Madeline’s Reviews > Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics > Status Update

“You philosophers are lucky men," she wrote to Denis Diderot. "You write on paper and paper is pa-tient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.”

Catherine the Great, 1762

“Out of a population of some nineteen million Russians, almost eight million were serfs, slaves owned either by individual families or the state itself. Russian wealth was usually measured in serfs-or "souls," as they were called-rather than money or land. Catherine, who had hoped to free the serfs, soon found that this lofty goal was all but impossible in her turbulent realm.” (Lose support of the nobles)