The Sexual Exploits & Accomplishments of Catherine the Great
PUBLISHED
Apr 1, 2023
AUTHOR
Shauna Jones
Catherine II, often known as Catherine the Great, ruled Russia for 34 years, longer than any other Russian woman. In her role as empress, Catherine the Great pushed for Russia to become more like the West. She successfully maneuvered her country into the center of European politics and culture.
Catherine the Great was not only a great conqueror, but was also an enlightened intellectual and a forward-thinking trailblazer. She supported vaccination, praised women artists, corresponded with prominent thinkers like Voltaire, wrote memoirs, and created the first Russian works of children's literature.
Her efforts and achievements made her one of the legendary figures of history. However, she is also known for the rumors about what she got up to behind closed doors.
Catherine’s Many Lovers
Catherine was famous during her lifetime for having a number of male lovers, some of whom gained political and financial power as a result of their relationship with Russia’s monarch. The number of men Catherine allegedly had relationships with ranges from 12 to 22, with conflicting accounts coming from different historians. Some give an even higher number, but we will never know how many lovers Catherine the Great truly had.
Russia’s Famous Sugar Momma
As well as being fairly younger than her, Catherine’s lovers seemed to get certain benefits from their relationships. She gave them positions of power in both politics and the military with very little practical reasoning.
She would give expensive gifts and financial support to some of her favorite lovers, spending roughly 93 million rubles on them. Catherine's expenses on her lovers was one of the biggest downfalls of her rule.
The Secret Sex Room
Although there is no official evidence of the existence of what is known as Catherine the Great’s erotic cabinet, it is a topic for compelling speculation. Catherine's erotic cabinet was filled to the brim with historical pornography and sexually explicit furniture that she had collected over the years.
Catherine's cabinet, a room full of furniture adorned with graphic erotica, was likely kept next to her suite of chambers in her favorite home in St. Petersburg, now known as the Pushkin Palace. It had a phallic doorknob, tables with erect penis’ for legs, chairs adorned with female genitalia, and obscene sceneries painted on the walls.
There are images supposedly taken in this room by German soldiers who arrived at the palace in 1941 during World War II, and discovered the revealing boudoir. If this is true, they were most likely the last witnesses of the room before the palace was bombed, destroying
most of what was inside.
However, experts and historians are convinced that everything in the erotic boudoir was taken out of the palace and that the erotic cabinet disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
Although the majority of the German soldiers' photographs of the room were likely destroyed in the turmoil of war, however, the furnishings belonging to the Romanov Russian Imperial Family was catalogued at one point before the family's members were executed following the collapse of the Russian Empire. Allegedly the only remaining proof of Catherine the Great's erotic cabinet are these catalogue shots and grainy soldier's photographs of erotic furniture.
Confident Woman in a Man’s World
Catherine’s sex life was most likely not all that different to that of any of the men in power at the time. But, Empress or not, she was born a female in a male-ruled world.
Men in power had numerous sexual habits, but no one ever seemed to question or speak of it. However, being a confident woman that ignored the boundaries of womanhood, Catherine the Great was called a nymphomaniac for her “private activities”.
Due to Catherine's notoriety for sexual freedom, she was the target of a campaign of slander by her envious and misogynistic male enemies, including her own son Paul, who aspired to the throne and attempted to poison the court against her.
Liberal historians claim that many of the sensational tales told about Catherine are nothing more than the cruel rumors her opponents spread and which have since become urban legends. Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette, and Elizabeth I are just a few examples of other prominent women who were also the subject of tales of sexual depravity.
No matter what she might have got up to in her own time, Catherine the Great was a confident, strong, modern woman. Russia wouldn’t be what it is today without her.