On the morning of July 9, 1762, a thirty-three-year-old woman in a borrowed officer's uniform rode at the head of fourteen thousand soldiers toward the imperial palace at Peterhof, where her husband — the Emperor of All Russia, anointed six months prior — sat drinking Burgundy and awaiting her arrival for a birthday celebration. She had risen before dawn at the apartment of a lover, been spirited to the Izmailovsky barracks, and within hours persuaded three regiments of the Imperial Guard to swear allegiance to her. She was not Russian. She had no legal claim to the throne. She was, by the strict conventions of dynastic succession, nobody — a minor German princess from a principality so small and so poor that it could not field a meaningful army, who had arrived in St. Petersburg at the age of fifteen with little more than three changes of clothes and an instinct for survival that bordered on the pathological. By nightfall, her husband had abdicated. Eight days later he was dead. She would rule Russia for thirty-four years, longer than any other woman in the empire's history, expanding its territory by more than 200,000 square miles, founding the Hermitage Museum, corresponding with Voltaire and Diderot, rewriting the country's legal code, and building more than a hundred new towns. Russians continue to call her Yekaterina Velikaya. The West, which she simultaneously dazzled and terrified, settled on a simpler epithet: the Great.
The paradox that animates her story is not the one history usually emphasizes — not the lovers, not the foreign birth, not even the coup. It is something more fundamental. Catherine the Great was a woman who possessed no power that was not, in some essential sense, invented. Every other monarch of her era inherited legitimacy like furniture. She manufactured hers from raw materials — from books, from charm, from the careful study of what a nation wanted to believe about itself — and then defended it so ferociously and for so long that the invention became indistinguishable from the thing itself. She was, in the vocabulary of a later age, a founder who executed a hostile takeover of an enterprise she had no right to run, and then built it into the dominant player in its market. The playbook she wrote has never gone out of print.
The Principality of Nothing
By the Numbers
The Reign of Catherine II
34 yearsLength of reign (1762–1796)
200,000+Square miles added to the Russian Empire
100+New towns built during her rule
29Provinces reorganized under administrative reform
1764Year she founded the Hermitage Museum
~62,000Pupils educated in state institutions by end of reign
12Official favorites after Potemkin
Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst was born on May 2, 1729, in Stettin, Prussia — a garrison town in Pomerania that is now the Polish city of Szczecin. Her father, Christian August, was a Prussian general of modest distinction and a member of the petty German nobility, the kind of prince whose principality existed more as a cartographic courtesy than a geopolitical fact. Anhalt-Zerbst could not influence European affairs any more than a cork could redirect a river. Her mother, Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, was a different species entirely — ambitious, cold, socially ravenous, and possessed of the one asset that mattered in the dynastic marriage market of eighteenth-century Europe: bloodlines that connected, however distantly, to ruling houses across the continent. Johanna disliked her eldest daughter. She found Sophie plain, too independent, too inclined to argue with her military chaplain during religious instruction. She lavished attention on Sophie's younger brother Wilhelm Christian, who would die at twelve. Sophie, the surviving child, the girl no one particularly wanted, was raised largely by a governess named Babette.
What Johanna understood, with the predator's clarity that sometimes accompanies maternal indifference, was that her daughter's value lay not in herself but in her exchangeability — as a marriageable princess whose very insignificance made her unthreatening to the great powers. Frederick II of Prussia, the patron of Anhalt-Zerbst, grasped this too. When the Russian Empress Elizabeth — daughter of Peter the Great, a woman of volcanic appetites and considerable political cunning who had seized her own throne via coup in 1741 — began searching for a bride for her nephew and chosen heir, Grand Duke Peter of Holstein-Gottorp, Frederick saw an opportunity to plant a Prussian sympathizer inside the Russian court. He endorsed Sophie for the role. It was, by all subsequent evidence, among the great miscalculations of his career. Catherine was the last person on earth to serve as anyone's instrument.
She arrived in Russia in the winter of 1744 with her mother. She was fifteen years old.
The Art of Becoming Someone Else
The transformation that followed was so total, so deliberate, and so successful that it has obscured a fact worth pausing over: it was executed by a teenager. Sophie did not merely accept the customs of her adopted country. She studied them with the intensity of an intelligence operative establishing a cover identity. She threw herself into learning Russian — a language of fiendish grammatical complexity that she would never speak without a German accent but would eventually write well enough to produce plays, fairy tales, and legislation. She converted from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy, adopting the name Yekaterina Alekseyevna over the strenuous objections of her father, a devout Lutheran who understood the conversion for what it was: a young woman amputating her own past. She memorized court rituals, cultivated friendships with ladies-in-waiting, and — this was the crucial thing — studied the Empress Elizabeth's moods and preferences with the attention other girls her age gave to embroidery.
Years later, Catherine would write in her memoirs that upon arriving in Russia she had made a decision: "to do whatever was required of her to become qualified to wear the crown." The sentence has the retrospective tidiness of autobiography, but the underlying calculation was real and continuous. She had assessed the landscape. She had identified the gap. She was filling it.
Her husband, the Grand Duke Peter, presented the opposite case study — a man who possessed every structural advantage and squandered each one with the determination of someone unconsciously committed to his own destruction. Born Karl Peter Ulrich of Holstein-Gottorp, raised in Germany until the age of fourteen, Peter was Peter the Great's grandson by blood and Elizabeth's chosen heir by decree, yet he remained defiantly, almost comically, un-Russian. He spoke Russian poorly. He played with toy soldiers well into his twenties. He drilled a small personal army at Oranienbaum and dreamed of punishing Denmark for the territorial offense of absorbing Schleswig from Holstein, a grievance so parochial it bewildered even his sympathizers. Robert K. Massie, whose
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman remains the definitive English-language biography, described Peter as "a very strange man, to put it mildly" — childish, uninterested in his wife, consumed by his adoration of Frederick the Great.
The marriage, formalized in a sumptuous ceremony at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan in St. Petersburg on August 21, 1745, was a disaster from the first night. By Catherine's later account — disputed by some historians, believed by many — it went unconsummated for nine years. Peter was glad to have a German companion. He had no romantic or sexual interest in her at all. Catherine endured this with a patience that was strategic rather than passive. She was waiting. And while she waited, she read.
The Education of an Autodidact
What Catherine did during the nearly two decades between her marriage and her seizure of power constitutes one of the most consequential programs of self-education in political history. Trapped in a miserable marriage, surveilled by Elizabeth's court, under relentless pressure to produce an heir — her first son, Paul, was born in 1754 and immediately taken from her by the empress — Catherine turned to books the way a drowning person turns to anything that floats.
She began with the French Enlightenment philosophers. Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws. Voltaire's essays and histories. Tacitus. The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert. She annotated works by William Blackstone on English common law. She read not for pleasure, though she took pleasure in it, but for a purpose she may not have fully articulated even to herself: she was constructing a philosophy of governance from first principles, assembling the intellectual architecture that would justify — retroactively, prospectively, in whichever direction proved necessary — the exercise of power by a foreign-born woman with no hereditary claim to anything.
She had been a bright child; her languages then were French and German, and she learned Russian. She began to read the great philosophers of the French Enlightenment. And in that way, she developed a philosophy of rule.
The Enlightenment gave her the vocabulary. The vocabulary gave her the framework. The framework gave her something more dangerous than a right to rule: it gave her a theory of ruling. Voltaire had coined the term "benevolent despotism" to describe an ideal in which the absolute monarch governed not by divine right but by rational administration, guided by philosophy rather than tradition. It was a lovely abstraction. Catherine was the first person to attempt it at scale, in a country that stretched across eleven time zones and ran on serfdom.
She also wrote. Compulsively. On winter mornings she rose at six and spent three hours in her study before the court stirred. Plays, legislation, letters, marginalia, fairy tales, memoirs. The Harvard Davis Center has described her as "a graphomaniac," and the term — which literally means a mania for writing — captures something essential. Over the course of her thirty-four-year reign, Catherine's written output dwarfed that of Peter the Great's entire forty-three-year rule. She was building, sentence by sentence, the documentary infrastructure of her own legitimacy. When you cannot inherit authority, you must author it.
Six Months to a Lifetime
Empress Elizabeth died on January 5, 1762. Peter ascended the throne as Peter III. And then, with the swiftness of a man determined to prove every skeptic right, he set about alienating every constituency that mattered.
In six months, Peter managed to: withdraw Russia from the Seven Years' War on terms wildly favorable to his hero Frederick the Great, bewildering the military; threaten to divorce Catherine and marry his mistress; insult the Orthodox Church by seizing ecclesiastical lands; and propose a war against Denmark over Holstein — a cause so personal and so irrelevant to Russian interests that even his own officers refused to take it seriously. He received news of Russian military operations exclusively from Prussian sources, dismissed official reports as lies, and announced his contempt for the empire he theoretically ruled with a candor that would have been refreshing in a private citizen and was suicidal in a tsar.
Catherine, who had spent eighteen years preparing for precisely this moment, moved with a speed that still startles historians. The conspiracy was organized through her lover, Grigory Orlov — a young Guards officer from a family of five brothers, all of whom were military men, all of whom adored Catherine. Orlov was handsome, brave, and not especially intelligent, which suited Catherine's purposes: she needed loyalty, not counsel.
On July 9, 1762, Catherine slipped out of the Peterhof palace complex before dawn. She was taken to the barracks of the Izmailovsky Guards, who swore allegiance. Then to the Semyonovsky Guards. Then the Preobrazhensky Guards. By midday, the Senate and the Synod had endorsed her claim. She donned the uniform of a Guards officer — a detail that was not merely theatrical but calculated to signal that she commanded the military, the only institution whose opinion ultimately mattered in Russian palace politics — and rode to Peterhof at the head of fourteen thousand troops.
Peter, informed of the coup, panicked, attempted to negotiate, briefly considered fleeing to Holstein, and ultimately signed an abdication document. He was taken to Ropsha, a country estate. Eight days later, on July 17, 1762, he was dead — killed, the official account claimed, in a "hemorrhoidal colic," though historians universally attribute his death to Alexei Orlov, Grigory's brother, probably by strangulation. Catherine's complicity has never been proven. It has never needed to be.
She was thirty-three. She would not relinquish power for the remaining thirty-four years of her life.
The Instruction and Its Discontents
Catherine's first great act as empress was not a military campaign or a territorial annexation. It was a document. In 1767, she convened the Legislative Commission — an assembly of delegates drawn from the nobility, townsmen, Cossacks, and other free subjects — and presented them with her Nakaz, or Instruction: a sprawling philosophical treatise on the principles of governance, drawn heavily from Montesquieu and the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria, that would serve as the foundation for a new Russian legal code.
The Nakaz was, in its way, a startup pitch deck for the Russian state. It argued that Russia's size demanded absolute monarchy but that the monarch was bound by natural law and reason. It advocated humane criminal punishment, religious tolerance, and the principle that law should aim at the prevention of crime rather than its retribution. It condemned torture. It suggested — carefully, abstractly, with sufficient escape hatches to survive scrutiny — that serfdom might not be entirely consistent with the rational organization of society.
Voltaire was delighted. Diderot was delighted. Frederick the Great, who understood power better than any philosopher, was amused. The Legislative Commission debated for eighteen months and produced no law code whatsoever. The delegates could not agree. The serfs — who constituted the vast majority of Russia's population — were not represented. The nobles, who depended on serfdom for their economic survival, had no intention of reforming it. Catherine, who was nothing if not a pragmatist, shelved the commission in 1768 when war with the Ottoman Empire provided a convenient excuse. The Nakaz remained a monument to what she might have done had the material conditions of Russia cooperated with the material conditions of French philosophy.
The gap between Catherine's Enlightenment aspirations and Russian reality was not a failing. It was the central structural challenge of her reign, and she navigated it with the cold lucidity of an operator who knows the difference between the product they're building and the product they're marketing. She believed — genuinely, it appears — in education, rational administration, and the possibility of creating "a new kind of person" through European-style schooling. She established schools. She founded the Smolny Institute, Russia's first state-funded higher education institution for women. By the end of her reign, an estimated 62,000 pupils were enrolled in approximately 549 state institutions — a number she cited with pride and which, set against a population of roughly thirty-six million, was an embarrassment she chose not to acknowledge.
Potemkin and the Architecture of Partnership
Every consequential leader has a lieutenant who is something more than a lieutenant — a person who functions as collaborator, mirror, counterweight, and occasionally as the more capable half of the partnership. For Catherine, this person was Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin.
Potemkin first entered Catherine's life during the coup of 1762. He was twenty-two, a young cavalry officer from minor Smolensk nobility, ten years her junior. He was physically enormous, intellectually voracious, emotionally volcanic, and possessed of one eye — the other lost, probably, in a brawl (though the exact circumstances remain disputed). Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose
Catherine the Great and Potemkin reconstructs their relationship from their astonishing correspondence, described him as "a titanic figure, a monumental man." He was everything Peter III was not: brilliant, charismatic, deeply Russian, and absolutely besotted with Catherine.
Their physical affair began in 1774 — twelve years after the coup — and lasted approximately two years. What followed was something rarer and more consequential: a political partnership that endured for seventeen years, until Potemkin's death in 1791, and that shaped the course of Russian expansion, administrative reform, and cultural development in ways that historians are still disentangling. They may have secretly married — Catherine herself hinted at it — and they certainly corresponded with an intimacy that makes their letters, discovered centuries later, read like the private language of a marriage conducted at geopolitical scale.
After the end of her liaison with Potemkin, who perhaps was her morganatic husband, the official favourite changed at least a dozen times; she chose handsome and insignificant young men, who were only, as one of them himself said, "kept girls."
The "Potemkin villages" — the phrase that survives in English to describe hollow façades — are almost certainly a slander, or at best a gross exaggeration. Potemkin governed vast swathes of southern Russia and the newly annexed Crimea. He built cities — Sevastopol, Kherson, Nikolaev — that still exist. He organized the Black Sea Fleet. He administered, badly in some ways and brilliantly in others, a territorial expansion that gave Russia access to warm-water ports for the first time in its history. The "villages" story originated with a Saxon diplomat who may not have witnessed what he described. It persists because it is a good story, and because history is unfair to people who work at the operational level while someone else gets the title.
After Potemkin, Catherine's romantic life devolved into a pattern that her critics have never tired of cataloging: a succession of young men — handsome, compliant, largely insignificant — who served as companions in a court that increasingly isolated her. She was, by her own admission, devoted to power above all else but dreamed endlessly of shared love. The contradiction was not hypocrisy. It was the tax levied on anyone who occupies absolute authority: the impossibility of genuine intimacy with a person who holds the power of life and death over everyone in the room.
The Expanding Frontier
The territorial legacy of Catherine's reign is easier to measure than any other dimension of it. At the end of her rule, Russia had absorbed more than 200,000 square miles of new territory — Crimea, large portions of Poland (through three partitions, in 1772, 1793, and 1795, conducted jointly with Prussia and Austria), and vast stretches of the Black Sea coast. The ancient Russian dream of access to the Bosporus Strait — connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean — had become, for the first time, an attainable strategic objective rather than a geopolitical fantasy.
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Territorial Expansion Under Catherine II
Key acquisitions that transformed Russia from a landlocked power into a Black Sea empire
1768–74First Russo-Turkish War; Russia gains access to the Black Sea
1772First Partition of Poland with Prussia and Austria
1783Annexation of Crimea from the Ottoman-allied Khanate
1787–92Second Russo-Turkish War; consolidation of Black Sea territories
1793Second Partition of Poland
1795Third Partition of Poland; Poland ceases to exist as an independent state
Two Russo-Turkish Wars (1768–1774 and 1787–1792) delivered the critical gains. The annexation of Crimea in 1783 — accomplished through a combination of military pressure, diplomatic maneuvering, and the installation of a compliant local ruler who was subsequently deposed — gave Russia the warm-water naval base it had coveted for centuries. The partitions of Poland, executed with the surgical cynicism that characterized eighteenth-century great-power diplomacy, erased an independent kingdom from the map of Europe and pushed Russia's western border deep into Central Europe.
Catherine's approach to expansion was not her husband's Holstein fantasy writ large. It was strategic, tied to identifiable economic and military objectives — ports, trade routes, buffer zones — and conducted with an eye to the European balance of power that Peter III had never bothered to understand. She was, in the language of a later era, building infrastructure: not just acquiring territory but integrating it into the administrative and economic architecture of the empire. New towns, roads, and naval facilities followed the advancing frontier. Potemkin, as governor-general of the south, oversaw much of this construction. The charges of fakery that attached to his name after his death were, in part, a reflection of how improbable the real achievements seemed: that a country widely regarded as backward and feudal could project power so rapidly across such vast distances.
The moral costs were significant and Catherine knew it, or should have. The partitions of Poland were an act of imperial predation that extinguished one of Europe's oldest states. The incorporation of Crimea displaced and subjugated Tatar populations. The wars with the Ottoman Empire were brutal conventional conflicts that killed tens of thousands. Catherine's correspondence with Voltaire and Diderot made no mention of these realities, not because she was unaware of them but because the Enlightenment, for all its emphasis on reason and humane governance, had never developed a consistent position on empire.
The Serf Problem and the Limits of Enlightenment
The deepest contradiction of Catherine's reign — the one that separates her from the image she cultivated and the one she might have preferred — was serfdom. Russia's economy, its military conscription system, and the entire social order of its nobility depended on the bondage of millions of human beings who were, in all but legal terminology, slaves. Catherine understood this. Her Nakaz gestured toward reform. Her correspondence with the philosophes dripped with progressive sentiment.
She did nothing.
Or rather, she did worse than nothing. Under Catherine, serfdom expanded. The demands of the state and private landowners increased. More than fifty peasant revolts occurred between 1762 and 1769 alone. In 1773, the dam broke: Yemelyan Pugachev, a Don Cossack who claimed to be the miraculously surviving Peter III, led the largest peasant rebellion in Russian history, mobilizing Cossacks, serfs, Bashkirs, and factory workers across an enormous swath of the Ural and Volga regions. It took the Russian army more than a year to suppress the uprising. Pugachev was captured, brought to Moscow in an iron cage, and executed in 1775.
Catherine's response to Pugachev was not reform. It was consolidation. In 1775, she issued a new administrative statute that divided Russia into provinces and districts, strengthening the power of local nobles — the very class that depended most on serfdom — as a bulwark against future rebellion. The Charter to the Nobility of 1785 formalized and expanded noble privileges. The Charter to the Towns of the same year created a framework for urban governance that distributed citizens into six categories, attempting to build a middle estate, but serfs remained outside the architecture entirely. They were not people, for the purposes of Catherine's Enlightenment. They were infrastructure.
This was not mere hypocrisy, though it was that too. It was the calculation of a ruler who understood that her power rested on the support of the nobility, that the nobility's wealth rested on serfdom, and that any attempt to dismantle the system would trigger a reaction that made Pugachev's rebellion look like a tavern brawl. Catherine chose stability over justice. She chose it deliberately, with full knowledge of what she was choosing, and she spent the rest of her life writing letters to French philosophers that made no mention of the choice.
The Graphomaniac on the Throne
Catherine was not a collector of art in the way that later wealthy Russians would be — impulsively, for display, as evidence of taste. She was a builder of institutions. In 1764, two years after seizing the throne, she acquired a collection of 225 paintings from the Berlin dealer Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, who had originally assembled them for Frederick the Great before Frederick ran short of funds. This purchase became the nucleus of the Hermitage Museum, which grew over the next three decades into one of the largest art collections in Europe. By her death, its holdings numbered in the thousands — paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Raphael — housed in an expanding complex of buildings adjacent to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.
But the Hermitage was only the most visible expression of a cultural program that was, in its ambition and its contradictions, characteristic of everything Catherine did. She founded the Russian Academy of Sciences on a more permanent footing. She established literary journals. She patronized Russian writers and playwrights while maintaining her primary intellectual life in French. She corresponded with virtually every important European intellectual of her era — Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert, Friedrich Melchior Grimm — in letters that combined genuine intellectual engagement with a shrewd awareness that these men served as her publicists in the courts of European opinion.
Diderot visited her in St. Petersburg in 1773. He stayed five months, meeting with her daily to discuss philosophy, governance, and his Encyclopédie. He was, by his own account, enchanted. Catherine found him stimulating but impractical. "You work only on paper, which endures all things," she reportedly told him. "I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is irritable and ticklish to a different degree." The quote, if authentic, captures the essential distance between the Enlightenment as a literary project and the Enlightenment as a governing program — a distance Catherine navigated daily and that her philosophical correspondents never had to cross.
She wrote her own memoirs — multiple drafts, across decades — in what literary historian Monika Greenleaf has called "a preemptive strike against the biographers and memoirists who were eager to write her history for her." Autobiography was an unusual genre for a monarch; royal self-presentation traditionally relied on pageantry, architecture, and mythological art. Catherine chose words instead — or rather, she chose words in addition to all the traditional apparatus, because she was not a person who believed in limiting herself to a single medium. She willed her memoirs to her son Paul, with whom she had a relationship of elaborate, icy mutual resentment, and they sat in the state archives for more than half a century before being published by Alexander Herzen, the Russian revolutionary exile, in London in 1859. They were the talk of Europe. She had known they would be.
The German Question
The fact that Russia's greatest empress was German is a paradox the country has never fully resolved. Non-Russian observers have, at various points in the last 250 years, treated Catherine's foreignness as the key to her story — she was a Western modernizer imposed on an Eastern empire, a civilizing force from the outside. Russians, who continue to regard her with enormous pride, have largely absorbed her into the national narrative, treating her conversion and her cultural immersion as a genuine transformation rather than a performance. Both interpretations miss something.
Catherine's foreignness was not incidental to her success. It was constitutive of it. Precisely because she was not born into the Russian system, she could see it clearly — its strengths, its absurdities, its points of vulnerability. She had no inherited loyalties, no faction she was obligated to protect, no ancestral grievances to avenge. She was free to be strategic in a way that native-born rulers, entangled in the webs of their own upbringing, rarely could be. Her conversion to Orthodoxy, her mastery of Russian, her adoption of Russian customs — these were not performances of belonging. They were investments, executed with the discipline of someone building a position in an unfamiliar market.
In 1763, one year into her reign, Catherine issued a manifesto inviting foreign settlers — particularly Germans — to colonize Russia's vast empty spaces, offering free land, tax exemptions, religious freedom, self-governance, and exemption from military service. Thousands came, settling first along the Volga River, later in southern Ukraine and Bessarabia. They became the Volga Germans, the Black Sea Germans, communities that would endure for more than a century before being swept away by the upheavals of the twentieth century. Catherine, the German who had made herself Russian, used Germans to make Russia more productive. The irony was structural, not accidental.
Russians continue to admire Catherine, the German, the usurper and profligate, and regard her as a source of national pride. Non-Russian opinion of Catherine is less favourable. Because Russia under her rule grew strong enough to threaten the other great powers, she figured in the Western imagination as the incarnation of the immense, backward, yet forbidding country she ruled.
The Revolution She Didn't Want
Catherine's relationship with the Enlightenment ended the way many relationships end — not with a dramatic rupture but with a slow, sickening recognition that the other party had changed, or perhaps had always been something different from what one had believed.
The French Revolution began in 1789. Catherine was sixty years old. She had been corresponding with the philosophes for a quarter century. She had styled herself as the embodiment of Enlightened governance. She had funded Diderot's library. She had exchanged letters with Voltaire until his death in 1778. She had argued, in document after document, that rational administration and enlightened monarchy were not merely compatible but necessary to each other.
And now the ideas she had championed in the abstract were being implemented in the concrete — with guillotines. The execution of Louis XVI in January 1793 horrified her. The Terror that followed — the systematic murder of aristocrats, clergy, and eventually the revolutionaries themselves — confirmed what she may have suspected but never acknowledged: that the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason, human rights, and the social contract led, when taken to its logical conclusion by people who actually meant it, to the destruction of everything she had built.
Catherine's response was sharp and comprehensive. She severed diplomatic relations with revolutionary France. She cracked down on domestic dissent with a ferocity that would have appalled her younger self. She banned the works of her old friend Voltaire. She imprisoned the journalist Nikolai Novikov. She exiled the writer Alexander Radishchev, whose A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow had criticized serfdom and autocracy in terms that, a decade earlier, would have sounded like Catherine's own Nakaz.
The woman who had invited Diderot to her palace and discussed Montesquieu's theories of governance over afternoon tea was now jailing people for expressing opinions she had once held. It was not a reversal. It was a clarification. Catherine had always been, beneath the philosophical correspondence and the Enlightenment vocabulary, an absolutist. The revolution revealed the distinction between using ideas and believing in them — or rather, between believing in ideas as instruments of governance and believing in them as principles that constrain the governor.
The Question of Succession
Catherine did not love her son Paul.
This is stated so frequently by historians that it has acquired the deadening quality of received wisdom, but the human dimensions of the estrangement deserve closer attention. Paul was taken from Catherine almost immediately after his birth in 1754 by Empress Elizabeth, who considered the heir too important to leave in the hands of his mother. Catherine was permitted to see him rarely. By the time she became empress, Paul was eight years old and essentially a stranger — a boy raised by courtiers to regard his mother, who occupied his father's throne and may have been complicit in his father's death, with a suspicion that calcified into loathing over the course of a lifetime.
Catherine's preferred heir was her eldest grandson, Alexander, whom she adored and personally supervised the education of, hiring the Swiss philosophe Frédéric-César de La Harpe as his tutor. She reportedly planned to bypass Paul entirely and name Alexander as her successor. She never did. On November 17, 1796, at the age of sixty-seven, Catherine suffered a stroke in her private apartments at the Winter Palace and died the following day. Paul inherited the throne.
He ruled for five years. He reversed many of Catherine's policies, antagonized the nobility, and was assassinated in a palace coup on March 23, 1801 — strangled by a group of officers with the tacit consent of his son Alexander, who became Alexander I and is remembered as the tsar who defeated Napoleon.
The dynasty Catherine built — not by blood, necessarily, but by the political architecture she established, the institutions she strengthened, the precedents she set — endured until 1917. The Romanovs who came after her largely adhered to the system she had designed: a system of absolutist rule moderated by collaboration with the nobility, administered through rationalized provincial governance, and legitimized through cultural patronage and military expansion. Her successors, scholars have argued, lived within the structures she created, and the Russian monarchy remained a viable form of government for more than a century after her death because the structures were sound.
Human Skin
Zoé Oldenbourg-Idalie, writing in Britannica with the careful balance of a biographer who admired her subject without sentimentalizing her, offered a final assessment that is worth quoting at length because it captures the irreducible complexity of the woman:
She was a woman of elemental energy and intellectual curiosity, desiring to create as well as to control.
The phrase "as well as" does a great deal of work in that sentence. Most rulers desire to control. A smaller number desire to create. Catherine wanted both, simultaneously, and the tension between the two impulses — between the philosopher who read Montesquieu and the autocrat who crushed Pugachev, between the patron who founded the Hermitage and the imperialist who partitioned Poland, between the woman who dreamed of shared love and the empress whose position isolated her from every human being alive — is the engine that drove her for sixty-seven years.
Her private life was, by any standard, unconventional. After Potemkin, she took at least a dozen official favorites — young men, selected largely for their appearance, whose function at court was understood by everyone, including the young men themselves. ("Kept girls," one of them called himself, with a candor that suggests either wit or resignation.) She was, as she aged, increasingly vain — a weakness she might have resisted had not the most distinguished minds of Europe competed to flatter her. In her friendships she was loyal and generous. In her enmities she was ruthless. She never forgave anyone who threatened the state, because the state and herself had become, over thirty-four years, indistinguishable.
She touched on everything, Oldenbourg-Idalie wrote, not always happily but always passionately. Construction projects. Legal codes. Art collections. Educational systems. Trade routes. Provincial administration. Military campaigns. The collection and deployment of lovers. The composition of fairy tales for her grandchildren. The annotation of philosophical treatises in the margins. The writing and rewriting of her own memoirs in multiple drafts across decades, as though the story of her life were a document that, like the Russian legal code, could always be revised into a better approximation of the ideal.
She worked on human skin, which is irritable and ticklish to a different degree.
On the morning of November 17, 1796, Catherine rose, took coffee, sat down at her writing desk, and began the day's correspondence. She collapsed in her dressing room sometime before noon. A stroke. They carried her to a mattress laid on the floor — she was too heavy, by then, to lift onto a bed. She never regained consciousness. She died the following evening, November 17, at the age of sixty-seven, in a palace she had built in a city she had transformed in a country she had entered as a stranger forty-two years before. Somewhere in the Winter Palace, stacked in cabinets and folders, were the millions of words she had written — the laws, the letters, the memoirs, the marginalia — the vast documentary architecture of a life that had been, from the very beginning, an act of authorship.
