The story of a German girl named Sophia who had no Russian roots but married the grandson of Peter the Great and overthrew her incompetent husband to seize the throne and become Catherine the Great.
My thoughts
Catherine the Great was a truly remarkable woman and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert K. Massie knows how to tell a story. (Especially this story. Russian history is confusing, and Massie does a good job making things interesting while explaining the convoluted rules of Romanov succession and keeping the endless foreign ambassadors straight.)
Catherine made her own destiny. She was married at the age of sixteen to the emotionally stunted Romanov heir, Peter, who either could not or would not consummate the marriage. Both Peter and Catherine eventually had extramarital affairs and Massie hints strongly that Catherine's son Paul may have been Sergei Saltykov's child rather than Peter's. Paul was taken from Catherine and raised under the direction of Peter's aunt, the Empress Elizabeth. Catherine was ignored while she recovered and she passed the time by reading the works of the Enlightenment, which influenced the early years of her reign. She began to cultivate friendships with political factions that were opposed to Peter's pro-Prussian leanings (Russia and Prussia were bitter enemies, but Peter's early upbringing had been German). These became significant when Elizabeth died and Peter assumed the throne and immediately halted the Seven Years' War with Prussia on terms that were immensely favorable to Prussia. By this point, Peter was openly hostile to Catherine and was making noise about setting her aside in favor of his mistress. Catherine's supporters rallied behind her and she seized the throne.
As empress, Catherine strove to be an enlightened despot. Early in her reign, she explored the feasibility of emancipating Russia's serfs but found no support among the nobility (the serfs were not freed until the reign of her great-grandson Alexander in 1861). As her reign progressed, she was forced to put down rebellions and she was shaken and horrified by the French Revolution. She came to realize that governing Russia required a heavier hand than Montesquieu, Voltaire, and the other scholars of the Enlightenment advocated.
Catherine was a power on the international scene. She installed one of her former lovers as the titular monarch of Poland and then initiated the partitioning of Poland between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. She also targeted the weakening Ottoman Empire and extended Russia's territory to give it ports in the Black Sea. Catherine ruled alongside (and sometimes fought against) some of the "greats" of European royalty - Frederick the Great of Prussia and Maria Theresa of Austria for starters. (And speaking of them, I'd like to request biographies on these two because I don't know nearly enough about them.)
Catherine blazed her own path when it came to her love life as well. Empress Elizabeth's "favorite" had been accepted in her court and Massie points out that this was de rigueur in other European nations as well. But two factors made Catherine's love life remarkable. First, Catherine had a rather large number of acknowledged lovers. Second, the mature Catherine was something of a cougar. Massie prints excerpts from some of the correspondence between Catherine and her favorites to show Catherine's passionate personality. Some of the most tempestuous letters are between Catherine and Gregory Potemkin, who Massie speculates may have actually married Catherine. His tenure as a favorite was relatively short, but after it was over Potemkin remained one of Catherine's closest and most trusted advisers right up until his death.
Bottom line
A meticulously researched and expertly paced biography of one of the most fascinating European monarchs.
Fine print
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, by Robert K. Massie
Genre: biography
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.
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