Catherine II of Russia (Catherine the Great)
Catherine II was a minor German princess who took the Russian throne from her own husband and held it for thirty-four years. She was born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst in 1729, brought to Russia at fourteen to marry the heir, converted to Orthodoxy, learned the language, and spent eighteen years in a miserable marriage reading Montesquieu, Voltaire and Tacitus. Peter III succeeded in January 1762, spent six months alienating the guards, the church and the army — including making peace with Prussia at the moment of victory because he admired Frederick — and was deposed by a conspiracy in July and killed within days. Catherine had no hereditary claim of any kind. She governed as an enlightened absolutist in the terms of her century: a legislative commission summoned in 1767 with an instruction she wrote herself out of Montesquieu and Beccaria, provincial administration reformed, a charter of rights for the nobility, smallpox inoculation demonstrated on her own person, schools, and the Hermitage collection. The commission produced no code. Pugachev's rising of 1773, in which some 30,000 people died, ended her interest in reforming serfdom, which she extended to Ukraine instead. The territorial record is the one that lasted: two wars with the Ottomans brought the Black Sea coast and Crimea, and three partitions removed Poland from the map. She corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot for decades and bought the latter's library. She died in 1796, and the horse story is a slander invented in France. Her reign is the clearest case of the enlightened despot's limit. She read every reforming author of the century, corresponded with them, wrote a legislative instruction out of them, and left serfdom heavier than she found it because the nobility she depended on would not have it otherwise.
- Lived: 1729 CE – 1796 CE
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: empress, ruler, patron_of_the_arts, writer
