Sex with the Queen (29 page)

The rule of women in eighteenth-century Russia gave rise to the flowering of the male favorite. The kings of western Europe had their silken mistresses, but the empresses of Russia had their muscular young studs. Some of these lovers wanted power, oth-ers just riches, and a few desired only the love of the monarch. As only men could command armies—even a feisty Russian empress would not gallop with her soldiers into battle—imperial lovers often served as generals. Others, less attracted to the smell of gunpowder and screams of men, served the empress in a politi-cal role. But of all their duties, those reserved for the night were by far the most pressing.

C a t h e r i n e I

“There Is a Fire Burns in My Breast”

Peter the Great liked to boast that he spent less on whores than any king in Europe. However, the paltry sums expended were the re-sult not of sexual moderation but of negotiating skills. The czar’s drunken orgies with prostitutes were legendary across the conti-nent. True to the double standard of the time, Peter expected his wife to remain scrupulously faithful.

Having thrown his critical, aristocratic first wife, Eudoxia, into a remote convent, Peter fell in love with the illiterate daughter of a Livonian gravedigger. Martha Skavronskaya had been captured as war booty and worked as a laundress for the e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y r u s s i a 1 3 1

Russian army. The soldiers passed her around until the czar claimed her for himself and eventually married her. Martha—who took the name Catherine upon converting to Russian Orthodoxy—was cheerful, plump, and jolly, the perfect compan-ion for a ruler whose eccentricities swung from visionary genius to sadistic insanity. Had the czar selected a fine-boned French princess for his bride, she might very well have packed her bags and galloped home.

Peter never mastered the Western fashion of eating with knife and fork. The czar ate with his fingers and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. The refined Polish ambassador Manteuffel, terrified of dining with this monster of bad manners, heaved a sigh of re-lief after his meal, praising the czar who “neither belched nor farted nor picked his teeth—at least I neither saw nor heard him do so.”2

For all his bad manners, Peter was resolved to pull his back-ward nation out of the muck and mire of the Dark Ages. Though monarchs rarely traveled outside their realms in the eighteenth century, Peter often visited western Europe to learn technology and customs, as well as to make foreign alliances.

Uncomfortable in the limelight and detesting royal recep-tions, he went incognito for large portions of his journeys to London, Paris, Hanover, Berlin, and Frankfurt. Peter once stayed several months in the Netherlands to become a master shipwright; with this firsthand knowledge he built the first Rus-sian navy. Living in a hut under an assumed name, Peter was fu-rious when Dutch subjects recognized him as the czar—the only loping Russian giant with a wart on his cheek that they had ever heard of. When a stranger on the street cheerfully called the czar by name, he was often rewarded with a bruising blow to the head.

Having enjoyed the customs of western Europe, Peter re-turned to Russia and cast a critical eye on his own backward tra-ditions. He ordered the upper classes to attend “assemblies”

dressed in Western fashion where they would dance the minuet and play cards and chess. Guests were commanded by imperial decree to cultivate small talk with members of the opposite sex.

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Men were forbidden to get drunk before nine p.m.; ladies were not permitted to show signs of any inebriation whatsoever. At these assemblies the czar stood sentinel with a cudgel, ready to spring on anyone spitting on the floor, picking his nose, or talk-ing with his mouth full, and beat him senseless.

In the West a smooth clean-shaven face was a sign of culture and a long ratty beard a sign of barbarity. When Peter returned to Russia, he immediately began grabbing his courtiers by their beards and cutting them off. He once gave a banquet where a clown attacked all the beards in the room with a giant pair of scis-sors. Though the czar wept with laughter, his subjects wept with shame; beards were the sign of a good Orthodox Christian. Some men safeguarded their shorn beards, instructing relatives to place them in their coffins so they could meet God as one of his faith-ful flock. Not content with beards, Peter stalked the streets wield-ing a pair of hedge clippers, ready to cut off the long Oriental sleeves he saw, reminders of an ancient superstitious past.

For all Peter’s love of Western fashions, he never developed the profound respect for wigs so noticeable at the French and German courts. In the early eighteenth century the best wigs, made of real human hair, stood several inches above the top of the head and tumbled in ringlets down to below the shoulders. A wig was often the single most expensive item of personal adorn-ment, washed, powdered, and curled with great reverence. Pe-ter, however, used his wig as a hat, slapping it on his head when he went outdoors. In the palace, whenever he, wigless, felt cold, he would grab a wig from a servant’s head and plop it on his own.

Sometimes when he grew warm, he would snatch the wig off his head and stuff it in his pocket. Whenever he became angry with someone, he would pluck off the offender’s wig and toss it across the room.

In Paris, Peter received a gift from the king of France—a long ornate wig from the finest court wigmaker, the cost of which could have purchased a small estate. But the czar liked to wear short chin-length wigs, with his own dark straight hair hanging below the white curls. To the horror of his French hosts, the czar e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y r u s s i a 1 3 3

attacked his gift with a pair of scissors, cut off the bottom half, and smacked it on his head with a satisfied grin.

One Western institution Peter did not like was the Roman Catholic Church. Upon his return to Russia he founded the Synod of Fools and Jesters to make fun of the Vatican and ap-pointed his former tutor, a notorious drunk, as the Prince Pope.

The Prince Pope was given a palace, a generous salary, and twelve stuttering servants. During his “official” ceremonies the Prince Pope wore a miter of tin, carried a tin scepter, and babbled an incoherent mixture of blessings and obscenities. Tucking his white robes up over his bowed legs, he danced, made obscene ges-tures, burped and farted. When blessing the faithful, he smacked them on the head with a pig’s bladder. As an icon to kiss, he pre-sented a statue of Bacchus with an enormous erection.

Initiates into the cult of the Prince Pope were asked not “Do you believe?” but “Do you drink?” After giving an answer in the affirmative, they held their mouths open while vodka was poured down their throats. In the Prince Pope’s processions, the czar, dressed as a Dutch sailor, led the way, beating a drum, while the Prince Pope, with playing cards sewn to his gown, rode astride a barrel pulled by twelve bald men. “Cardinals” waving vodka bot-tles rode in sleighs pulled by oxen, while “dignitaries” sat on carts pulled by bears, pigs, and dogs. In other processions Peter had a seven-foot-six-inch giant, dressed like a baby, seated in a sleigh pulled by twelve midgets.

Peter’s diplomatic gatherings were no better than his papal ceremonies. A Hanoverian diplomat, invited to the palace for a reception, found himself locked in a room for three days with two large barrels set before him; one contained the alcohol he would have to drink before he was permitted to go home, and the other was to hold bodily wastes. On another occasion Peter ordered all his dead-drunk diplomatic guests to go into the forest and cut down trees. The ambassadors swung wildly and fell down amid gales of laughter; by some miracle no one was hurt. Many diplo-mats urgently wrote their governments begging to be recalled from Russia and sent to a country less deleterious to their health.

Foreign diplomats and native Russians alike were panic-1 3 4

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stricken when Peter learned the art of tooth pulling. With a pair of pliers always in his pocket, the czar requested those he en-countered to open their mouths for inspection, and if he found a rotten tooth he would immediately yank it out. Proud of this accomplishment, he kept the teeth he pulled in a little leather pouch, which is now in the Hermitage Museum of St. Peters-burg. It was just a short step to learn the executioner’s art, and Peter executed at least five condemned men himself, proud of how cleanly he sliced through bone and sinew.

This, then, was Catherine’s husband. Surely no other woman in the world could have lasted as long or kept Peter as happy.

Cheerful, helpful Catherine never once complained about his sexual escapades or violent temper tantrums. Putting aside every desire of her own, she devoted herself to calming her mad giant.

After a decade together, he married her in 1712, their two daughters aged five and two skipping along as bridesmaids. The very proper English envoy was speechless when Peter told him that the marriage was “guaranteed to be fruitful,” since he al-ready had five children by his bride.3

In 1716 Peter had his detested son and heir, Alexis, Eudoxia’s child, tortured to death in prison. Seven years later his young sons with Catherine were all dead, and his once large brood of children had dwindled down to their two daughters. To protect their future he decided to crown his wife as his successor and empress in her own right. Peter had to threaten his subjects with death if they uttered “foolish and drunken rumors” about Catherine.4 But he could not threaten foreign courts, which had a good hearty laugh at a former laundress and camp follower as-cending the double-eagled throne of imperial Russia.

For her coronation the empress wore a purple mantle em-broidered with golden eagles costing four thousand rubles, and her crown was made of four pounds of precious stones. Peter crowned her himself as she wept and babbled in a most undigni-fied manner, throwing her arms around her husband’s knees.

He raised her up and placed in her hands the orb, symbol of sov-ereignty. But she wasn’t getting her hands on his scepter, symbol of power. That he kept for himself.

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