Family secrets of the first Romanovs: “Documents that are indecent for history”

In an article based on little-known sources, for the first time an attempt is made to trace the fate of especially secret documents from the personal archive of the first Romanovs. These documents disappeared during the reorganization of the state archives under Peter I. The possibility of some of these documents appearing in Holstein, together with the personal belongings of Crown Prince Anna Petrovna, the wife of the Duke of Holstein, is being considered. The author explores the methods of the foreign policy of the government of Anna Ioannovna, which were used during the operation to return historical documents within the Russian Empire. Also described is the search for another part of the disappeared documents in Moscow, in which both the highest dignitaries of the empire and the employees of the secret political police took part. As a result, the documents were found and placed in a special archive of the Cabinet of Ministers. The author suggests that in the future the contents of these documents became known to the Cabinet Minister A.P. Volynsky and served as the basis for the organization of the political process against him. It does not exclude the possibility that the echoes of the "Volynsky case" played a certain role in the preparation of the Decembrist uprising. The author makes an attempt to reconstruct the contents of secret documents relating to the circumstances of accession of the Romanov dynasty. According to the author, the occurrence of any possibility of publicity of these documents forced the imperial government to go to extreme measures, up to provocations in foreign policy and terror inside the country.