The years 1728-1732 occurred during the oft-overlooked decades between the reigns of Russia's two greats, Peter I and Catherine II. Six rulers governed the empire in these intervening thirty-seven years, four of them for three or fewer years. This includes Peter II (the grandson of Peter the Great), who ascended to the throne in 1727 as an 11-year-old.

As a minor, Peter II was overshadowed by the machinations of his advisors and the nobility more generally. The Supreme Privy Council, organized in 1726 and comprised of a half-dozen nobles led by Prince Menshikov and later the Dolgurukii family to advise Catherine I on matters of state, continued as de facto rulers under Peter II. These nobles were opposed to westernization and therefore Peter the Great's "Window to the West" (The court had moved to St. Petersburg only a decade and a half earlier).

The simplest answer is, then, that Peter II was crowned in Moscow and simply didn't leave. He showed little interest in matters of state, so the Supreme Privy Council was free to do as they pleased.

Upon Peter II's death in 1730 from smallpox they chose Anna Ivanova, who had ruled the Duchy of Courland/Kurland (in what is now Latvia) after her husband, Friedrich Wilhelm Kettler, died in 1711. (This was just two months into their marriage and on the way home from the festivities in St. Petersburg!) The council believed this choice would permit them to continue ruling the country, going so far as to require her to sign a series of "conditions" that would have created, in effect, a constitutional monarchy, whose powers would be officially checked by the Supreme Privy Council. Anna agreed to this demand, then shortly thereafter had the Council dissolved and its members exiled to Siberia. Anna would not allow her powers to be abrogated and Peter the Great's westernization program could continue. Her advisors were largely German, in doubt influenced by the nearly two decades she spent among the Baltic German elite before ascending to the throne. In 1732 Anna returned the capital to St. Petersburg, where she had married Kettler two decades earlier, a place both intellectually and geographically more familiar to her and her advisors.