QI The Book of the Dead

weak, Peter preferred playing soldiers to managing affairs of state. Hisabsorption in these games was total and he would change uniform up to twenty times a day while having mock battles with his valets, guards and a selection of companion dwarfs. Catherine was expected to join in and often had to stand on guard as a sentry in the doorway between their two rooms when she was his fiancée. Peter had several other lovers, one of whom Catherine described as being as ‘discreet as a cannonball’. After their wedding in 1745 they moved into the Oranienbaum Palace on the Gulf of Finland, near St Petersburg. Catherine realised the marriage was doomed from the start, writing in her journal that he was ‘unlovable’ and telling herself ‘if you love him you will be the most wretched creature on earth’. Fortunately, the marriage wasn’t consummated for several years and, by the time it was, Catherine had already started on her own sequence of dashing lovers, beginning with a handsome chamberlain called Sergei Saltyov and a suave Polish nobleman, Stanislaw Poniatowski, whom she visited disguised as a man (Catherine later made him king of Poland). She insisted that her first son, Paul, was the result of her affair with Saltyov, though he was both physically and emotionally very like the Grand Duke Peter, a weak-willed bully who shared the older man’s love of dressing up. In an effort to stop him becoming an effeminate laughing-stock like her husband, Catherine arranged for a young widow to instruct him in the art of love when he was fourteen.
    In 1762, on the death of his mother, Grand Duke Peter became Emperor Peter III. He was a German, born in Kiel, and he hated Russians. At his mother’s funeral he disgraced himself by deliberately walking slowly so that the cortège drew ahead and then sprinting after it so that the elderly courtiers were left gasping for breath. Six months later, a group of Russian nobleman deposedhim in a coup d’état , provoked by both his incompetence and his support for Prussia’s land claims in Poland. The feeble-minded Peter seemed quite happy to retire to his country palace with his mistress and, despite her own lack of Russian blood, Catherine was proclaimed Catherine II, Empress of All the Russias. She’d been careful not to implicate herself directly in the coup but she ordered that the victorious army be given free drinks in St Petersburg, paying the bill herself. It came to over 100,000 roubles (around £20 million today). Three days later, a young officer called Alexei Orlov assassinated Grand Duke Peter.
    Orlov was the third of four brothers, the second of whom, Grigory, had been Catherine’s paramour since 1759 and was one of the leaders of the military coup. Historians generally exonerate Catherine from her husband’s murder, but she rewarded all four Orlovs by creating them counts, and Grigory got a palace in St Petersburg as well. He had obvious attractions as a lover. He was a powerfully built guardsman who had been wounded several times on the battlefield and enjoyed bear-hunting, cock-fighting and boxing. Catherine almost married him but, though they stayed friends, she decided he wasn’t up to the politics and she’d have more freedom as the Dowager Empress. In the meantime, she continued to enjoy the services of younger, physically impressive men. Perhaps the most important of these was General Grigori Potemkin, who remained a confidant and ally even after their love affair was over. They wrote to each other several times a day even when they were in the same building – she called him her ‘lion of the jungle’, ‘golden tiger’, ‘wolf’ and her ‘Cossack’. He called her ‘Sovereign Lady’, and occasionally ‘Little Mother’ ( Matrushka ). After their affair, it was rumoured that he acted as her bedroom advisor, choosing young men she would findsuitably attractive and interesting. Catherine was sexually active until the end of her life: one of her last lovers was Prince Platon Zubov. He was only twenty-two, more than forty years her junior. She was devoted to him, referring to him as her ‘baby’, and telling everyone he was ‘the greatest genius Russia has ever known’. Under her patronage, he amassed great wealth and eventually succeeded Potemkin as governor general of New Russia, the newly conquered lands in what is now southern Ukraine.
    What Zubov, Potemkin and many of Catherine’s other partners shared was their capacity to engage her