Catherine the Great

The woman history knows as Catherine the Great began life far from Russia. She was born Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst on 2 May 1729 (21 April, Old Style) in Stettin, a Baltic port town in Prussian Pomerania, now Szczecin in Poland ^[1]. Her father, Prince Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, governed the town as a general in Prussian service. The family belonged to the minor German nobility: respectable, well connected, and chronically short of money.

Sophie's mother, Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, came from a family with useful ties to the courts of northern Europe, and she pursued those connections with energy. The daughter received a conventional education from a French Huguenot governess, Elisabeth Cardel, who left her with fluent French and a lasting appetite for reading ^[2]. By her own later account, Sophie was an unremarkable child who compensated for plain looks with wit and application. Ambition arrived early. Relatives noticed that the girl followed dynastic gossip with unusual attention.

The opening she needed came through her mother's family. Johanna's cousin had once been engaged to Elizabeth, the reigning Empress of Russia, before dying of smallpox, and Elizabeth retained a sentimental attachment to the Holstein line. When the empress went searching for a bride for her nephew and heir, the young Peter of Holstein-Gottorp, the obscure princess from Stettin made the shortlist. In January 1744, aged fourteen, Sophie set out with her mother on the long winter journey to Moscow ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Catherine the Great before the crown finds the answer in her first two decades at the Russian court, a masterclass in patience. On arrival she set about becoming Russian with a thoroughness that impressed Empress Elizabeth. She studied the language late into the night, and when a severe illness struck she asked for an Orthodox priest rather than a Lutheran pastor, a gesture that won wide sympathy ^[2]. In June 1744 she converted to Orthodoxy and took the name Yekaterina Alekseyevna, Catherine. Her marriage to Grand Duke Peter followed in August 1745 in St. Petersburg.

The marriage failed almost at once. Peter was immature, devoted to Prussia and to playing soldiers, and openly contemptuous of his wife. Catherine survived the isolation by reading: Tacitus, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, and Voltaire shaped her sense of what government could be ^[3]. A son, the future Emperor Paul, was born in 1754 and immediately taken from her to be raised by Elizabeth. Catherine later wrote frankly in her memoirs about the emptiness of those years and about the lovers who filled some of it, including Sergei Saltykov and the Polish nobleman Stanislaw Poniatowski ^[2].

Elizabeth died in January 1762 (December 1761, Old Style) and Peter III became emperor. Within months he had alienated the army by pulling Russia out of the Seven Years' War on terms favorable to Prussia, offended the church by moving to seize its lands, and humiliated his wife publicly. Catherine, by contrast, had cultivated the Guards regiments through her lover Grigory Orlov and his brothers. On 9 July 1762 (28 June, Old Style), while Peter was away from the capital, she rode to the Izmailovsky Guards and was proclaimed empress. Peter abdicated without a fight and died days later in custody at Ropsha, almost certainly killed by his guards, though Catherine's direct involvement has never been proven ^[1]. She was crowned in Moscow that September.

Any honest list of Catherine the Great achievements starts with territory. Her armies fought two major wars against the Ottoman Empire (1768 to 1774 and 1787 to 1792) and broke Turkish power on the northern Black Sea coast. The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji in 1774 gave Russia its first secure foothold there, and in 1783 she annexed the Crimean Peninsula outright ^[4]. Her favorite and probable secret husband, Grigory Potemkin, organized the new southern lands, founding cities including Sevastopol and Yekaterinoslav and building the Black Sea Fleet. Through the three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795), carried out with Prussia and Austria, Russia absorbed vast Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian territories. By the end of the reign the empire had gained roughly 200,000 square miles ^[1].

At home she attempted something no Russian ruler had tried: government by Enlightenment principle. In 1767 she convened a Legislative Commission of more than 500 delegates drawn from most social classes and gave it her Nakaz, or Instruction, a document she spent two years writing, built largely on Montesquieu and the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria. It condemned torture and capital punishment and argued that laws should protect subjects rather than terrorize them ^[3]. The commission dissolved without producing a code, yet the Instruction circulated across Europe and made her reputation as the era's model of an enlightened autocrat.

Administrative and cultural reform proved more durable. The Provincial Reform of 1775 reorganized the empire into governorships of manageable size with local courts and welfare boards. The 1785 Charter to the Nobility defined aristocratic rights in law for the first time, and a parallel charter organized the towns ^[4]. She founded the Smolny Institute in 1764, the first state school for girls in Russia, promoted smallpox inoculation by having herself and her son inoculated in 1768, and bought art on a scale no monarch matched: the collections she assembled at the Winter Palace grew into the Hermitage Museum ^[5]. Under her patronage the journalist press, the theater, and Russian letters all expanded, and she wrote comedies, satires, and children's tales herself.

Few rulers have documented their own inner life as fully as Catherine, whose memoirs, left unfinished at her death, remain a primary source and a deliberate act of self-fashioning ^[2]. She rose before six, lit her own fire, and worked through mountains of paperwork with strong coffee before most of the court woke. Her correspondence was enormous: decades of letters to Voltaire, to Friedrich Melchior Grimm, and to Denis Diderot, whose library she purchased in 1765 while letting him keep it for life, with a salary attached, an act of publicity as shrewd as it was generous ^[3].

Her favorites were an institution of the reign. Twelve men are securely documented as lovers across her life, among them Orlov, who helped make her empress; Poniatowski, whom she later placed on the Polish throne; and Potemkin, who remained her chief partner in government long after their romance ended and who probably married her in secret around 1774 ^[1]. Hostile pamphleteers in Europe inflated this record into legend, and after her death fabricated stories about her private conduct spread widely; historians treat them as slander with no documentary basis ^[6].

Her family relations were colder. She kept her son Paul at arm's length from power, mistrusting his temper and his cult of his dead father, and instead poured attention into her grandsons Alexander and Constantine, supervising their education personally. Two other children, a daughter named Anna who died in infancy and a son by Orlov, Alexei Bobrinsky, completed a family life shaped at every point by politics ^[2].

The last decades tested the limits of her early liberalism. The Pugachev Rebellion of 1773 to 1775, in which the Cossack Yemelyan Pugachev claimed to be the dead Peter III and raised the Volga and Ural regions in the largest peasant revolt of the century, shocked the government. After its brutal suppression and Pugachev's execution in Moscow in January 1775, Catherine bound herself more tightly to the nobility on whom order depended, and serfdom in practice grew harsher and spread into Ukraine ^[4].

The French Revolution completed the turn. The philosophes' admirer became a determined enemy of everything 1789 represented. When Alexander Radishchev published his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow in 1790, an indictment of serfdom written in the reformist language she had once encouraged, she annotated it furiously and had him sentenced to death, commuted to Siberian exile. The publisher Nikolai Novikov was imprisoned in 1792 ^[3]. Foreign policy stayed aggressive to the end: the second Turkish war closed victoriously in 1792, and the final partitions erased Poland from the map, in part as a response to Polish constitutional reform she regarded as Jacobinism on her border ^[4].

She remained at her desk almost to the last day. On 16 November 1796 (5 November, Old Style) she suffered a stroke in the Winter Palace and died the following evening without regaining consciousness, aged 67 ^[1]. Paul, succeeding at last, had his father's remains exhumed and reburied beside her in the Peter and Paul Cathedral, a pointed rebuke, and soon issued a law barring women from the Russian succession.

Catherine's thirty-four year reign fixed Russia's place among the great powers. The Black Sea coast, Crimea, and the western borderlands she acquired defined the empire's shape into the twentieth century, and the naval base she founded at Sevastopol still carries strategic weight today ^[4]. Within Russia her provincial administration lasted, with adjustments, until 1917, and the noble culture her charters protected produced the generation that made Russian literature's golden age.

The contradictions are equally part of any Catherine the Great biography. She talked liberty and extended serfdom; she praised law and partitioned a neighboring state out of existence; she patronized critics until they criticized her. Scholars such as Isabel de Madariaga, whose 1981 study remains the standard academic account, argue that she nonetheless changed Russian political culture by insisting, in principle, that even autocracy was bound by law ^[4]. Simon Dixon and Robert K. Massie, in later biographies, have emphasized her skill as a self-made politician who held power for decades without the dynastic legitimacy her rivals possessed ^[1].

Among basic Catherine the Great facts, one is often missed: she was the only Russian ruler besides Peter I to earn the epithet "the Great" from her contemporaries and keep it. The Hermitage she began now ranks among the world's largest museums, her Instruction is studied as a monument of Enlightenment political writing, and the bronze horseman she raised to Peter the Great in 1782, inscribed simply from Catherine the Second to Peter the First, announced the claim history has largely allowed her: that she finished what he began ^[5].