Royal Babylon (16 page)

In 1944 the men who unsuccessfully plotted against Hitler's life considered restoring the Hohenzollerns as constitutional monarchs, a plan that was dropped when they realized with some embarrassment that at least half the German royal family were members of the Nazi party. In 1951 when the former Crown Prince William became the last of God's Bailiffs to be buried in the family vault at Hohenzollern Castle, he did so wearing the uniform of a Death's Head Hussar.

         

The Russian title “czar” was the Slavic form of Caesar. This was not inappropriate given that most of the leading members of the House of Romanov—as did many of the rulers of ancient Rome—suffered from gross personality disorders, and
many more were mentally unbalanced. Even some of the key female Romanovs were degenerate megalomaniacs who used their power to give free rein to their fantastical whims and took pleasure in humiliating the defenseless people around them.

Considered the most heroic of all the Romanovs, Peter the Great was huge both in stature and accomplishment. He was regarded by his contemporaries as the most talented man of his age and he is often described as Russia's first modern man. His sweeping policies, and the mental state that helped to create them, shaped Russia's destiny. He applied his incredible energy to reforming his government and state and turning it into a leading European power, but for much of his reign he was evidently mentally unbalanced. His name was a byword for enlightenment, but the methods he chose to educate his fellow Russians would have made Stalin queasy. Some of his more brutal behavior was that of a violent drunk, and the Czar was drunk for most of the time; in fact he only ever rested when he had a hangover. But Peter didn't need alcohol to be vicious. Like so many leading members of his royal house, he was a paranoid sadist.

His father, Alexis Mikhailovich, was the second Russian ruler from the House of Romanov. Regarded as one of the more laid-back and tolerant czars, Alexis once had 7,000 people tortured and executed after a popular uprising. The young Peter, his fourteenth legitimate child, was unlike any of the Czar's other offspring because he was healthy and strong and stood out in a nursery full of congenitally ugly and malformed Romanov children. Before Alexis died, he proclaimed his eldest living son, Theodore, as his successor, but the puny heir died aged twenty. Peter's real father was probably a close friend of Czar Alexis. Many years later, Peter confronted the man he
suspected of being his true father and offered to strangle him if he didn't own up to sleeping with his mother. “I don't know what to say to you,” the terrified man stammered, “except I was not the only one.”

Czar Peter had amazing physical strength and stamina, although his chronic alcoholism had a disastrous effect upon both his personality and his health. According to most contemporary reports, he was a giant—probably six feet five inches tall—and could bend coins by twisting them in his fingers. He was swarthy and sunburned, cared little for his appearance, was generally unwashed and wore filthy clothes. On the Czar's visit to Prussia in 1717, he and his verminous entourage were described by a German baron as like “baptized bears.” They offended their hosts with an open display of bad behavior, including the virtual destruction of a palace at Mont Bijou which had been provided for him by the Prussian royal family.

In Hanover he dined with King George I's mother, the Electress Sophia, a flabby, toothless crone who had replaced all her missing teeth with squares of wax. She was repelled by his disgusting table habits, but found redeeming qualities under the layer of imperial dirt. She noted that the fact “that he has not been taught to eat in a tidy manner is obvious,” but she was “much taken with his natural and easy manner.” The Electress also commented on Peter's ignorance of whalebone corsets: the Czar was confused by what he believed to be German women's “damnably hard ribs.”

In London, Peter met King William III and was put up briefly in a house in Buckingham Street. When the King walked into the room he was overcome by the stench that accompanied Peter and a couple of servants. When the Czar left, he presented King William III with a huge uncut diamond
wrapped in a scrap of dirty paper. When the Czar had had enough of London he and friends moved to Deptford and lodged at the home of Sir John Evelyn. They tore up paintings and furnishings, smeared vomit and excrement on the floors and walls, smashed expensive parquet floors and used paintings as target practice with their guns. Sir John later presented the British government with a bill for
£
350 for damage to his property.

The Czar was given to unprovoked bouts of violence and would often thrash his own courtiers with a cudgel for fun. These beatings became such a regular part of court routine that to take a thrashing from the Czar was looked upon as a mark of favor. He once had a peasant tortured because the poor man was unaware that the Czar now also bore the title “Emperor,” although the title was not generally acknowledged in his lifetime. He took pleasure in personally beheading dissidents with his ax, and the road to the Kremlin was regularly strewn with the decapitated corpses of Peter's victims left to rot in the snow for months. The heads were placed on spikes and became food for crows.

In the Czar's most violent drunken binges he suffered from alcohol-induced hallucinations and paranoia. He convinced himself that the whole of Russia was populated with traitors, and used the slightest suspicion as an excuse for a witch-hunt. Shortly before he set out on the first of his famous missions to Western Europe, Peter's spies informed him of a plot against his life. He had the ringleaders arrested and tortured. To make sure the Russian people behaved themselves while he was away, he arranged a little exhibition to concentrate their hearts and minds. The Czar disinterred the remains of a famous dissident,
Ivan Miloslavsky, who had been executed twelve years earlier. Miloslavsky's decomposed corpse was dragged by pigs to the place of execution, hacked into small segments, and placed underneath the scaffold in an open coffin. On the platform above, the plot ringleaders were slowly dismembered so that their fresh blood dripped down on to the remains of the late Miloslavsky. The severed body parts were neatly arranged, and their heads fixed on spikes. The Czar left orders that no one was to remove this grisly display, which lay putrefying until his return.

In 1713, Peter declared that St. Petersburg was now the new capital of Russia. In order to populate it he simply emptied Moscow of thousands of families and forced them to move to St. Petersburg on pain of death. Between 100,000 and 200,000 people died in the process. The city itself was built on the corpses of hundreds of thousands of Russians. In the merciless extremes of the Russian winter, he forced laborers to work without proper tools, often waist deep in water. Although conditions were impossible, discipline was shockingly severe. The Czar ran around the building sites, personally beating workers with his cudgel. Any man caught slacking had his nostrils flayed. He killed more people in the name of civic planning than he did by his almost continuous warfare.

The Czar mixed vodka, wine, beer and mead and swilled them simultaneously. When he traveled to Western Europe in 1697 he was more often than not dead drunk. In a day and a half at Antwerp he and a handful of friends consumed 269 bottles of wine. His trip to France in 1717 was considered by Parisians to be the best free freak show they had ever seen. The visit cost France
£
150 a day to keep him—one itemized bill was for the women called in to undress and clean up the Czar when he
got drunk at a reception and urinated in his pants on the way home.

He created a drinking club, “The Vastly Extravagant Supremely Absurd, Omni-Intoxicated Synod of Fools and Jesters.” The name was a dig at the more reactionary features of the Russian Church, but was mainly an excuse for orgiastic drinking sessions which lasted for days on end. At the head of this company was his former tutor, an elderly and senile dipsomaniac named Nikita Zotov. At these quasi-ceremonial binges Peter poured vodka down the throats of his cronies with a funnel, while Zotov, seated on a high ceremonial chair, was sick on the heads down below. The Czar liked to get other people drunk and watch them make fools of themselves while showing off his own legendary ability to drink. He would force everyone who dined with him to drink from bucketfuls of vodka, and anyone who tried to duck out was forced to drink even more. It was a prospect that terrorized many of his guests, but the Czar had sentries posted at the doors of the banquet hall to stop them from leaving until he had been entertained.

Peter the Great was a keen amateur surgeon and anatomist, but his morbid fascination for the macabre far exceeded his interest in medical science. During a trip to Holland, just after a heavy meal, the Czar watched with fascination the anatomical dissection of a human cadaver. When two of his nauseous attendants made it clear that they didn't share his enthusiasm for human intestines, Peter forced them to bite into the flesh of the corpse. Although the Czar was an incompetent surgeon, no one ever dared to disappoint him when he volunteered to wield the knife. When the Czarina Martha Apraxina, widow of his half-brother Theodore III, died, Peter personally opened up her
corpse to find out if the rumor that she was still a virgin at the age of forty-nine was true. He once removed twenty pounds of water from the dropsical wife of a rich Russian merchant named Borst. The Czar was extremely proud of his handiwork, but was furious when the woman selfishly died shortly afterward. He ordered an autopsy to prove that he hadn't been responsible for the death—naturally the inquest found that the Czar was entirely blameless.

Peter once saw a bad tooth being pulled, and was suddenly consumed with ambition to turn his hand to amateur dentistry. Overnight, the Czar's retinue of 250 courtiers became unwilling accomplices to his new hobby. He carried out spot dental checks on anyone who happened to be passing—if any tooth looked suspect he whipped it out. Unfortunately, as he was quite unaware of his own strength and sometimes got carried away, he accidentally removed gums also. Peter kept the teeth he'd drawn from his courtiers in a little bag. One day a courtier appealed to him for help: his wife had a terrible toothache, he said, but she was so scared of having a tooth pulled she would pretend nothing was wrong whenever a dentist approached her. The Czar obliged and, ignoring the screams and protests of the woman, pulled the tooth and popped it in his bag. Only later did it emerge that the woman had never had a toothache in the first place: her husband just wanted to teach her a lesson.

Peter built a Museum of Curiosities to satisfy his fascination with freaks of nature. His collection included a man without genitals, a child with two heads, a five-footed sheep, a deformed fetus, the organs of a hermaphrodite, “the hand of a man who died by excessive drinking with all its blood stagnated in the
veins” and the corpses of Siamese twins. Each specimen was individually pickled in an alcohol-filled jar. The museum caretaker, a badly deformed dwarf, could look forward to the day when he too would be pickled. One of Peter's prize exhibits was a pickled phallus, donated by the Prussian King Frederick William. This item had caught the Czar's eye on his trip to Berlin and the Prussian King was only too delighted to get rid of it. Peter thought it would be a good jape to persuade his wife, Catherine, to kiss it: she accepted his invitation, but only after he made his offer more attractive by offering to cut off her head if she declined.

The sight of blood whetted Peter the Great's appetite. The Czar would torture people with his own hands and then immediately sit down to enjoy a hearty meal. He loved watching torture sessions and would shout and cheer and urge the torturer on. He was even capable of knouting his own son to death without any sign of remorse.

The Czar had become increasingly paranoid, until he became convinced that even his heir Alexis was a traitor. The Czarevitch had inherited none of his father's talents or ambitions and turned out to be a feeble, shiftless youth who lived in dread fear of his drunken, erratic father. When Alexis was once asked to draw up some simple plans, he shot himself in the hand rather than expose himself to his father's criticism.

When it was time to find a bride for Alexis, the fiancée chosen for him was Charlotte of Brunswick, a skinny sixteen-year-old with a smallpox-raddled complexion. Alexis disliked the idea of marriage in general and his new wife in particular. Shortly after his wife gave birth, he moved his new mistress, a Finnish floor scrubber named Euphrosyne, into their home. When
Alexis discovered that his wife was pregnant a second time he kicked her in the stomach. Charlotte, just twenty-one years old, survived the beating just long enough to give him a son, Peter. The Czar ordered an autopsy on his daughter-in-law and attended it in person, studying her in detail. Charlotte was quickly forgotten and Alexis resumed relations with his mistress.