Peter acquiesced without a fight, was imprisoned and killed a week later in shadowy circumstances. After Elizabeth died, Peter was crowned but quickly made himself unpopular, and Catherine, considering herself better fit to rule, was receptive to a coup. Peter occupied himself with drilling soldiers and missing Germany. She retreated to books, immersing herself in the works of the Enlightenment. ‘Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman’ by Robert K. Sophia obligingly gave up her Lutheran faith, embraced Russian Orthodoxy, took the name Catherine, and worked hard at becoming Russian, a transformation of little interest to Peter. The intelligent and fortuitously demure Sophia passed muster and soon married Peter, her second cousin and a difficult young man brought up in Germany (his mother had married a German prince, and both parents died when he was young) by a domineering tutor who managed to stunt him emotionally and intellectually. His story of this epic life is warm, sure and confiding, even when plowing through yet another war with the Turks.Ĭatherine was a 14-year-old small-town German princess named Sophia when she was summoned to Russia by Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, who was looking for a wife for her nephew, Peter’s grandson, Peter III.
Massie, biographer of the tsars, who brings great authority to this sweeping account of Catherine and her times.
She wrote diligently, to her lovers, to her diplomats, to friends, and left detailed memoirs, all put to good use by Robert K. She ruled for 34 years, going to bed at 10 p.m., rising at 6 a.m., drinking black coffee and getting to work, running her empire until she died of a stroke on Nov. She herself led 14,000 soldiers to arrest him, charging along on a white horse, in uniform, a sword at her side. A gown in the Kremlin Armory testifies to her amazing waist - whisper-thin when she was young.Ĭatherine the Great ascended to the Russian throne when her husband, Peter III, was removed in a coup in 1762. She rewrote Russia’s laws, expanded its borders and powers, made America’s John Paul Jones briefly an admiral in her navy and became Europe’s greatest art collector. She was pen pals with Voltaire, a hard-working single mother who always kept a lover - 12 of them over the years.
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