Catherine the Great and Her Pornographic Furniture
- Apr 25, 2019
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 24
Catherine the Great ruled Russia for 34 years, expanded its borders, modernised its government, and turned the country into one of Europe's great powers. She's also the subject of one of history's most persistent pieces of gossip: that she kept a secret room filled with sexually explicit furniture, tables with phallic legs, chairs shaped like naked bodies, walls covered in erotic art. The legend has never been definitively proven, but it hasn't gone away either, and the story behind it says as much about how history treats powerful women as it does about Catherine herself.
From German Princess to Empress of Russia
Catherine wasn't Russian by birth. She was born Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst in Prussia in 1729, and arrived in Russia as a teenager to marry Grand Duke Peter, heir to the throne and grandson of Peter the Great. She converted to Russian Orthodoxy and took the name Catherine ahead of the wedding, a fairly standard move for foreign princesses marrying into the Romanov line.
Peter became Tsar Peter III in 1762, but his reign lasted barely six months. He was deeply unpopular, both for his open admiration of Prussia and for sidelining Catherine in favour of his mistress, and in July 1762 a group of nobles and officers, several of them Catherine's own allies and lovers, deposed him in a bloodless coup and placed Catherine on the throne instead. Peter died in custody just over a week later, officially of a stroke, though most historians believe he was murdered on the orders of one of Catherine's supporters. Catherine went on to rule alone for the next three and a half decades.
A Reputation Built on Rumour
Catherine took a series of lovers throughout her reign, a fairly ordinary practice for European monarchs of the era, male or female, but one that drew outsized scrutiny because she was a woman ruling in her own right. Grigory Orlov and Grigory Potemkin were the most politically significant of these relationships; Potemkin remained one of her closest advisors and possibly a secret husband until his death in 1791. She's often credited with having as many as 300 lovers across her lifetime, though historians generally count somewhere closer to a dozen serious relationships, meaning the higher figure is almost certainly exaggerated gossip that outlived her.
That gossip curdled into something darker after her death in 1796. The most infamous rumour, that she died attempting to have sex with a horse, has no basis in fact; she died of a stroke, the same as her husband decades before. Historians have pointed out that this kind of sexualised character assassination was a common tool used against powerful women of the era, drawing a direct line to the pornographic pamphlets that circulated about Marie Antoinette around the same period, designed to discredit her by making her seem monstrous and depraved rather than simply powerful.
Powerful men weren't immune to the same treatment either; Caligula's own reputation was built on similarly unverifiable rumours of depravity passed down by writers who had every reason to want him remembered badly.
The Legend of the Erotic Cabinet
Against that backdrop, the story of Catherine's so called erotic cabinet took root. According to the legend, Catherine kept a secret chamber adjoining her private rooms, thought to be at the Tsarskoye Selo palace complex near St Petersburg, now known as Pushkin, filled entirely with sexually explicit furnishings. Writer Ivgheny Kosthin described it in Sang Bleu Magazine: one wall was said to be hung with wooden phalluses of every shape and size, while chairs, desks and screens throughout the room were carved or decorated with explicit imagery. Even the doorknob was reportedly shaped like a phallus.
The story goes that two German Wehrmacht soldiers stumbled across the room during the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union in 1941, and photographed its contents before the palace was later looted and burned. Most of those photographs are said to have been lost in the chaos of the war, but a handful of images, showing a table with carved phallic legs and a chair adorned with figures, have circulated for decades and are widely cited as the only surviving evidence.
The trouble is that none of it can be verified. No official German military report on the discovery has ever surfaced, and no historian has been able to trace the surviving photographs back to a confirmed original source. Some erotic art belonging to the Romanov family was catalogued in the 1930s, which lends the story a thin layer of plausibility, but experts remain split on whether the erotic cabinet ever really existed as described, or whether it's a story that grew in the telling over two centuries, feeding on the same impulse that produced the horse rumour.
A Legend With Its Own Afterlife
Whether or not the original room ever existed, the images associated with it have taken on a life of their own. Modern furniture designers have produced their own interpretations of the phallic table and other pieces based on the surviving photographs, treating the legend as inspiration rather than historical fact. Catherine's case wouldn't even be the oldest example of explicit decorative art surviving from European history; a set of erotic cameos tracing back to the reign of Tiberius were still being published and collected well into the 1770s, decades before Catherine's own reign ended.
One reproduction of the alleged Catherine table, a painted plywood piece styled after the surviving photographs, sold at Sotheby's for roughly £20,000, a striking price for an object nobody can actually connect to Catherine herself.
None of it appears anywhere in the Hermitage Museum, the vast St Petersburg collection built largely from Catherine's own acquisitions during her reign, which holds thousands of the paintings, sculptures and decorative objects she genuinely did collect. Whatever the truth of the erotic cabinet, it says something about her legacy that, more than two centuries after her death, an unverifiable rumour about a room full of pornographic furniture remains one of the things people are still most curious to learn about her.
