Catherine the Great, throughout her long reign, has taken many lovers, often elevating them to high positions for as long as they hold her interest, then pensioning them off with gifts of serfs and large estates.

The percentage of state money spent on the court has increased from 10.4% in 1767 to 11.4% in 1781 to 13.5% in 1795.

Catherine has given away sixty-six thousand serfs from 1762–72, two hundred and two thousandf rom 1773–93, and in one day, August 18, 1795, gives away one hundred thousand.

Just as the church has supported her, hoping to get their land back, Catherine had bought the support of the bureaucracy.

From April 19, 1764, any bureaucrat holding the same rank for seven years or more got instantly promoted.

On September 13, 1767, Catherine had decreed that after seven years in one rank, civil servants would be automatically promoted regardless of office or merit.

After her affair with her lover and adviser Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin ended in 1776, he had allegedly selected a candidate-lover for her who had the physical beauty and mental faculties to hold her interest (such as Alexander Dmitriev-Mamonov and Nicholas Alexander Suk).

Some of these men had loved her in return, and she always showed generosity towards them, even after the affair ended.

One of her lovers, Pyotr Zavadovsky, received fifty thousand rubles, a pension of five thousand rubles, and four thousand peasants in Ukraine after she dismissed him in 1777.

The last of her lovers, Prince Zubov, is forty years her junior.

Her sexual independence has led to many of the legends about her.