Catherine the Great, who modernized Russia during her reign, took about 22 lovers over her lifetime — enough to fuel a legend that outlived her by centuries: that she died attempting intercourse with a horse, crushed when the harness suspending the animal above her snapped.
She didn't. Catherine actually collapsed from a stroke in a bathroom at the Winter Palace in 1796 and died in her bed the next day — a detail that spawned its own myth, that she died when a toilet seat broke under her. Alexander Pushkin joked about it in verse, in lines that translate as "Decreed the orders, burned the fleets / And died boarding a vessel" — or, as the last line can also be read, "And died sitting down on the toilet."
The horse story is thought to have started among rival European rulers threatened by a woman who'd seized power in a coup and expanded the Russian Empire on her own terms. A related legend claims she commissioned an "erotic cabinet" of furniture carved with genitals, supposedly seen by two Wehrmacht officers in 1940 — a year before Germany actually invaded the Soviet Union, which is one reason historians consider the whole story fabricated.
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