Anna (Russia)

Anna (Anna Ivanovna) , 1693-1740, czarina of Russia (1730-40), daughter of Ivan V and niece of Peter I (Peter the Great). On the death of her distant cousin, Peter II , she was chosen czarina by the supreme privy council, which thus hoped to gain power for itself. Anna signed articles limiting her power, but she soon restored autocratic rule, with support from the lesser nobility and the imperial guards. She made minor concessions to the nobles but restored the security police and terrorized opponents. Distrusting the nobility, she excluded Russians from high positions and surrounded herself with Baltic Germans. Her favorite, Ernst Johann von Biron , had the greatest influence. Allied with Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI , Anna intervened in the War of the Polish Succession (1733-35), installed Augustus III as king of Poland, and attacked Turkey in 1736. Charles's separate peace with the Turks at Belgrade forced Russia to make peace in turn, at the price of all recent conquests except Azov. During Anna's reign began the great Russian push into central Asia. She was succeeded by her grandnephew, Ivan VI .

Golubkina, Anna (1864–1927). Russian sculptor, one of her country's outstanding artists in the early 20th century. She was born in Zaraysk, the daughter of a market gardener, and studied in Moscow and St Petersburg before making two visits to Paris (1895–6 and 1897). During the first of these she studied at the Académie Colarossi and during the second she met Rodin, whose vigorous surfaces and Symbolist leanings strongly influenced her work (she later wrote to him: ‘While I live I shall always venerate you as a great artist and the person who gave me the possibility of life'). After her return to Russia she settled in Moscow. Golubkina was principally renowned as a portraitist, and one of her most famous works is the first sculptural portrait of Karl Marx (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 1905). Typically, she donated her fee for this to a fund for homeless workers, for she had passionate humanistic convictions and took an active part in the Russian Revolution of 1905; two years later she was imprisoned for distributing literature urging peasants to ‘overthrow the Tsar and the government', but she was soon released because of ill-health. In 1914–15 she organized an exhibition of her work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow ‘in aid of the war-wounded'. From 1918 to 1921 she taught at Svomas and then Vkhutemas. She worked mainly in bronze, but also in marble and wood. Following serious illness in 1924, she concentrated on smaller works, including cameos. M. N. Yablonskaya (Women Artists of Russia's New Age, 1990) writes that ‘Golubkina was one of the new generation of artists who searched for fresh expressive possibilities with which to convey contemporary life’ and that she ‘almost single-handedly introduced a renaissance into the medium of sculpture'.