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."
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