The Legend of "The erotic cabinet " of Catherine the Great

The erotic cabinet of Catherine the Great

An urban legend states that an erotic cabinet was ordered by Catherine the Great, and was adjacent to her suite of rooms in Gatchina. According to said urban legend; the furniture was highly eccentric with tables that had large penises for legs. Penises and vulvas were carved out on the furniture, the walls were covered in erotic art, statues of a naked man and woman inside, and some versions of the legend state that some erotic artifacts from Pompeii were even brought into Russia to augment this collection.

There are unconfirmed reports of photographs of this cabinet. The rooms and the furniture were allegedly seen in 1940 by two Wehrmacht officers during the Nazi Invasion of The Soviet Union, but even if that were true, the rooms and furniture seem to have vanished since then. This account is "dodgy" , "sketchy" , and "dubious" at the very best[citation needed]. The account says the Wehrmacht officers filed a report, but no report has ever been found, nor are any other records from anyone from before, during, or after the Second World War; other than the aforementioned legend. Also, the account says the rooms and furniture were seen in 1940, during the Nazi Invasion of The Soviet Union, but the invasion of The Soviet Union by Nazi Germany did not start in 1940, but on June 22, 1941. For this reason, historical experts challenge the veracity of such claims. But being as all of these stories did not even originate until some years after Catherine the Great's death, it is most likely the cabinet never existed, and the whole story was simply fabricated as another bawdy tale.

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"During the second world war in one of the palaces of Tsarskoye Selo, a group of Soviet soldiers found a room decorated in a frank erotic style. According to witnesses , one of the walls was entirely hung with wooden phalluses of various shapes, a range of chairs, desks, and screens all decorated with pornographic images supplementing the whole appearance. Soldiers didn’t loot anything or destroy anything there, on the contrary, they made a dozen of documentary photos.

There are photographs of this room, or at least claiming to be, taken by German soldiers who arrived at the palace in 1941 during WWII and stumbled across the eye-opening boudoir. These Wehrmacht soldiers may very well have been the last witnesses to see the room before the palaces were bombed and most of their contents destroyed in the ensuing fire. Experts and historians however adamantly believe that the contents of the erotic boudoir were most certainly purposefully removed from the palace and all traces of the erotic cabinet vanished under suspicious circumstances.

Russian authorities have always been very secretive about this peculiar Czarist heritage. Catherine was a confident woman with too much passion who ignored the boundaries of womanhood in her time. Labelled a nymphomaniac and hyper sexual, in reality, her sexual adventures were unlikely all that different from her male counterparts, but Catherine, Empress or not, was born a woman trapped in a man’s world, and the rumours that circulated around her private life led to negative portrayals of her reign.

Most of the pictures were lost in the fire of war, but some of Hermitage personnel also confirm the existence of the parlour, noting that Catherine the Great even made a bodouir for Platon Zubov, but it’s unlikely that it could reached the 20th century. It is also known that the collection of erotic art belonged to the Romanov family was catalogued in 1930s . The evidences indicate that the objects were only shown to a selection of visitors. But the catalogue was lost. Like the whole entire collection, it was allegedly destroyed in 1950."