A few days later the fallen man appeared before the Privy Council and received sentence. He was fined, for conspiracy against the throne, 375,000 dollars, stripped of all his honours and offices, and ordered to retire to the dreary waste of the steppes. But his wife Daria--we remember Peter the Great forcing him to marry that merry lady--appealed passionately against the brutal sentence, and he was suffered to retire, instead, to a beautiful estate he had in the Ukraine. Few wept when, one morning in September, a long caravan bore Menshikoff and his wife and daughter out of the life of Russia. But his enemies were not satisfied. The Dolgorukis, who came to power, trumped up a charge of conspiracy in the following year, and, on the miserable word of tortured witnesses, which in Russia was still admitted, banished the broken-hearted adventurer to the frozen shores of the Arctic. There for two years, until death set him free and ended one of the great romances of that stirring period, Menshikoff supported by the labour of his own hands his devoted wife and the unlucky girl who had thought to become an Empress. Ostermann remained the most important and most useful statesman, but the Golitzuins, Dolgorukis, and other families of the old nobility now came to power and they made an effort to drag Russia back to the ruts from which Peter the Great had violently shifted it. They were of what came to be called in the nineteenth century the “Russophile school”: narrow-minded conservatives who railed at all innovation and foreign influence, and persuaded themselves that the genius of Russia was different from that of other European nations. St. Petersburg was to them the hated symbol of the new order, and they induced Peter to return to Moscow. He was crowned there on February 25th (1728) with all the archaic ceremonies of Russian tradition, and they took care to impress him with the contrast between the comparatively bright and healthy air of Moscow and the dank climate of the northern metropolis. This court remained at Moscow, and the departments of State were presently transferred to it. To complete the transformation from the ideals of Peter the Great to those of Alexis the aged Eudoxia was appointed Regent, and a court of the old type gathered about her. Ostermann was alarmed, and the reactionaries tried to remove him. Peter, fortunately for Russia, would not hear of the dismissal of his old director, but he allowed the conservative nobles to act much as they pleased and he was encouraged by them to spend his time in hunting and laborious idleness. The fleet was suffered to rot in harbour, and only the steady effect of such internal reforms as Peter the Great had introduced kept the country in some degree of prosperity. The old indolence returned. Since there were now no costly schemes to be realised, and the favourable turn of foreign relations brought no war, the taxes were not enforced, and the country enjoyed a fallacious happiness.