Royal Babylon (18 page)

Like all of the Romanovs, the Empress survived by inspiring a mixture of dread and veneration. She abolished capital punishment but had tongues cut out and their owners banished to Siberia instead. In the mid-eighteenth century, most Russians given the choice between Siberia and death would have chosen the latter.

Elizabeth's awesome clothing and jewelry collections went some way toward taking Russia to the brink of bankruptcy. When she dressed to impress it was said that she looked like a Holy Shrine. For twenty-odd years she never wore the same outfit twice. Her residence was crammed to the ceiling with incredibly expensive dresses. In a Moscow fire in 1744, Elizabeth lost 4,000
of them, along with countless priceless Romanov family gems. When she died she left 15,000 dresses hanging in her cupboards, 5,000 pairs of shoes, two trunks filled with stockings, and massive debts. It wasn't as though she was stuck for choice, but she also liked to wear tight-fitting men's clothes because they showed off her legs, of which she was inordinately proud. Every Tuesday evening she held balls, known as her “metamorphoses,” at which everyone was ordered to cross-dress. Everybody hated her for it, especially the male courtiers, but no one dared complain.

The Empress was extremely vain and would not tolerate competition. No one else at court was allowed to wear her favorite color, pink. She was naturally fair-haired, but had her hair dyed black to conform with the fashion of the day. When the fashion changed and she wanted to revert to blond, she found she couldn't remove the dye from her hair and in a fit of temper shaved it all off. Naturally, all of her ladies-in-waiting were also obliged to have their heads shaved.

Although she was regarded as a beauty when she first came to the throne, her gluttony and her addiction to strong alcohol quickly destroyed her looks. Elizabeth dreaded the approach of old age. She commissioned absurdly flattering portraits of herself which showed her looking decades younger, and had copies of them sent abroad. Before every engagement, her maids would slave for hours on her hair and makeup, burying her puffy, bloated features under an ever-thickening wall of cosmetics. Often she would despair at the end result and elect to stay in bed.

Swollen with fat, barely able to breathe, she ignored her doctors' warnings and drank and gorged herself to an early grave. By the age of forty-seven she was burned out, a miserable, bloated lush tortured by delirium tremens. At fifty, her health was completely shot, but her sex drive was undiminished. By this time the
men wouldn't come to her: her legs were so swollen she had to be carried to her lovers' apartments on a litter.

         

When Empress Elizabeth died in 1762 the imperial crown passed to her nephew Peter III. His reign was as spectacularly crazy as it was brief. The new Czar had just two interests and they consumed most of his waking hours. The first was the Romanov weakness for strong alcohol; the second, inherited from his father, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp Karl Friedrich, was an obsession with military field-drill trivia.

While the dipsomaniac Duke spent all day drilling his soldiers and generally ignoring his son, Peter was raised by a bunch of German household-guard officers. The first book he learned to read was a manual of arms. The end product of this inadequate education was an emotionally stunted paradomaniac. In his teens, Peter became unusually devoted to his regiments of toy soldiers. When he grew tired of his toys he inflicted his hobby on his wife and servants. He spent his honeymoon drilling his footmen and making them change uniforms up to twenty times a day, and wasted long hours instructing his wife from an arms manual. Occasionally he made her spend all night on sentry duty, standing guard at their bedroom door. One day his wife came into her bedroom and found a dismembered rat hanging over the bed. Peter explained that the rat was guilty according to military law of eating two of his toy soldiers.

On the demise of the Empress Elizabeth, Peter became Czar, just before his thirty-fourth birthday. He made no effort to conceal his delight, and within a couple of hours of his aunt's
death threw a party just three rooms away from the bedroom where her body was laid out. Guests were instructed to wear something bright and colorful. The festivities went on for six weeks around Elizabeth's corpse while it lay in state.

At last, as Commander-in-Chief, Czar Peter had some real troops to play with. For a while he was content merely to review his troops ten times a day, but even for Peter the entertainment value of this began to pall. What was needed was a good war, but Peter had no one to fight. He decided to create the illusion of being permanently at war by ordering nonstop salvos of gunfire, and St. Petersburg rocked to the sound of cannon fire from dawn to dusk. One day he ordered that 1,000 cannons be fired simultaneously, but canceled the order when it was carefully explained to him that the city might collapse.

In an astonishingly short time, Czar Peter had managed to wreck Russia's image abroad, alienate his allies, and make enemies of everyone around him, including his own wife. In 1762, just six months after his accession, his reign was suddenly terminated by yet another palace coup d'état, instigated by his wife, Catherine, and organized by the palace guards. A few weeks later he died in custody, apparently as the result of a drunken brawl with another prisoner. The official announcement was made, in the inimitable Russian fashion, that the ex-Czar had died of an acute attack of colic during one of his frequent bouts of hemorrhoids.

         

Catherine the Great succeeded her husband in 1762. She began a thirty-four-year reign for which she is remembered as one of the most extraordinary Romanov leaders of all. In fact her real
name wasn't Catherine; she didn't have a drop of Romanov blood in her veins; nor was she even Russian.

Like the Empress Elizabeth, Catherine II was known for her improbable sex life, yet she married aged sixteen without even a rudimentary grasp of the facts of life. Fortunately for Catherine, her immature and drunken husband was not only similarly ignorant but incapable. After eight years of unconsummated marriage she discovered sex for the first time with the husband of one of her ladies-in-waiting, Serge Saltykov.

As a young woman, Catherine was an obsessive horse rider and would spend up to thirteen hours a day in the saddle. Her love of riding gave rise to the popular myth about her allegedly unhealthy equine-related lusts. Although she was not a big hunting enthusiast she liked to take part in the chase—the faster the better. Her riding activities attracted criticism from the Russian court because she preferred to ride like a man—ladies were always instructed to sit sidesaddle because sitting astride the horse was believed to be the cause of gynecological problems.

Given the number of men she slept with and the uncertainties of eighteenth-century contraception, it is strange that during her husband's lifetime she gave birth to only three children by three different men—none of them her husband. Catherine managed to convince him that the first child was his and somehow kept the births of the next two a secret from him. She was able to carry off this deception only by the skin of her teeth. When the arrival of her third child was imminent, Peter was inconveniently close at hand, and Catherine hatched a desperate plan with her valet to distract him. Guessing that her childish husband wouldn't resist the prospect of watching a good fire, she instructed the valet to torch one of the servants'
quarters. The plan worked better than expected because the fire spread and destroyed a large part of the palace. Meanwhile, Catherine's valet delivered her baby boy, cut the umbilical cord and whisked it away before Peter returned.

Catherine had a small recess built behind her bed where she could receive her lovers in secret. When anyone asked her about the curtain she would explain that it hid a commode. After the death of her husband she no longer felt obliged to make excuses for her sex life and the secret alcove fell into disuse. Next to Catherine's main bedroom were two smaller rooms, each with the walls covered with exquisite gilt-framed miniatures. In one room these frames held pictures of erotica; in the other, portraits of the men she had seduced.

The selection procedure for her lovers was thorough because of her dread of syphilis. Once a new boyfriend had been nominated, he would be summoned to the court and subjected to a general physical examination by Catherine's English physician, Rogerson. He could then expect to be introduced to Catherine's intimate and trusted friend Countess Bruce, whose job it was to screen the young man before he reached the Empress's bed. Initially this would usually involve a formal interview to ascertain the candidate's IQ. Catherine didn't want her lovers to be too intellectually challenged, but this particular rule could be waived if there were other mitigating circumstances. When the dashing, handsome and exceptionally well-endowed twenty-four-year-old Russian hussar named Rimsky Korsakov arrived on the scene, the Empress was immediately smitten, drooling that he was “a masterpiece of nature.” He was installed in his new apartment and a librarian was instructed to acquire a body of reading material for him. When Rimsky Korsakov was asked which books he would most like, he
replied, “Oh, you know, big volumes at the bottom and little ones on top like the Empress has.”

According to procedure, the Countess Bruce would then subject the candidate to an intimate examination of his physical capabilities, which could involve anything up to and including full sexual intercourse with the examiner. On one occasion the Countess courted disaster when she fell in love with a candidate and asked him back for a second, third and fourth interview. Finally, the young man would be thoroughly briefed about Catherine's particular sexual requirements. Once the candidate had received instruction on the etiquette of sleeping with an empress, a detailed report would be submitted to Catherine. If the young man met with her approval he would be taken to his new apartment, where he would find his customary first gift—a box containing 100,000 rubles. That evening, he would be “presented” to court on the Empress's arm. At precisely ten o'clock they retired to the Empress's bedroom.

Catherine's lovers were expected to be on call to service her sexual needs round the clock. By night they were tireless athletes; by day they were dressed up and paraded at the Empress's side. Life was tough on top, because Catherine allowed only occasional failure in the execution of duty. Her lovers often became paranoid about not being able to perform on command, and naturally the fear of failure would make it even more likely. When one of her lovers fell ill he dosed himself with a cocktail of aphrodisiacs to try to keep the side up and made himself violently sick. Catherine was, however, as generous in her rewards for good performance as she was ruthless with failure or infidelity. Once a lover had been sacked he would normally receive a generous settlement and discreetly vacate his apartment while a replacement was found.

Gregory Orlov, who helped her seize power, was her lover on and off for thirteen years and gave her three sons. He was made a prince and became extremely rich. In 1772 she found out that he was sleeping with his thirteen-year-old cousin. Orlov was pensioned off and he eventually died insane. Another lover, the twenty-six-year-old Ukrainian Peter Zavadovsky, serviced Catherine for a few months and then was relieved of his duties with a pension of 50,000 rubles and an estate of 9,000 Ukrainian peasants. Although she was acclaimed for her liberal views, she gave away serfs by the thousand, and the land that they lived on, to the men who shared her bed. Zavadovsky's immediate replacement, Simon Zorich, for example, received a gift of 1,800 peasants for his “trial run.”

Catherine the Great's lovers were generally large in stature. The nearest she ever came to a monogamous relationship was with Gregory Potemkin, a giant, hirsute, one-eyed Russian known as “Cyclops”—he had lost one eye in an argument over a game of billiards and he had a squint in the other. Catherine was attracted, if not by his looks, by his fiery temperament and his awesome libido. His sexual appetite was said to be even more ferocious than hers. In her letters, Catherine often referred to Potemkin as her husband. It was rumored that they contracted a morganatic marriage. According to some accounts, a wedding ceremony took place in 1774 before a few witnesses sworn to secrecy. Their relationship finally ended when the cyclops, aged forty-three, married his fifteen-year-old first cousin, Catherine Zinoviev. Potemkin continued to be the Empress's confidant long after the mutual physical attraction had passed, and in later years it was usually Potemkin who did the hiring and firing of Catherine's lovers because he knew her requirements more intimately than most.

After Potemkin, the Empress's greatest love was probably the “irreplaceable” Sacha Lanskoy, who died of diphtheria in her arms aged twenty-six. She was so inconsolably grief-stricken that it was several weeks before she took another man to her bed. Then she explained that she needed to resume her sex life for health reasons.

Catherine was predisposed to extreme vanity and a dread of old age. She kept two dwarfs, one to look after her powder and combs, and another to take care of her rouge, hairpins and black stick-on beauty patches, called “mouches.” She was notoriously touchy about her hair. When she was a child she suffered from impetigo, and had to have all of it shaved off several times in order to remove the scabs. In later years she lost her hair a few times through illness. When she found out that she was suffering from dandruff she had her hairdresser locked up for three years to prevent him from telling anyone else about it.

As the years passed she refused to admit that she was losing her looks, always sleeping with men who were years younger than her because they made her feel more youthful. Although her first half a dozen official lovers were only slightly younger than she was, the age gap grew less respectable as the Empress grew older, eventually arriving at the point where her activities with men young enough to be her grandchildren became too much for her own family to contemplate without feeling nauseous. She was sixteen years older than Zorich, twenty-five years older than Rimsky Korsakov and Alexander Ermolov, thirty years older than both Sacha Lanskoy and Alexander Dmitriev-Mamonov. This alarming trend reached its unsavory nemesis with the desperate Platon Zubov, who was nearly forty years younger than his famous mistress.