. This unpleasantly surprised Peter III — he had thought the prisoner was mad, forgetful, and sick.

Catherine II inherited the problem of Ivan from her wayward husband. Driven by curiosity, she went to Shlisselburg in August 1762 to see the secret prisoner and possibly speak with him. There is no doubt that Ivan Antonovich’s wild appearance made a heavy impression on visitors. Twenty years of solitary confinement had crippled him; the life experience of the youth was deformed and defective. A child is not a kitten that will grow into a cat even in an empty room. Ivan was isolated at four years old. No one took care of his upbringing. He knew no affection or kindness, living like a beast in a cage. The guards, ignorant and rude men, teased Ivanushka like a dog out of malice and boredom, beat him, and chained him "for disobedience." As M. A. Korf, author of a book about Ivan Antonovich, rightly wrote, "his life until the very end was one endless chain of torment and suffering of all kinds." Yet deep in his consciousness, the memory of early childhood and the terrible, dreamlike story of his abduction and renaming was preserved. In 1759, one of the guards reported in his report: "The prisoner was asked who he was, to which he first said that he was a great man, and one vile officer took that from him and changed his name." It is clear that Ivan was talking about Captain Miller, who took the four-year-old boy from his parents in 1744. And the child remembered this!

Later, Catherine II wrote that she came to Shlisselburg to see the prince and "to learn his mental qualities and assign him a peaceful life according to his natural qualities and upbringing." But she allegedly met with complete failure because "with our sensitivity we saw in him, besides his very burdensome and almost incomprehensible stammering (Ivan stuttered terribly and supported his chin with his hand to speak clearly), deprivation of reason and human sense." Therefore, the sovereign concluded, no help could be given to the unfortunate, and nothing would be better for him than to remain in the casemate. The conclusion about Ivanushka’s madness was not based on medical examination but on reports from the guards. We know well from Soviet history what kind of psychiatrists guards can be. Professional doctors were never allowed to Ivan Antonovich.

In short, the humane sovereign left the prisoner to rot in a damp, dark barracks. Soon after the Empress left Shlisselburg, on August 3, 1762, the secret prisoner’s guards, officers Vlasyev and Chekin, received new instructions. In them (in clear contradiction to the claim of the prisoner’s madness), it was said that conversations with Grigory should be conducted "to awaken in him a tendency toward the spiritual rank, that is, monasticism… explaining to him that his life is already determined by God for monasticism and that his whole life has proceeded so that he must hasten to seek tonsure." It is unlikely that with a madman "deprived of reason and human sense" one could hold high conversations about God and monastic tonsure.

It is extremely important that this instruction, unlike previous ones, included the following point: "4. If, contrary to expectations, someone comes with a detachment or alone, even an officer… and wants to take the prisoner from you, then do not give him to anyone… But if that hand is strong so that escape is impossible, then kill the prisoner and do not give him alive into anyone’s hands."

The attempt to free Ivan Antonovich, made exactly two years later, seemed as if anticipated by the authors of the 1762 instruction. As if following a written script, an unknown officer appeared with a detachment, presented no papers to the guards, a fight broke out, the attackers intensified their pressure, and seeing that "that hand would be strong," Vlasyev and Chekin rushed into the cell. As a contemporary reported, "they attacked the unfortunate prince with drawn swords, who by that time had awakened from the noise and jumped out of bed. He defended himself from their blows and, although wounded in the arm, broke one of their swords; then, having no weapon and almost completely naked, he continued to resist fiercely until they finally overcame him and wounded him in many places. Then he was finally killed by one of the officers who pierced him through from behind."

In general, a dark and unclean deed was done. There are grounds to suspect Catherine II and her circle of striving to destroy Ivan Antonovich, who, despite his defenselessness, remained a dangerous rival for the reigning empress, as he was the legitimate sovereign, overthrown by Elizabeth in 1741. Benevolent rumors about Ivan Antonovich circulated in society. In 1763, a conspiracy was uncovered whose participants planned to kill Grigory Orlov, the empress’s favorite, and marry Ivan Antonovich to Catherine II, thereby ending the long dynastic dispute. Such plans clearly displeased both Orlov and the sovereign herself. In short, there was a man — and there was a problem…

Here appeared Lieutenant Vasily Mirovich — a poor, nervous, offended, ambitious young man. Once his ancestor, a companion of Mazepa, was exiled to Siberia, and he wanted to restore justice and return the family’s former wealth. When Mirovich sought help from his influential countryman, Hetman Kirill Razumovsky, he received not money but advice: make your own way, try to grab Fortune by the forelock — and you will become a nobleman like the others! After that, Mirovich conceived the idea to free Ivan Antonovich, take him to Petersburg, and raise a rebellion. However, the plan failed, which some historians find quite natural, as they believe Mirovich became a victim of provocation, resulting in the death of a dangerous rival to Catherine.

During Mirovich’s trial, a dispute unexpectedly flared among the judges: how could the guards’ officers raise their hands against a royal prisoner and shed royal blood? The fact is that the judges were kept in the dark about the August 3, 1762 instruction given to Vlasyev and Chekin, which ordered the prisoner’s killing in case of an attempted liberation. However, the judges, unaware of the instruction, were convinced that the guards acted so harshly on their own initiative, not following orders. One wonders why the authorities needed to withhold this instruction from the court?

The story of Ivan Antonovich’s murder again raises the eternal problem of the correspondence between morality and politics. Two truths — divine and state — clash here in an irresolvable, terrible conflict. It turns out that the mortal sin of killing an innocent person can be justified if it is provided for by instructions, if this sin is committed in the name of state security. But, to be fair, we cannot ignore Catherine’s words, who wrote that Vlasyev and Chekin managed to "prevent by killing one, unfortunately born," the inevitable countless victims that would undoubtedly have followed if Mirovich’s rebellion had succeeded. Indeed, it is hard to imagine what rivers of blood would have flowed through the streets of Petersburg if Mirovich had brought Ivan Antonovich (as he intended) to Liteiny Sloboda, seized cannons there, and raised soldiers and craftsmen in rebellion… And this in the center of a huge, densely populated city.

Ivanushka’s death did not upset Catherine and her circle. Nikita Panin wrote to the empress, who was then in Livonia: "The matter was carried out with desperate boldness, which was stopped by the extremely commendable resolution of Captain Vlasyev and Lieutenant Chekin." Catherine replied: "I read your reports with great amazement and all the wonders that happened in Shlisselburg: the guidance of God is wondrous and unprecedented!" It turns out that the sovereign was pleased and even glad. Knowing Catherine as a humane and liberal person, even believing that she was not involved in the drama on the island, we must still agree that objectively Ivan’s death was beneficial to her: no person — no problem! After all, not long ago, in the summer of 1762, a joke was passed around Petersburg about Field Marshal Minikh, who said he had never before lived under three emperors simultaneously: one sits in Shlisselburg, another in Ropsha, and the third in the Winter Palace. Now, after the death of Peter III "from hemorrhoidal colic" and the demise of Ivanushka, no one would joke like that anymore.

The investigation into Mirovich’s case was brief and, most importantly, extraordinarily humane, which seems strange for such cases. Catherine forbade torturing Mirovich, did not allow many of his acquaintances or even the prisoner’s brother to be interrogated, dismissing it with a joke: "My brother, but his mind." Usually, in political police investigations, relatives became the first suspects of aiding the criminal. Mirovich remained calm and even cheerful. It seemed he had received some assurances regarding his safety. He was calm when led to the scaffold erected at Obzhorka — a filthy square near today’s Sytniy Market. The huge crowd gathered for the execution was convinced the criminal would be pardoned — after all, people had not been executed in Russia for more than twenty years. The executioner raised the axe, the crowd froze… Usually, at this moment, the secretary on the scaffold would stop the execution and announce the pardon decree, granting, as they said in the 17th century, "life instead of death." But this did not happen; the secretary was silent, the axe fell on Mirovich’s neck, and his head was immediately lifted by the executioner by the hair… (As an addition, the execution had to take place. Documents show that executioners trained for a long time the day before on a slaughterhouse — honing their skill on sheep and calves.) The people, as Derzhavin, an eyewitness to the execution, wrote, "who for some reason expected the sovereign’s mercy, when they saw the head in the executioner’s hands, unanimously gasped and shuddered so much that the bridge trembled and the railing collapsed." People fell into the Kronverk fortress moat. Truly, the ends were hidden in water… and also in the ground. For even before Mirovich’s execution, Catherine ordered Ivanushka’s body to be secretly buried somewhere in the fortress.

As already mentioned, some historians believe that Mirovich’s case was actually a provocation aimed at murder or even a staged event to create an official legend about the heir’s death, while in reality Ivan VI was secretly transferred to the Kexholm fortress under a pseudonym, finally hiding his identity.

Source:

Palace Secrets, Evgeny Viktorovich Anisimov

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Иван_VI