Sex and the Romanovs
Russia’s Racy Rulers, from 1613 to 1918
With The Romanovs: 1613-1918 (2016), pop-historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, the award-winning biographer of Joseph Stalin and Grigory Potempkin, delivers his richest and most ambitious tome to date. Spanning three centuries and twenty rulers, Montefiore chronicles the rise and fall of Russia’s greatest—and raunchiest—dynasty in what amounts to 744 tightly packed pages of palace intrigue, sex, murder and mayhem. Below are just some of the salacious passages that populate this masterwork.
Catherine the Great’s “try-outs”:
In place of family, Catherine created an intimate coterie. Her closest friend was her long-serving lady-in-waiting, Countess Praskovia Bruce, the daughter of Countess Rumiantseva, once Peter the Great’s mistress. Bruce was an ally in all matters amorous—”the person to whom I can say everything, without fear of the consequences.” They shared the same taste in men and the same sexual enthusiasm, which led to Praskovia’s reputation as l’eprouveuse, “trying out” the empress’s lovers.
Peter the Great’s parties:
…the tsar convened his new All-Mad All-Jesting All-Drunken Synod (or Assembly), an inebriated dining society that was, in part, the government of Russia in brutally raucous disguise. It had started as the Jolly Company, but Peter made it ever more elaborate. Between 80 and 300 guests, including a circus of dwarfs, giants, foreign jesters, Siberian Kalmyks, black Nubians, obese freaks and louche girls, started carousing at noon and went on to the following dawn.
Rasputin’s sexual prowess:
His own feral sexuality, harnessed to peasant charm and mystical prestige, was irresistible to some: one woman boasted that she had fainted during the orgasm he delivered. His penis was said to be equine in scale while (his future murderer) Felix Yusupov claimed that a fortuitously positioned wart explained his prowess.
