Royal Babylon (17 page)

In 1718 Peter gave his feckless son an ultimatum: mend your ways or you will be disinherited. The Czarevitch took fright and fled abroad. Peter interpreted his son's flight into the custody of a foreign power as an act of treason, and he had Alexis arrested and tortured. Peter supervised the torture and even joined in. Long after the inevitable confession, the racking and knouting continued, until Alexis, fatally weakened by the time-honored practice of bloodletting, finally expired.

By his early thirties the ravages of alcoholism and gluttony had rendered the Czar a physical wreck. The nervous tic he suffered in his youth had developed into a violent spasm which convulsed his whole face, and he began to suffer from epileptic fits and blackouts. In the final years of his life, his early fifties, he refused to retire to bed alone in case he had a seizure and died in his sleep: if a woman wasn't available a male servant would do. The Czar's doctors begged him to take spa waters to repair some of the damage done to his body. He drank the water but always topped it up with alcohol to improve the flavor.

Any one of a variety of health problems could have explained the Czar's final slide into mental derangement. It was preceded by an unexplained and severe illness, possibly encephalitis. His convulsive fits could easily have been delirium tremens or the effect of tertiary syphilis, which can lead to
dementia or rapid decay of physical and mental ability. His death from cirrhosis of the liver in 1725 was an inevitable consequence of prolonged alcohol abuse.

         

Curiously for a family littered with lunatics, murderers and emotional cripples, the Romanovs considered Peter the Great's wife, the Empress Catherine I, to be the very biggest skeleton in their wardrobe, because of her non-royal birth. Over a hundred years after her death, the imperial secret police were still under orders to keep the details of her background a state secret.

The Empress Catherine's remarkable rise began from the very bottom rung of Russia's social ladder. She was born Martha Skavronski, the daughter of a Lithuanian slave and part-time gravedigger. Her first husband, Johann, had simply vanished, believed either dead or sent to Siberia to die. Peter met her when she became a camp follower of his armies, but not before she had slept with most of his friends and he had heard them swap notes about her sexual expertise. Catherine was a common laundry woman by trade but she was built like a hod carrier. She was described as having “a little stumpy body, very brown.” When she became Peter's mistress, she coated her face with white and pink lead to hide her swarthy complexion and her purple nose, dyed her hair and her teeth black to suit the fashion of the day, and changed her name to the more upmarket Catherine. When he finally married her in 1712, after she had been his mistress for seven years, their illegitimate daughters stood as maids of honor. The Czar boasted to a confused English ambassador that the new marriage was bound to be fruitful,
since she'd already given him five children. They had twelve children in all.

Peter the Great had passed a law allowing czars to nominate their successor and when he died in 1725 he was succeeded by his widow, whom he had crowned Empress the preceding year. Next to her husband, the Empress was one of the greatest sots ever to occupy a European throne. In the words of the biographer Henri Troyat, “Catherine was not one to be frightened by a bucket of vodka.” In fact, one of the things that had made her attractive to the dipsomaniac Czar in the first place was her ability to drink. The Empress was already a habitual drunk while Peter was alive, but with his death she became many times worse. Her reign became one long destructive round of alcohol abuse. In two years she spent about 700,000 rubles on Hungarian wine alone, and another 16,000 on schnapps. She spent her nights wandering around the palace gardens in an alcoholic haze and would go to bed at dawn. To accommodate her erratic lifestyle, military parades were held in the middle of the night, and her cooks, musicians and even her guests were on twenty-four-hour standby in case she decided to entertain.

The Empress became considerably more obese, her vast blotchy arms as thick as her thighs. Aged beyond her years and befuddled with drink, Catherine shuffled listlessly through her royal engagements. Although she was a raddled old alcoholic with bloodshot eyes, wild and matted hair and clothes soiled with urine stains, she was still accorded the respect and flattery due to a Russian empress, and was fêted and indulged by her fearful subjects wherever she went. She once survived an assassination attempt too drunk to realize that anything had happened: while reviewing a guards regiment a bullet flew past her and struck an innocent bystander dead. The Empress moved on without flinching.

When Catherine died aged forty-three, her body wrecked by twenty years of hard drinking, venereal disease and relentless childbearing, she was succeeded by her late husband's hapless eleven-year-old grandson Czar Peter II. He had a weak constitution and suffered from frequent illnesses. He died of smallpox on what should have been his wedding day. A group of Russia's noblemen offered the Crown to Peter the Great's niece Anne, with the provision that she should move the capital back to Moscow and accept governance of a Grand Council. They thought that they had chosen a quiet, tractable girl who wouldn't give them any trouble. It was a ghastly mistake.

         

Empress Anne was certifiably insane. Her reign marked one of the darkest chapters in Russian history and, according to the nineteenth-century historian Kliuchevskii, “the darkest stain was the Empress herself.” Anne's father, Ivan V, had been Czar in name only because he was mentally infirm—what the Russians called a “sad head.” Her mother, the Czarina Praskovya, was mad. She filled her palace with dwarfs, jesters and people who were either mentally ill or suffering from some sort of terrible physical disability or deformity—her own private human freak show.

At the age of eighteen Anne was widowed. Her husband, selected for her by Peter the Great, was Frederick the Duke of Courland, a nephew of the King of Prussia. They were both seventeen years old when they met. Their marriage ceremony, orchestrated by the Czar, was a typically extravagant affair, a marathon drinking session punctuated only by toasts, gun
salutes and more toasts. At the height of the festivities two enormous pies were carried in and placed before the couple. Suddenly the crusts broke open and a couple of dwarfs, one male, one female, leapt out and danced around the table. Six weeks later the groom was dead from alcoholic poisoning.

Anne never remarried but she took dozens of lovers, never pausing to worry about the social status, or for that matter the sex, of the people she slept with. She allowed one of her less reputable male lovers to turn one of her spare palaces into a temporary brothel. The Empress surrounded herself with a coterie of young girls. She wrote to one of her Governors ordering him to find her tall, exotic-looking “Persian, Georgian or Lesghian girls” who “must be clean, good, and not stupid.” When one of her favorite long-serving girlfriends fell ill she ordered Saltykov to find a look-alike: “I believe she will soon die,” explained the Empress, “and I want someone to replace her.” She had a passionate lesbian affair with the young daughter of an important Lithuanian official, Mademoiselle Oginska. Anne was so open about this relationship that the wife of an English ambassador was able to remark that the Empress seemed to spend most of her time in bed with her girlfriend.

Her most permanent heterosexual affair was with the brutal and much hated Count Biron. He was already married and Anne insisted on having his wife hang around the palace playing gooseberry while Biron shared the Empress's bed. Biron was her regular lover for the next twenty years, and he used his influence to become one of the richest and most powerful men in Russia. Within a year of Anne's death, the Russian Supreme Privy Council ensured that Biron and his family joined the thousands of peasants Anne had sent packing to Siberia.

While she blew the state's money on luxuries and amusements, Russia starved. She used her power throughout her eleven-year reign to humiliate and oppress. Tens of thousands of her subjects were exiled to Siberia. Thousands more were executed or starved to death, and she had tongues pulled out to prevent her victims from pleading their innocence.

Routine oppression, torture and starvation of the Russian people was hardly a feature unique to Anne's reign, but this Empress also specialized in persecuting her own courtiers. The story about how she had her chef hanged because he cooked pancakes in rancid butter is probably apocryphal, but there were many such anecdotes concerning her sick practical jokes and her lethal mood swings. She once surprised the eminent poet Tredyakovski, who had just given her a private reading of his latest work, with a punch in the mouth. She commanded one of her ladies-in-waiting to sing to her all night: when the woman collapsed with exhaustion Anne sent her to work in the laundry. The Empress was very particular about her laundry. Strictly confidential and curious instructions were passed on concerning the washing of the Empress's smalls. Her dirty underwear was kept under lock and key, and special washerwomen were hired and carefully vetted—no unauthorized person was allowed in the laundry while her linen was being washed.

Her cruelest practical jokes were saved for some of the Russian Empire's leading noblemen and -women. She had two overweight noblewomen force-fed huge amounts of pastries until they almost choked to death on their own vomit. The Russian nobleman Prince Nikita Volkonskii was appointed official keeper of her favorite dog and made to feed it with jugs of cream at appointed hours, while his wife was put in full-time charge of the Empress's white rabbit. He and another prince,
Aleksei Apraskin, were employed as court jesters and made to squat in the corner for hours on end, cackling like hens. Although most of the people she degraded in this manner were intelligent, well-read and cultured men, few dared to resist her wishes. When Prince Balakirev found her games too much and refused to play, he was taken outside and whipped.

Her most infamous and elaborate practical joke was reserved for Prince Michael Golitsyn, a nobleman who incurred the Empress's displeasure by marrying an Italian Catholic. In 1740 it was decided that Golitsyn, by now a widower and in his forties, should marry again, but this time to the woman of the Empress's choice—an ugly old maid. The wedding, the Empress announced, would be the greatest spectacle that Russia had ever seen. Golitsyn and his bride were led through the streets by a procession of goats, pigs, dogs, cows and camels. The court poet read an ode composed for the occasion entitled “Greetings to the Bridal Pair of Fools.” The couple were then escorted to their home for the night—a palace specially constructed, at a cost of 30,000 rubles, and made entirely of ice. The Empress accompanied them inside and had them undressed and laid out on their ice bed, where they then spent the night. Russian history books record that the next morning the couple emerged very cold and very embarrassed but still alive.

A few days before she died, Empress Anne, unmarried and childless, proclaimed that the infant son of her German niece, Anna Leopoldnova, should succeed her as Ivan VI. Her twenty-two-year-old niece was elected Regent for the child-Czar. Anna Leopoldnova used her unexpected promotion as a position from which to sate her unconventional sexual appetites. When she became Regent she was pregnant by her husband, Prince Anthony, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Throughout her
pregnancy, Anna had a passionate affair with her favorite lady-in-waiting, Julie Mengden. The couple spent days on end locked in her private apartments, or wandering around the court together wearing only their underclothes. After Anna's child was born she turned her sexual attentions on the Saxon Ambassador, Count Maurice Lynor. During the last weeks of her brief reign she became obsessed with marrying her male and female partners, Lynor and Mengden, to each other.

The wedding never took place: a palace coup brought the brief Regency to a sudden end in November 1741. Anna was exiled to Germany and most of her German relations thrown into Russian jails. The infant Czar Ivan was left to rot in a prison cell for nearly a quarter of a century. Poor Ivan, by then a complete physical and mental wreck who had only ever known the bare walls of his cell, was finally released from his misery when he was murdered by his jailers on the orders of Catherine the Great.

         

Empress Elizabeth, although born out of wedlock, was the last surviving child of Peter the Great. She stepped out of a palace coup at the age of thirty-two and began one of the most scandalous reigns in Russian history. When she died in 1762, few of the thousands of respectful subjects who filed in silent awe past the imperial coffin were aware that they were paying tribute to an immoral old hag who had worn herself out by a life of sex, alcohol and general debauchery. Elizabeth's astonishing sex life has been the subject of great speculation, but 300 is the round figure usually put on the number of lovers she took during her
twenty-one years as Empress. She is also believed to have borne eight illegitimate children, although there is not enough evidence to put a precise number on either activity.

Elizabeth was to have been married to Charles Augustus of Holstein-Gottorp, a German prince who died prematurely when he was struck down by smallpox. Soon after his death she began a series of squalid and very public affairs. Although Elizabeth may have gone through a secret morganatic marriage to one of her lovers, Alexei Razumovski, officially she remained unmarried all her life. She would often get blind drunk and too impatient for sex to bother to even undress. Her ladies-in-waiting would cut the clothes off her with scissors and carry her to bed, where the next lover was waiting. Servants, footmen, court officials, coachmen, ambassadors, guards officers, kitchen staff—one after another they climbed into her bed. She kept irregular hours, dining at supper time and retiring to bed at sunrise. Elizabeth terrorized her court officials and ladies-in-waiting: on the rare occasions when she couldn't find a man to share the imperial bed, her ladies were expected to sit up all night and tell her stories or tickle her feet.