Russia, 1740: the Empress Anna is dead, a regent rules for an infant tsar, and Peter the Great's daughter Elizabeth waits in disfavour while the German ministers at court — Münnich, Ostermann, the favourite Biron — fall one after another. Mühlbach was Klara Mundt, who wrote nearly three hundred volumes and poured the courts of Europe into them; the palace revolution of 1741 that put Elizabeth on the throne is history, and so is the knout at the end. Thirty-nine plates, among them winter scenes by Edvard Munch and coastal landscapes by Semyon Shchedrin, carry the northern cold and the Russian court through the book.
