From Russia with lust: Tsar’s erotic letters to his young mistress

During more than a decade of letters, Russian Tsar Alexander II and his young mistress Ekaterina Dolgaroukaya, wrote frankly of their desire for one another – and of the pleasures of past and future love-making!

In 2007, 22 unpublished erotic letters written by the Tsar to the woman he simply called “Katia” – and by her to him – were auctioned in Paris.
Christie’s sold nine of the letters for £7,400/€10,800

The letters were among thousands exchanged by the pair, whose passionate affair began in the summer of 1866, when he was a 47-year-old emperor and she was 18 years old.

The couple had enjoyed chaste daily strolls for months.
The tsar became smitten by the 18-year-old with ash blonde hair, alabaster skin and a firm curvaceous figure.
Katia found young men tedious, and was equally smitten by the tsar.

After their first tryst, Alexander writes –

‘I’ll never forget what happened on the sofa in the mirrored room, when we kissed on the mouth for the first time.
You made me go out while you removed your crinoline, and I was surprised to find you without your pantaloons.

I was almost mad at this dream, but it was real…
I felt a frenzy.
That’s when I encountered my treasure…
I would have given everything to dip inside again…
I was electrified that your saucy crinoline let me see your legs that only I had ever seen.’

After four years of correspondence, the Tsar installed his young mistress in quarters close to St Petersburg’s Winter Palace, with direct access to the imperial apartments through a secret staircase.

Katia used this secret passageway to enter Alexander’s quarters for passionate and sometimes torrid bouts of “bingerle” – their code word for sex.

It was in these apartments, which they nicknamed “the nest”, that Alexander II and Katia frequently bingerled – an activity that led Katia to bear the Tsar four children.

The enamoured pair often wrote to each other several times a day.
They always signed off with the phrase: “With you always”.

The letters were in French.
But some s3xual references were jotted down in Russian.

The tsar often sketched Katia naked: the drawing shows her voluptuous figure and her thick tresses, usually tied up in a bun, down to her waist.
After which, according to his letters, they “clenched each other like hungry cats”.

Alexander writes –

“I confess these memories reawaken my rage to plunge inside your delirious coquillage again.
I’m smiling about it, I’m not ashamed, it’s natural!”

Alexander especially liked it when Katia took the initiative.

“I enjoyed until delirium” wrote the emperor.
“Lying still on the sofa while you moved on me yourself… we’re made for each other and I see you before my eyes, now in bed, now without knickers”.

Katia also relished the love-making, writing:
“You know I want you.
I feel overwhelmed by pleasure incomparable to anything else.
I took pleasure like a mad thing under our dear blanket. This pleasure has no name, as we are the only ones who feel it”.

After Alexander had talked of ‘four times’, ‘on every piece of furniture’ and ‘in every room’, his doctors advised him to limit his strenuous lovemaking.

Katia then suggests that ‘if you think we overtire ourselves, let’s rest a few days’.

But later that day, she writes:
‘This evening, I want you,’
By the following morning she writes
‘I slept restlessly, everything inside me trembles’

Alexander and Katia married morganatically in July 1880 following the death of his wife, Marie of Hesse.

On 13th March 1881, the tsar did two things that always comforted him.
He wrote in his diary and then, pulling up Katia’s skirts, he ‘toppled her on to a table and took her’.

At 12.45pm, he set out to review the guards in his bullet-proof carriage.
Returning by the same route, a young man, Nikolai Rysakov, tossed a bomb under the carriage.

When the smoke cleared, the carriage was largely intact.
The emperor dismounted and crossed himself. .
Then another young man, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, threw a bomb at Alexander’s feet.

Alexander could be heard gasping:
‘Take me to the Palace – there to die!’

At the palace, Katia fell on top of the tsar’s lifeless body, kissing his hands and crying out his name.

Holding his head, she ordered the doctors ‘to bring pillows, to bring oxygen, to try to revive the emperor’. When the end came, she shrieked and dropped to the floor, her negligee soaked in the tsar’s blood.

Despite her heartbreak, Katia survived her husband by 41 years, living in great style in Paris and the French Riviera.
She died in 1922, aged 74.

? Emperor Alexander II & Katia with their children George and Olga c1870.
Unknown Photographer.