The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
A penniless German princess sent to Russia at fourteen with three old dresses, Catherine spent eighteen years as the unloved wife of an unfit heir, made herself more Russian than the Russians, read her way to a political education and waited; then she took the throne from her husband in a single summer day and kept it for thirty-four years by charm, patience, well-chosen partners and a close reading of opinion, preaching the Enlightenment while handing out serfs, and profiting from two deaths she never ordered and never punished.
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Critical acts
- 1
Making Herself Russian (1744)
She set out to win the Empress and the country rather than the groom. She took Russian and Orthodox lessons, "begged that her lessons be prolonged," and studied at night until she collapsed with pneumonia. Elizabeth threw her mother out of the sickroom and had the girl bled sixteen times in twenty-seven days.
- 2
The Gamble of 1758
First she cut the paper trail. She had her valet bring every document and letter she owned, threw them all into the fire, and told him: "You are a witness to the fact that all my papers and accounts are burned."
- 3
The Coup of 28 June 1762
At dawn Alexei Orlov woke her at Mon Plaisir in Peterhof: "Matushka, Little Mother, wake up! The time has come! You must get up and come with me! Everything is ready for your proclamation!" Her own account: "I no longer hesitated, but dressed hastily, without waiting to make any toilet."
- 4
Writing the *Nakaz* and Calling the Nation (1765-1768)
She spent two years writing the Instruction (Nakaz) for a commission to draft a new code: 526 articles, 294 of them taken from Montesquieu and 108 from Beccaria. She was frank about it: "like the crow in the fable, I have decked myself out in peacock's feathers," and "For the sake of my empire, I have robbed Montesquieu without mentioning him by name."
- 5
Taking the Smallpox First (1768)
She invited the Quaker doctor Thomas Dimsdale and told him at their first dinner that she wanted to be inoculated "as the best way of overcoming the fears of others." He asked to consult her physicians; she said this was unnecessary. He proposed first to inoculate other women of her age; "again, Catherine said no."
- 6
Choosing Potemkin and Letting Him Build (1774-1787)
She wrote to Potemkin that she wished "to preserve fervent, brave, clever, and skillful individuals, so I ask you not endanger yourself," and when he returned, sulked and threatened to become a monk, she told her critics that such men "were not so numerous in Russia that she could allow this one to hide in a monastery."
Maxims
Learn the language of the people who will judge you
She studied Russian at night until she nearly died of it, and the court decided she loved Russia. Her husband never did, and "passed for a foreigner" when the Guards chose between them. See "Making Herself Russian."
Please the one who holds power, not the one you'll marry
At fourteen she saw that "it was Elizabeth, not Peter, whom she had to please," and she spent eighteen years doing it.
Wear meekness like a cloak, and keep your pride underneath
"A cloak of meekness, deference, and temporary submission" carried her through her mother, the Choglokovs and Peter III.
When cornered, ask to leave
In 1758 she begged to be sent home, knowing the Empress could not afford to let her go. "Catherine was certain now that she would not be sent away." See "The Gamble of 1758."
Burn the letters before they are read
When Bestuzhev fell she burned every paper she owned, and had her valet watch her do it so he could swear to it.
Part IThe Story
At ten on the night of June 28, 1762 (July 9 by the Western calendar), a thirty-three-year-old woman in a borrowed Guards uniform rode out of St. Petersburg at the head of some fourteen thousand soldiers to arrest her husband, the Emperor of All Russia, who had reigned for six months. That afternoon he had arrived at Peterhof to celebrate his name day and found her pavilion empty, with only the gala dress she was to have worn laid out for the occasion. Alexei Orlov, her lover's brother, had woken her there at five that morning, driven her to the Izmailovsky barracks, where at first there were "only twelve men and a drummer," and by noon she had been proclaimed autocrat in the Kazan Cathedral. 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 Russia at the age of fourteen with "three old dresses, a dozen chemises, some pairs of stockings, and a few handkerchiefs" and an instinct for survival that bordered on the pathological. The next morning her husband signed his abdication. A week 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, trying to rewrite 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
1763Year she bought the 225 paintings that began the Hermitage
~62,000Pupils educated in state institutions by end of reign
12Lovers across her whole life, by Montefiore's count
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 told the girl she was ugly, made her kneel and kiss the hems of visiting ladies, and lavished attention on Sophie's sickly younger brother Wilhelm Christian, who would die at twelve. Sophie, the girl no one particularly wanted, was raised largely by a Huguenot governess, Babet Cardel. Massie traces a lifelong tactic to these years: "Threatened, she drew around herself a cloak of meekness, deference, and temporary submission."
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. Elizabeth had specified that her father "shall under no circumstances take part in the journey." She was fourteen 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. Within weeks, Massie writes, she had grasped "first, that it was Elizabeth, not Peter, whom she had to please; and, second, that if she wanted to succeed in this new country, she must learn its language and practice its religious faith."
She rose at night to walk barefoot on the cold floor memorizing Russian words, and caught pneumonia. The servants spread the story that "the little foreign princess loved Russia so much that now she was lying at death's door because she had risen from bed every night in order to learn the Russian language more quickly!" When her mother proposed a Lutheran pastor for the sickbed, Sophie whispered, "Why do that? Call Simon Todorsky instead," naming her Orthodox tutor, and "Elizabeth, hearing this, burst into tears." Massie cannot decide whether this was luck or presence of mind; her memoirs admit she sometimes feigned sleep to eavesdrop. By her fifteenth birthday, "Russians had begun to think of her as a Russian." Late in life, in a mock epitaph, she wrote the plan down: "At the age of fourteen, she made the threefold resolution to please her husband, Elizabeth, and the nation. She neglected nothing in trying to achieve this." 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, quotes her verdict after ten days in his company: he "cared little for the nation over which he was destined to rule, that he remained a convinced Lutheran, did not like his entourage, and was very childish. I kept silent and listened which helped gain his confidence."
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, "matters remained in this state without the slightest change during the following 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 — Catherine turned to books the way a drowning person turns to anything that floats.
The heir came by order of the state. When Elizabeth learned that "nothing had happened yet," the governess, Madame Choglokova, offered the Grand Duchess a choice of lovers, as Catherine's memoirs record: "I leave you to choose between Sergius Soltikoff and Leon Narichkine." Sergei Saltykov, "handsome as the dawn," was already her lover. Paul was born in 1754 and immediately taken from her by the empress. Massie calls Saltykov "almost certainly Paul's father"; Montefiore is warier, noting that "she had every reason to belittle Peter and she later considered disinheriting Paul."
She read a ten-volume history of Germany at "a volume every week" and Bayle's Dictionnaire "from beginning to end." In the winter after Paul's birth came Voltaire, Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws and Tacitus, which "caused a singular revolution in my brain," she wrote; "I began to take gloomier views of things, and to look for more hidden and interested motives in the occurrences around me." 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.
— Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a WomanBooks were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French was the language she preferred, and she read French books indiscriminately, picking up whatever her ladies-in-waiting happened to be reading. She always kept a book in her room and carried another in her pocket.
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. On the throne, Massie writes, she tried "to create a government in which efficiency was guided by intelligence; in short, a benevolent despotism." 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. As empress she rose at six (Montefiore says seven) and worked alone for hours before the court stirred. Plays, legislation, letters, marginalia, fairy tales, memoirs. Montefiore notes that she "wrote furiously in her own hand" and had her own name for it, graphomania, a word that 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 Christmas Day 1761 (January 5, 1762, by the Western calendar). 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. At a banquet of four hundred he shouted "Dura!" ("fool") at his wife across the table, and that night ordered her arrest, then cancelled the order. She "bore this public humiliation with dignity and resignation," Massie writes. "But this was a façade." She was secretly pregnant by her lover, and when the child was born in April her valet set fire to his own house, knowing the Emperor "loved fires," so that the court would be watching the blaze.
Catherine, who had spent eighteen years preparing for precisely this moment, moved with a speed that still startles historians. The conspiracy had three strands that barely knew one another. One ran 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. The second was Nikita Panin, Paul's guardian, who wanted the boy as emperor. The third was the nineteen-year-old Princess Dashkova.
On the evening of June 27 one plotter, Captain Passek, was arrested, and the others feared he would be tortured into talking. At five the next morning Alexei Orlov woke Catherine in the pavilion of Mon Plaisir at Peterhof: "Matushka, Little Mother, wake up! The time has come!" She dressed, she wrote, "without waiting to make any toilet." At the Izmailovsky barracks the regiment swore allegiance. Then the Semyonovsky Guards. Then, in the Kazan Cathedral, she was proclaimed autocrat. The Preobrazhensky Guards wavered and came over. When Peter's chancellor arrived to remonstrate, she led him onto a balcony above the crowd. "Deliver your message to them, sir," she said. "It is they who command here. I only obey." 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 at ten that night rode toward Peterhof at the head of fourteen thousand troops.
Peter dithered at Peterhof, then sailed for the fortress of Kronstadt, where the sentries shouted, "We no longer have an emperor!" He offered to share the throne; she did not reply. He offered to abdicate, and she said, "I accept the offer but I must have the abdication in writing." Frederick later said he let himself be dethroned "like a child being sent to bed." He was taken to Ropsha, a country estate, under Alexei Orlov. On July 6 (July 17 in the West), his seventh day there, a rider brought Catherine a note in Orlov's drunken scrawl: "Matushka, he is no more. But no one intended it so." The manifesto blamed "a severe attack of hemorrhoidal colic." Massie thinks Peter was strangled, perhaps in a drunken quarrel, and that Catherine "would seem to have been innocent. However, she was not blameless," since she had put him in the hands of a man who hated him. Montefiore is harsher: "There was no mistake in his murder," and "She cannot have been surprised." Nobody was punished. Thirty-four years later Paul made Alexei Orlov walk behind Peter's coffin carrying the crown.
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: "Humanity itself cries out against it, and demands it to be utterly abolished." Of its 526 articles, 294 came from Montesquieu and 108 from Beccaria, and she said so: "For the sake of my empire, I have robbed Montesquieu without mentioning him by name." In its original form it proposed that serfs might buy their freedom. Panin warned, "These are axioms which will bring down walls." She showed the draft to the Senate: "I let them erase what they pleased and they struck out more than half of what I had written."
Voltaire declared that neither Lycurgus nor Solon "would have been capable of its creation." France banned it. The 564 delegates began by debating what title to give her. When the poet Sumarokov claimed that landowners lived quietly on their estates, she wrote in the margin: "And have their throats cut from time to time." 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, and "The Legislative Commission never met again." Massie defends the exercise as "the first attempt in imperial Russia to give the people a voice," but its practical lesson for Catherine, he concedes, was that it "reinforced Catherine's conviction that the stability of Russia depended on maintaining the absolute authority of the autocracy." 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, when the young Guardsman gave her a sword-knot. He was twenty-two, from minor Smolensk nobility, ten years her junior. He was physically enormous, intellectually voracious, emotionally volcanic, and possessed of one eye. The legend that the Orlov brothers beat him up over billiards is one Montefiore doubts; another has him hurting it at tennis and a quack's ointment burning it out. Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose Catherine the Great and Potemkin reconstructs their relationship from their astonishing correspondence, writes that "Everything about him was exaggerated, colossal and original." 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. On June 8, 1774, she crossed the Neva at night to the St Sampsonovsky Church, where, by the legend Montefiore accepts, they were married before two witnesses. She called him "dear husband" in at least twenty-two letters, and the two ran a government on paper, correcting each other's drafts with agreed marks: "We ask you to put + near the articles and it will mean you agree." Their letters read like the private language of a marriage conducted at geopolitical scale.
— Zoé Oldenbourg-Idalie, BritannicaAfter 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."
Britannica's "at least a dozen" after Potemkin overcounts. Montefiore puts the total for her whole life at twelve, Orlov and Potemkin included: "we know that Catherine had at least twelve lovers, hardly the army of which she stands accused."
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 the Saxon envoy Georg von Helbig, "who was not on the journey" of 1787. Massie points out that "no one has produced any evidence" that the eyewitnesses lied, and Montefiore finds "absolutely no evidence in Potemkin's own orders or in the accounts of eye-witnesses for the 'Potemkin Villages.'" He concedes the theatre ("Potemkin beautified and ornamented everything that he could") and admits that in Kharkov and Tula, off Potemkin's route, "the governors did conceal things from her and may have built false houses." The story 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. Each was gazetted as adjutant-general, found "a large bundle of rubles" in his dressing-table drawer, and left with a fortune: "On parting, almost all received extravagant gifts; none experienced vindictiveness." When the gentle Lanskoy died in 1784 she shut herself away for three weeks and wrote to Grimm: "I have become a desperate, monosyllabic creature. I drag myself about like a shadow." To Potemkin she explained herself: "The trouble is only that my heart cannot be content even for an hour without 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
1768–74
First Russo-Turkish War; Russia gains access to the Black Sea
1772
First Partition of Poland with Prussia and Austria
1783
Annexation of Crimea from the Ottoman-allied Khanate
1787–92
Second Russo-Turkish War; consolidation of Black Sea territories
1793
Second Partition of Poland
1795
Third 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 khan who then abdicated — 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 tied to identifiable objectives — ports, trade routes, buffer zones — and new towns, roads, and naval facilities followed the advancing frontier, much of it built under Potemkin as governor-general of the south. She gave him rescripts so hedged with conditions, Montefiore writes, "that both knew that he was really free to pull off his prize if he could get away with it."
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, and for the last of them she proposed the most extreme solution on the table: "to subdivide the entire remaining territory of Poland and thereby simply erase this dangerous neighbor from the map." When Suvorov stormed Praga, "the whole of Praga was strewn with bodies, and blood was flowing in streams." Potemkin told her to "write down this annexation, unempurpled with blood," though Montefiore records that the Russians had killed four hundred Crimean rebels "rather wantonly" the year before. At Ismail alone, his best estimate is that 26,000 Turks died. 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. In her first month on the throne she gave away "no fewer than eighteen thousand crown and state peasants" to the men who had made her empress. When a noblewoman was found to have killed 138 of her serfs, Montefiore notes, "the Empress, who depended on noble support, had to punish the maneater carefully." 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. In July 1774 he burned Kazan. It took the Russian army more than a year to suppress the uprising. Pugachev was betrayed by his own lieutenants and brought to Moscow "inside an iron cage not large enough to allow him to stand." Catherine ordered, "For God's sake, refrain from all questioning under torture which always obscures the truth." The court sentenced him to be quartered alive; her procurator-general, knowing she would not accept it, had the executioner behead him first, to the fury of the watching nobles. He died in January 1775, and she consigned "all that has passed to eternal oblivion and profound silence."
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. "There would be no further talk of eliminating serfdom," Massie writes, and the Nakaz "became no more than a memory."
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 1763, a year after seizing the throne, she bought a collection of 225 paintings from a Berlin dealer who had assembled them for Frederick the Great before Frederick, ruined by the Seven Years' War, decided he could not afford them. Massie detects "an element of spite" in the purchase. This became the nucleus of the Hermitage Museum. In 1771 she bought the Crozat collection, with eight Rembrandts and a dozen Rubens, and the Hermitage 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 bought Diderot's library for more than he asked and left it with him for life ("It would be cruel to separate a scholar from his books"), and knew what it bought her: "I never thought that buying Diderot's library would bring me so many compliments." 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, and she sat with him for sixty afternoons to discuss philosophy, governance, and his Encyclopédie. He was, by his own account, enchanted. Catherine found him stimulating but impractical. His plans, she told him, "would do splendidly in books and very badly in practice," for "you work only on paper which accepts anything… while I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more sensitive and touchy." The line 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." 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 1859. Herzen wanted them to prove that "the father of the Emperor Paul is Sergius Soltikoff." They stop in 1759, three years before her accession, and they are self-justifying throughout: they blacken Peter, flatter her own judgement and explain her lovers. 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. 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. Her conversion to Orthodoxy, her mastery of Russian, her adoption of Russian customs were investments, executed with the discipline of someone building a position in an unfamiliar market. Her husband never made them, and she knew what that cost him: "Hatred of foreigners was the chief factor in the whole affair and Peter III passed for a foreigner."
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.
— Britannica, on Catherine's legacyRussians 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, had funded Diderot's library, and had exchanged letters with Voltaire until his death in 1778.
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. Already in 1790, a year after the Bastille fell, she had read Alexander Radishchev's A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, an indictment of serfdom that proposed a gradual emancipation not far from the one she had cut from her own Nakaz. She filled its margins: its author was "infected and filled with the French madness," "a rabble-rouser, worse than Pugachev." He was condemned to death. She "did what she always did," Massie writes, and commuted the sentence to ten years in Siberia.
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. Massie's judgment is flat: "Through the next forty-two years of their shared existence, she was never able to feel or display toward him the warmth of a mother's affection." By the time she became empress, Paul was seven 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. When Paul wept for his first wife, dead in childbirth, Catherine "chose a cruel remedy": she broke into the dead woman's desk and "thrust the pages under Paul's eyes" of her love letters to his best friend.
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 16, 1796 (November 5 in the Russian calendar), at the age of sixty-seven, Catherine suffered a stroke in her private apartments at the Winter Palace and died the following night. 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: legal codes, art collections, provincial administration, military campaigns, fairy tales for her grandchildren, and her own memoirs, rewritten across decades as though the story of her life could always be revised into a better approximation of the ideal.
She worked on human skin, which is far more sensitive and touchy.
On the evening of November 4, 1796, by the Russian calendar, Lev Naryshkin, who had once been offered to her as a possible father for her heir, clowned for her as a peddler hawking trinkets, and she laughed so hard that she went to bed early. The next morning she rose at six, drank black coffee, and sat down to write. At nine she went into her dressing room and did not come out. Her valet found her unconscious on the floor. A stroke. Too heavy to lift onto her high bed, she was laid on a leather mattress on the floor. She never regained consciousness. She died at 9:45 the following night, November 6 (November 17 in the West), at the age of sixty-seven, in the Winter Palace, in a city she had transformed in a country she had entered as a stranger fifty-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.
Part IIThe Playbook
Catherine the Great's reign offers a remarkably coherent set of operating principles for anyone attempting to build, lead, or transform an institution under conditions of uncertainty and contested legitimacy. She is one of the figures in The Anatomy of Greatness. What follows are twelve principles distilled from her thirty-four years of rule — not as historical curiosities, but as tactical lessons that remain applicable to founders, executives, and leaders operating in environments where the right to lead must be earned and re-earned continuously.
The principles
- 1.When you have no legitimacy, manufacture it from first principles.
- 2.Master the language before you attempt to lead the conversation.
- 3.Use your outsider status as an analytical advantage.
- 4.Read not for knowledge but for a framework of action.
- 5.Move faster than anyone believes possible when the window opens.
- 6.Build the narrative layer as aggressively as the operational layer.
- 7.Hire one indispensable partner, not a committee of adequate ones.
- 8.Distinguish between the product you're building and the product you're marketing.
- 9.Use cultural investment as a strategic instrument, not a vanity project.
- 10.Know which reforms to fight for and which to concede to the structure.
- 11.Write your own story before someone else writes it for you.
- 12.Build systems that outlast your tenure.
Principle 1
When you have no legitimacy, manufacture it from first principles
Catherine had no hereditary claim to the Russian throne. She was not a Romanov. She was not Russian. She was the wife of a man who was himself an inadequate heir. Every other monarch of her era inherited the right to rule as a birthright. Catherine had to construct hers — from her conversion to Orthodoxy, her mastery of Russian customs, her cultivation of military support, and her philosophical correspondence — assembled piece by piece over eighteen years until the construction was solid enough to bear the weight of an empire.
The parallel to founding a company in a market where you have no track record, no network, and no obvious right to win is not exact, but it is instructive. Legitimacy, when it cannot be inherited, must be built from the materials at hand: demonstrated competence, strategic relationships, and a narrative that explains why you, specifically, deserve to be in charge. Catherine's genius was understanding that legitimacy is not a credential you present once but a claim you reinforce daily through every action, every appointment, every public statement.
Tactic: If you lack the conventional credentials for your position, identify the three to five specific actions that will make your authority self-evident, and execute them before anyone has time to question your right to be there.
Principle 2
Master the language before you attempt to lead the conversation
Catherine arrived in Russia speaking French and German. She immediately began learning Russian — not conversational Russian, but deep structural fluency: the idiom, the court language, the religious liturgy, the literary tradition. She never spoke it without an accent. She wrote in it well enough to produce legislation, drama, and political theory. This was not a gesture of politeness. It was a precondition of power.
Every organization, every industry, every institution has its own language — the technical vocabulary, the cultural references, the inside jokes, the unspoken assumptions. Outsiders who attempt to lead without mastering this language are identified immediately as tourists. Catherine understood that fluency — even imperfect fluency — signals commitment that no amount of strategic positioning can substitute for.
Tactic: Before attempting to lead or transform any organization, invest disproportionate time in mastering its internal language, its unwritten norms, and its cultural shorthand — even if you intend to change all of them.
Principle 3
Use your outsider status as an analytical advantage
Catherine's foreignness was, in the conventional wisdom of her court, a liability. She turned it into her primary strategic asset. Because she was not born into the Russian system, she could observe its inefficiencies, its absurdities, and its points of leverage with a clarity that insiders — embedded in the web of inherited loyalties and assumptions — could not achieve. She had no faction to protect, no ancestral grudges to settle, no unconscious attachment to the way things had always been done.
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The Outsider's Advantage
How Catherine's foreign perspective reframed Russian governance
| Insider assumption | Catherine's reframe |
|---|---|
| Legitimacy requires bloodline | Legitimacy requires demonstrated competence and institutional support |
| Russian governance follows Russian traditions | Russian governance can be rationalized using European Enlightenment principles |
| The military serves the monarch | The military's support must be actively cultivated and maintained |
| Cultural patronage is aristocratic ornament | Cultural patronage is a strategic instrument of state legitimacy |
Catherine's Enlightenment reading was not a hobby. It was an alternative operating system imported from a different intellectual culture and installed, with modifications, on Russian hardware.
Tactic: If you are an outsider entering a new organization or industry, resist the temptation to downplay your difference. Instead, systematically catalog the assumptions that insiders take for granted and identify which ones are load-bearing and which are merely inherited.
Principle 4
Read not for knowledge but for a framework of action
Catherine's reading habits during her eighteen years as Grand Duchess were not the idle cultivation of a bored aristocrat. They were the deliberate construction of an intellectual architecture that would support the exercise of power. She read Montesquieu not to understand political theory in the abstract but to develop a theory of governance that she could implement. Tacitus taught her "to look for more hidden and interested motives in the occurrences around me." Once on the throne she added Beccaria, not to appreciate legal philosophy but to draft criminal law reform: 108 articles of the Nakaz came from him. Her own mock epitaph made the point: "Eighteen years of boredom and loneliness gave her the opportunity to read many books."
The distinction between reading for knowledge and reading for a framework of action is one that separates effective leaders from well-informed observers. Knowledge accumulates. Frameworks direct. Catherine's Nakaz — whatever its practical shortcomings — was the direct product of a reading program that had a specific strategic objective: to produce the document that would justify and guide her rule.
Tactic: For every book, essay, or body of research you engage with, ask: "What decision does this help me make? What framework does this give me that I don't currently have?" If the answer is "none," the reading may be pleasurable but it is not strategic.
Principle 5
Move faster than anyone believes possible when the window opens
The coup of June 28, 1762, took barely a day. Catherine went from being woken at five in the morning at Peterhof to proclamation in the Kazan Cathedral by noon and to the head of fourteen thousand troops by ten at night; Peter signed his abdication the next morning. She had prepared for eighteen years. She executed in a single day.
The lesson is not "be patient." Catherine was patient when patience was the correct strategy. The lesson is that preparation and execution operate on fundamentally different timescales, and the transition between them must be instantaneous. The window for Peter III's overthrow was narrow — his policies were alienating the military, but coalitions shift, loyalties realign, and hesitation in a moment of institutional crisis is fatal. Catherine did not convene a committee. She did not seek consensus. She did not even choose the moment: Captain Passek's arrest the evening before forced it, and the plotters moved within hours, before torture could make him talk. She seized the moment she was given and moved so fast that opposition could not organize.
Tactic: Spend years preparing for the decisive moment, then execute in hours. The bias should always be toward speed once the decision to act has been made — delay compounds risk faster than it improves information.
Principle 6
Build the narrative layer as aggressively as the operational layer
Catherine's correspondence with Voltaire, Diderot, and the leading intellectuals of Europe was not a side project. It was a core strategic initiative — the eighteenth-century equivalent of a public relations and investor relations operation conducted at the highest level. By cultivating relationships with the men who shaped European opinion, she ensured that the narrative of her reign was written, in real time, by her allies rather than her enemies.
Voltaire called her the "Semiramis of the North" and the Nakaz "the finest monument of the age." The narrative Catherine constructed — of a rational, enlightened monarch modernizing a vast empire — was not entirely accurate, but it was compelling, and it provided a framework within which her actual decisions could be interpreted favorably. Military aggression became "expansion." Autocratic control became "administrative reform." The gap between aspiration and reality was bridged by an army of Europe's finest writers, enlisted voluntarily through the irresistible combination of flattery, intellectual engagement, and imperial patronage.
Tactic: Identify the five to ten most influential voices in your domain and invest in genuine relationships with them before you need favorable coverage. The narrative layer must be built in advance of the events it will frame.
Principle 7
Hire one indispensable partner, not a committee of adequate ones
Catherine's relationship with Potemkin was not a romance that happened to have political consequences. It was a partnership deliberately structured to combine complementary capabilities at the highest level. Catherine provided vision, legitimacy, diplomatic skill, and the intellectual framework. Potemkin provided operational execution, military leadership, administrative energy, and an understanding of Russia's southern frontier that Catherine, from St. Petersburg, could not possess.
Their partnership lasted seventeen years and produced the annexation of Crimea, the development of Russia's Black Sea coast, the construction of the Black Sea Fleet, and the administrative integration of vast new territories. No committee could have done this. Joseph II saw why she could not drop him: "The empress of Russia does not wish to part with him, and for a thousand reasons." Stalin, of all people, said: "Her greatness lay in her choice of Prince Potemkin and other such talented lovers and officials to govern the State." The speed, the flexibility, the willingness to take risks, the ability to communicate in shorthand — all depended on the trust and complementarity that only a genuine partnership provides.
Tactic: Find one person whose capabilities are genuinely complementary to yours — not similar — and invest in that relationship with the depth and seriousness you would bring to a marriage. A single extraordinary partnership outperforms a dozen adequate hires.
Principle 8
Distinguish between the product you're building and the product you're marketing
Catherine's Nakaz proposed Enlightenment governance. Her actual policies expanded serfdom. The Legislative Commission discussed rational reform. The provincial administration strengthened noble power. The gap between these two realities was not accidental. It was the operating model.
Catherine understood — in a way that the philosophes she corresponded with never had to — that the governing product she was building (a stable, expanding empire administered through rationalized provincial structures) and the governing product she was marketing (an Enlightened monarchy guided by philosophical principles) were different things that served different audiences. The marketing attracted European intellectual support, discouraged foreign interference, and provided an aspirational narrative for domestic reformers. The product maintained the loyalty of the nobility, sustained the economic system, and preserved internal stability.
This is not cynicism. It is the recognition that institutional transformation occurs at a different pace than narrative transformation, and that the narrative must run ahead of the reality to create the space for the reality to evolve. Catherine's schools educated 62,000 students in a nation of 36 million — a fraction — but the story of the schools mattered as much as the schools themselves, because stories create expectations, and expectations create pressure, and pressure, over time, creates change.
Tactic: Be clear-eyed about the difference between your aspiration and your current capability. Communicate the aspiration to your market and your stakeholders. Deliver the capability to your operations. The gap between them is not hypocrisy — it is the space in which transformation occurs.
Principle 9
Use cultural investment as a strategic instrument, not a vanity project
The Hermitage Museum was not a personal art collection. It was a statement of geopolitical intent. When Catherine purchased 225 paintings that Frederick the Great could not afford, the message was not aesthetic — it was economic and political. Russia could now buy what Prussia could not. The culture of Europe's most sophisticated courts was relocating, voluntarily, to St. Petersburg.
Every subsequent cultural investment — the literary journals, the educational institutions, the patronage of Russian writers and scientists, the invitation to Diderot — served the same strategic function. Catherine was not decorating a court. She was constructing the cultural infrastructure that would make Russia legible to Europe as a civilized power rather than a feudal backwater. Culture was the interface layer between Russia's internal reality and Europe's perception of it.
Tactic: Treat investment in culture, education, or intellectual capital not as overhead but as strategic infrastructure. The returns are measured not in direct revenue but in the credibility, talent attraction, and institutional resilience that compound over decades.
Principle 10
Know which reforms to fight for and which to concede to the structure
Catherine wanted to reform serfdom. She did not do it. This is often cited as her greatest failure, and on moral grounds the criticism is unanswerable. On strategic grounds, the calculus was different. The nobility's support was the foundation of Catherine's power. The nobility's wealth depended on serfdom. Reforming serfdom would have triggered a reaction — not from serfs, but from nobles — that could have ended her reign and replaced her with someone far less inclined toward any reform at all.
She explained the method to Diderot as a maxim: "What I despair of overthrowing, I undermine." Late in life she told Potemkin's secretary that "they will not obey blindly when orders are not adapted to the opinion of the people." Catherine chose to reform what she could — provincial administration, urban governance, education, the legal code, cultural institutions — and to leave untouched the structural foundation that made her reforms possible. This is the decision that every transformative leader eventually faces: the recognition that the system you are trying to change is also the system that keeps you in power, and that destroying the foundation to improve the building is not reform but suicide.
The Pugachev rebellion demonstrated what happened when the structural tensions she was managing exploded. She responded by strengthening the structure, not by reforming it. This was the correct tactical decision. Whether it was the correct moral decision is a question history has not resolved.
Tactic: Identify the three structural elements of your organization that, if changed, would trigger existential resistance from your most critical stakeholders. Sequence your reforms to strengthen your position before you attempt to change these load-bearing elements — or accept that some reforms may not be achievable in your tenure.
Principle 11
Write your own story before someone else writes it for you
Catherine wrote memoirs — multiple drafts, across decades. She wrote plays. She wrote legislation. She wrote hundreds of letters to the most influential minds in Europe. She wrote fairy tales for her grandchildren. She annotated other people's books in the margins. She was, by every measure, the most prolific writing monarch of her era, and the volume was not coincidental. It was strategic.
A ruler who does not control her own narrative is at the mercy of those who do. Catherine's enemies — and she had many — generated a steady stream of calumny: sexual rumors, accusations of illegitimacy, charges of murder. Her response was not to deny the rumors but to flood the zone with an alternative narrative so voluminous, so intellectually sophisticated, and so widely distributed through the most prestigious channels in Europe that the rumors, while they never disappeared, could never dominate.
Literary historian Monika Greenleaf described Catherine's memoirs as "a preemptive strike against the biographers and memoirists who were eager to write her history for her." The phrase applies equally to her entire literary output. She was not writing for posterity, though posterity was on her mind. She was writing for the present — shaping the informational environment in which decisions about her reign were evaluated.
Tactic: If you are building something consequential, write about it yourself — publicly, frequently, and with enough intellectual depth that your version of the story becomes the default frame through which others interpret your actions.
Principle 12
Build systems that outlast your tenure
Catherine's greatest achievement was not any single policy, military victory, or cultural acquisition. It was the administrative system she established — the provincial structure, the charters, the rationalized governance framework — that endured for more than a century after her death and provided the institutional skeleton of the Russian Empire until 1917.
Her successors, including her unloved son Paul and her adored grandson Alexander I, governed within the system she had designed, and it proved robust enough to survive multiple regime changes and a Napoleonic invasion.
This is the difference between a leader who builds for their own tenure and a leader who builds for the institution. Catherine's personal charisma, her intellectual gifts, her political cunning — these died with her. The systems she built did not. The test of any leader is not what they achieve while in power but what survives after they leave.
Tactic: For every major decision, ask: "Does this depend on me being here to work, or will it function independently of my presence?" Prioritize the latter. The systems you build are worth more than the decisions you make.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Legitimacy is constructed, not inherited. When you cannot claim authority by birthright, build it through demonstrated competence, strategic alliances, and a narrative compelling enough to make the question of origin irrelevant.
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Learn the language before you lead the institution. Fluency — in the literal and cultural sense — is the prerequisite for credibility; without it, every directive sounds like a foreign accent.
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Eighteen years of preparation, one day of execution. The asymmetry between the time spent building readiness and the time spent acting is the signature of consequential leadership.
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The outsider sees what the insider cannot. Inherited assumptions are invisible to those who inherit them; the person who arrives from outside carries the gift of structural clarity.
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Reading is a weapon when aimed at action. Philosophy becomes power only when translated into frameworks that guide decisions, not when accumulated as intellectual ornament.
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Build the narrative before you need it. The informational environment in which your actions are judged is as important as the actions themselves; cede control of the story and you cede control of perception.
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One extraordinary partnership outperforms a dozen adequate hires. Find the person whose capabilities complement rather than mirror your own, and invest in that relationship with the seriousness of a co-founding.
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Distinguish between the reform you want and the reform the structure can absorb. Attempting to change the foundation before securing your position on it is not courage; it is recklessness.
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Culture is infrastructure. Investments in art, education, and intellectual life are not overhead costs but the interface layer through which an institution communicates its seriousness to the world.
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Write your own story or someone else will. The volume, quality, and strategic placement of your narrative output determines whether history judges you on your terms or on your enemies' terms.
In Their Own Words
The laws ought to be so framed as to secure the safety of every citizen as much as possible.
Political liberty does not consist in the notion that a man may do whatever he pleases; liberty is the right to do whatsoever the laws allow.
Happiness and unhappiness are in the heart and spirit of each one of us: If you feel unhappy, then place yourself above that and act so that your happiness does not get to be dependent on anything.
You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.
Nothing is more difficult, in my opinion, than to avoid something that fundamentally attracts you.
The more a man knows, the more he forgives.
In politics a capable ruler must be guided by circumstances, conjectures and conjunctions.
A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.
I sincerely want peace, not because I lack resources for war, but because I hate bloodshed.
One does not always do the best there is. One does the best one can.
It is better to inspire a reform than to enforce it.
Power without a nation's confidence is nothing.
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.— Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman
I shall be an autocrat: that's my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that's his.— Catherine the Great, on governance
You work only on paper, which endures all things. I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is irritable and ticklish to a different degree.— Catherine the Great, reportedly to Diderot
I did not care about Russia; what I did care about was the crown.— Catherine the Great, from her memoirs
She was a woman of elemental energy and intellectual curiosity, desiring to create as well as to control.— Zoé Oldenbourg-Idalie, on Catherine
