When Elizabeth mounted the throne, her lover of several years was Alexei Razumovsky, a Cossack village shepherd whose exquisite singing voice had procured him a job in the royal chapel. His voice, clear and achingly sweet, pierced the smoke of incense and burning tapers, danced about the glinting icons, and rose into the vaulted arches. Curious to see the owner of this voice, Elizabeth prowled around the church until she found a tall, dark, and muscular young man with flashing black eyes. Elizabeth was smitten and began the greatest love affair of her life.
As the lover of the empress, Razumovsky became a patron of Russian drama and opera and made Russia a leading European center for the study and performance of music. Unlike Elizabeth, who was convinced that too much reading could prove fatal, Razumovsky loved books and encouraged literature.
The new empress made no secret of her love affair; she openly held hands with Razumovsky and kissed him in public. Razumovsky served the empress every night with such devotion that court wags called him the “Night Emperor.”15 The church bleated its disapproval, suggesting the empress make the union a moral one. And Elizabeth, superstitious almost to paranoia, most likely married the singing shepherd secretly in 1742. That year she made him a count and appointed him court chamberlain. She bestowed on him a palace in Moscow and another in St. Petersburg.
Unlike most royal lovers, Razumovsky loved his imperial mistress deeply and remained unspoiled by the wealth and honors heaped on him. In a court of vicious self-seekers, it seemed that Razumovsky alone was gentle and kind. He made no efforts to hide his humble origins and invited his family to court. His terrified mother was plucked off her dirt farm and dolled up in a white wig and satin gown to meet the empress. When she caught a glimpse of a splendid-looking female in a full-length mirror, she assumed it was Empress Elizabeth herself who stood before her and curtsied deeply.
Having decided never to marry officially and bear legitimate children, Elizabeth summoned the fourteen-year-old German son of her dead older sister to Russia to be her heir. Elizabeth, who liked swaggering red-blooded men, tried to hide her disappointment when she met this narrow-shouldered, twitching boy with an annoying high-pitched voice.
When Elizabeth set about choosing a bride for the unpromising Grand Duke Peter in 1744, she wanted a princess who was attractive but would not eclipse her own beauty at court. As she entered her late thirties she found herself in the position of Empress Anna fifteen years earlier, who had looked on the radiant youth of Elizabeth with thinly veiled hostility. She covered her graying hair with yellow tint, rouged her sagging cheeks, and wore increasingly elaborate gowns to hide her heavy hips. She alone was permitted to wear the largest hoopskirts at court and changed her gown six times a day.
Having studied portraits of all suitable brides, Elizabeth chose for her sixteen-year-old nephew the humble fourteen-year-old Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, a tiny German principality. The empress was pleased with her choice; the bride’s impoverished family would not demand privileges or treaties from Russia. Though the girl was attractive, she was no raving beauty. Slim as a twig, her figure would not rival the baroque curves of the empress.
The princess’s features were too strong to be considered beautiful; her blue eyes were heavily hooded and her chin jutted out to a stubborn point. Her mouth, a narrow line when at rest, could flash a winning smile. But Catherine—the name she took upon converting to Russian Orthodoxy—boasted rich chestnut hair and a fresh prettiness. Though only five foot three, the girl had such excellent posture that she was often thought to be much taller.
In her memoirs, Catherine recalled her introduction to the empress. “No one could see Elizabeth for the first time without being overwhelmed by her beauty and her majesty,” she wrote. “She was very tall and very stout, without it being in the least bit disfiguring or in any way impeding the grace of her movements. Her hooped dress was of glittering cloth of silver trimmed with gold. Her unpowdered hair glistened with diamonds and one black feather curled against her rosy cheek.”16
It occurred to Elizabeth that her tall, heavy frame would look better in men’s clothing. Her thick muscular legs looked handsome in white silk stockings and knee breeches. Her expanding abdomen and hips were covered by a flaring coat. The empress began to hold “metamorphosis” balls, in which all the men were required to come dressed as women, and the women as men. Generals and ministers alike were required to wear corsets and hoopskirts and put powder and patches over a five o’clock shadow. Holding dainty fans in clumsy hairy fingers, the men stumbled about awkwardly on high heels. At one such ball, a fat major general tripped on his hoopskirt and fell on top of Grand Duchess Catherine, nearly breaking her arm. But on the whole, Catherine and the other women were delighted to find themselves liberated from corsets, hoops, and high heels, and they had a wonderful time romping about the ball dressed as men.
But Elizabeth’s mounting distress at aging was not limited to metamorphosis balls. Once she dyed her hair black and, displeased with the result, found she could not get the dye out. She had to shave her head and as a matter of course made all the ladies at court do the same. They cried pitifully as their long coveted locks were shaved. As her father, Peter the Great, had taken shears to the beards of his courtiers, so did Elizabeth stalk palace corridors wielding a large pair of scissors to despoil the tresses of pretty young women, crying that she did not like their hairstyles. Catherine wrote, “These young ladies claimed that Her Majesty had taken off a little of their skin along with their hair.”17
Despite the advancing hand of time, the daughter of Peter the Great did not need such stratagems. Age and weight gain did not rob her of her magnificent height, blazing energy, beguiling smile, and firm stride. Nor did she have any problem finding lovers. Unburdened by fidelity to Razumovsky, Elizabeth would often call another favorite to make love to her after her ladies had retired. She still cooked for Razumovsky, and babied him when he was sick, and gave him splendid diamond buttons and shoe buckles and epaulettes glittering with gems. Grateful for the attention, gentle Razumovsky did not mind the competition from other men. In 1749 she took a new lover, her gentleman of the bedchamber, Ivan Shuvalov, and moved him into an adjoining apartment. Handsome Shuvalov was in his early twenties when Elizabeth was about to celebrate her fortieth birthday.
Like Razumovsky, Shuvalov became the patron of theater, music, literature, and the arts. He established the Academy of Fine Arts and Russia’s first university. He brought French plays to the Russian stage. At one of these plays Elizabeth fell in love with the young man in the lead role, a cadet named Nikita Beketov, whom she promoted to colonel and invited to live in the palace.
But Beketov was no actor. Her chancellor Alexei Bestuzhev had resented the influence of her lover Shuvalov and decided to replace him with a man of his own. He handpicked Beketov as a youth likely to appeal to the empress’s prurient interest and arranged for him to take the lead role in the play. Bestuzhev then dressed the young man in a way that would attract the empress—dripping with lace, diamond shoe buckles glinting in the footlights, diamond rings sparkling on his fingers.
But though Elizabeth took Beketov into her bed, she did not oust Shuvalov. And Razumovsky remained always gracefully lingering in the background. She took a fourth lover, a young man named Kachenevski, whose beautiful voice had hypnotized her when she heard him in a church choir. For a while she had four acknowledged lovers at once.
Behind each handsome face were roiling political factions and greedy family ambitions. The Shuvalov family, well aware that Beketov was the pawn of their enemy Bestuzhev, spread rumors around court of his disgusting homosexual orgies. They delivered to the vain boy a jar of cosmetic ointment which, when he applied it to his delicate skin, made him break out in a rash that looked just like smallpox. Or perhaps, it was whispered, his rash was the result of some venereal disease caught only from homosexual activity. Their ploy paid off; he was ejected from the palace immediately.
By 1751 Elizabeth began having p
ainful digestive problems and convulsions. Sometimes she was in such pain she would lie motionless for days, looking up at the cupids on the ceiling, ever young, ever in love, ever mocking her age and illness and loss of beauty. Reviving, she would spend hours dressing for a ball, then look in the mirror and, saddened by the sight, decide not to go.
For years it was confidently believed that Elizabeth was a dying woman. But after the most awful attacks of fainting and paralysis, she would defy the odds and recover completely. Finally, on Christmas Day 1761 Elizabeth died at the age of fifty-two, having suffered from fever and vomiting for nearly two weeks. In her last illness she turned from her more recent favorites back to her greatest love and probable husband, Alexei Razumovsky. In her last agony, her only comfort was listening to Razumovsky’s exquisite voice, the one she had first heard thirty years before in the palace chapel, singing old Ukrainian lullabies to her. As soon as she breathed her last, her nephew Peter was proclaimed czar, and Razumovsky locked himself in his rooms and sobbed.
CATHERINE THE GREAT
“I Cannot Live One Day without Love”
The death of Empress Elizabeth meant that Grand Duchess Catherine was now empress consort. But as consort she possessed no power in her own right; power rested in the twitching hands of her imbecile husband, Czar Peter III. And Peter wanted nothing so much as to kill his annoying wife.
Peter had been poised to inherit the German duchy of Holstein and the kingdom of Sweden. He had a mania for all things German, particularly his hero Frederick the Great, and was a devout Protestant. But fate in the form of Aunt Elizabeth, empress of Russia, decreed that he must give up Germany and Sweden and everything dear to him and embrace a strange language, religion, and customs. The change unbalanced the sensitive child who was dragged kicking and screaming to his new domain, and whose mental health seemed to decline with each passing year.
When Catherine first met Peter, he was tiny for his age but good-looking in a vapid blond way. Within the year he caught smallpox; the fever unhinged what was left of his mind, the lesions gouged out his skin as if they had been acid. The groom was now a disfigured giggling idiot; his nose was red and swollen, his eyes watering, his skin scabbed and mutilated. When Elizabeth announced the date of the wedding, Catherine recoiled. “I had a very great repugnance to hear the day named,” she wrote, “and it did not please me at all to hear it spoken of.”18
The elaborate church wedding was followed by a long banquet and a dance. But Empress Elizabeth, intent on getting herself an heir from this ill-matched pair, was in a hurry to get them to bed. Peter, she realized, would never be able to rule Russia. A child must be born soon to lead Russia into the future.
Ceremoniously placed in the bridal bed, Catherine waited for her groom. “Everyone had gone and I remained alone for over two hours,” she recalled, “not knowing what I had to do, whether to get up or remain in bed.” Finally, Peter came, climbed into bed, and guffawed. “How it would amuse my servants to see us here in bed together!”19 Then he fell asleep. Peter had been informed of the sex act only a few days before the wedding and seemed not to understand it. Catherine, who had only been told the night before of her marital duties, must have been both relieved and humiliated by her husband’s lack of interest.
At sixteen Catherine was ready and willing to have sex. Even as a child she gave a hint of her future intense sexuality; she would ride her pillows astride, as if they were a horse, a form of masturbation, we can assume, until she finally fell off in exhaustion. “I was never caught in the act, nor did anyone ever know that I traveled post-haste in my bed on my pillows,” she confessed in her memoirs.20
Peter often did keep his wife up all night, but instead of making love he took his toy soldiers to bed, playing until dawn, having mock battles on the covers. Sometimes he made Catherine drill for hours at night with a heavy musket over her shoulder. Peter trained a pack of hounds to drill, and when he wasn’t beating them, he kept them locked up in Catherine’s closet where they urinated all over her clothes. “It was amid this stench,” Catherine reported, “that we slept.”21
The empress surrounded Catherine with strict chaperones to ensure the future heir would be Peter’s, a prince of Romanov blood. But after seven years, Catherine still remained a virgin. Like Louis XVI of France, Peter suffered from phimosis, a condition in which a long flap of foreskin prevented intercourse. Circumcision was the only remedy, but Peter refused.
The disgruntled empress, realizing any heir would be better than no heir at all, relaxed her vigilance and encouraged Catherine to take a lover, the darkly dashing Sergei Saltikov. The twenty-six-year-old was a born seducer, vain and sleek, the kind of man who, reeking of cheap cologne, sneaked up back staircases. Debonair and well-built, Saltikov was everything Catherine’s skinny, pale, obnoxious husband was not. When encouraged to relieve the twenty-three-year-old grand duchess of her unwanted virginity, Sergei accepted the mission with alacrity.
When Catherine became pregnant, Empress Elizabeth ordered Peter’s friends to get him drunk and hold him down as the doctor, who had been waiting in the wings, was brought in to perform a circumcision. When the czarevitch had healed, Catherine was forced to swallow her revulsion and seduce him. Much to Elizabeth’s chagrin, Catherine had two miscarriages in quick succession before becoming pregnant a third time with the future Czar Paul I, who was born in 1754.
As Empress Elizabeth cooed over the cradle, a court lady coolly remarked how dark the child’s complexion was, compared with Peter’s paleness. “Hold your tongue, you bitch,” the empress roared. “I know what you mean. You want to insinuate he is a bastard but if he is, he is not the first one that has been in my family.”22
After the birth Saltikov was sent on diplomatic missions to various European courts, and word got back to Catherine that he talked of her as a triumph, even as he seduced other court ladies. Not only had she been casually tossed aside by her first lover, but Catherine had no contact with her infant son, who was being raised by Elizabeth.
Worst of all, she knew that her husband’s mind was becoming completely unglued. One night he came late to their room and attacked her with a sword. Thinking fast, Catherine gamely suggested that he give her a sword, too, so they could duel. He walked away and she slumped against the wall, thinking how close she had come to being killed.
Lonely and sexually frustrated, Catherine cast about for a new lover. He was provided by the British ambassador, Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams, who had in his suite a handsome young Polish count. At twenty-three, Stanislaus Poniatowski was thoughtful and sensitive and offered the startling advantage of having attended the major salons of Paris.
Hoping to further relations between Russia and England, Sir Charles brought the blond, hazel-eyed Poniatowski to Russia with the sole intention of landing him either in the bed of Empress Elizabeth or Grand Duchess Catherine. Eager to advance the fallen fortunes of his family in Poland, Poniatowski allowed himself to become a sexual pawn in the hands of Sir Charles.
When Sir Charles introduced the young Pole to Catherine, he noticed how she never took her eyes off him. One observer said the grand duchess had the look “of a wild beast tracking down its prey.”23
The English ambassador worked assiduously to get the two into bed together. Though Poniatowski enjoyed flirting with the grand duchess, whom he found achingly attractive, he was terrified that an affair would send him to Siberia. Catherine had to seduce a professed virgin and, after a while, began to despair. How to get this fearful young man into bed? A good friend of hers came to the rescue and one night brought Poniatowski to the entrance of her private apartments. As Poniatowski wrote in his memoirs years later, he found the door half open, and inside Catherine was waiting for him in “a simple white gown trimmed with lace and pink ribbons, and looking so enticing as to make one forget the very existence of Siberia.”24
One day when Poniatowski and several courtiers made a formal visit to Catherine, her little dog gave the love affair away. T
he dog, who detested strangers, came prancing up to Poniatowski, tail wagging, then turned to the others and barked ferociously. The courtiers eyed each other meaningfully and tried not to laugh. The Swedish ambassador pulled Poniatowski aside and said, “My friend, there can be nothing more treacherous than a small dog; the first thing I used to do with a woman I loved was to be sure and give her one, and it was through them that I learnt if someone was more favored than myself. It is an infallible test. As you see, the dog wanted to eat me up, as he did not know me, but he went mad with joy on seeing you again, for it is clear that this is not the first time you have met.”25
Catherine was not alone in her infidelity. Liberated from his impotence, Peter had taken a mistress, who, if possible, was even uglier than himself. Elizabeth Vorontsova was fat and hunchbacked with disfiguring smallpox scars on her face. Worse, she was slatternly and fearless, insulting people with a gusto that made Peter whinny with laughter. Peter and his mistress would insist that Catherine and Poniatowski join them for dinner. Catherine always played the role of good sport; but the gentlemanly Pole hated the forced dinners with his mistress, her husband, and his mistress.
Catherine gave birth to Poniatowski’s daughter in 1757, a sickly child who lived less than a year. Peter, though an idiot, was no fool. He went around in public commenting cheerfully, “I have no idea how my wife becomes pregnant, but I suppose I shall have to accept the child as my own.”26
In 1758 French and Austrian factions at court, fearing Poniatowski’s pro-English sentiments, arranged with Empress Elizabeth to have him ordered back to Poland. Tired of the intrigues at court and the embarrassing dinners with his mistress’s drooling husband, he was not sorry to go. Moreover, Catherine’s sexual demands were becoming deleterious to his health. In one of his more lucid moments, Peter described his wife as a woman “who would squeeze all the juice out of a lemon and then throw it away.”27 Poniatowski had not been thrown away, but he didn’t have a drop of juice left when he took the road to Poland. Catherine cried as long and bitterly as she ever would in her life. “I sensed he was bored,” she wrote, “and it nearly broke my heart.”28
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