Catherine the Great

We've arrived at entry #61 in project #EuropeanBios, Catherine the Great, and I gotta say I've read about a lot of people called The Great and few live up to the title but Catherine most certainly does. She went from being a German teenager with a stage mom to Empress of Russia.

We must start, as we surprisingly frequently have to do, by correcting her name. "Catherine" was sort of her stage name, adopted when she swapped religions in order to marry into the Russian royal family. She was born Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst in 1729. I'll be calling her Sophie.

Anhalt-where? Oh yeah, nowhere near Russia. Middle of Germany. Her mom and dad were very minor German nobility. Her father was a military general stationed in quiet town in the middle of nowhere, her mother was a social climber who was bored out of her mind by the quiet town.

Desperate to find some ticket out of her backwater town, her own life ambitions thwarted, Sophie's mom Johanna became the ultimate "stage mom", attempting to live vicariously through her daughter by arranging a marriage to someone rich and important. She cultivated her contacts.

One of these contacts was the Empress of Russia, Elizabeth. The last time we were in Russia it was being ruled by Peter the Great, who died in 1725, a few years before Sophie was born. Since then Russia had gone through quite a few monarchs.

To recap: Peter The Great died and left Russia to his wife Catherine. She died and left it to Peter's 11 year old son by an earlier marriage, Peter 2. He died 3 years later. He had no heir so it went back up the line to the daughter of Peter's half-brother Ivan, Anna.

Anna died 10 years later, also with no heir, so scraping the bottom the barrel they found her grand-nephew, Ivan 6, who was all of 2 months old at the time. The infant emperor "ruled" for just a year before Peter the Great's second daughter, Elizabeth, deposed him in a coup.

This left Elizabeth de facto in charge but not *legally* in charge. Baby Ivan had been named emperor and was still alive; when he grew up he could claim the throne. This possibility terrified Elizabeth her entire life. She put Ivan and his mother in prison, forever.

This is relevant because it meant Elizabeth was really keen on having a strong, attractive, qualified successor in place as soon as possible. But unmarried and with no children, she didn't have one, so she dug up a nephew, Peter 3. It's complicated; here's a diagram.

A minor snag in this plan is that Peter 3 didn't live in Russia, he lived in Holstein, Germany, in fact not too far away from Sophie. He also didn't speak Russian, didn't like Russia, and was notably stupid. But Peter was who she had, and Elizabeth was determined to make it work.

Peter didn't help matters at all. He never warmed to Russian language or culture. In addition to being emperor of Russia he remained Prince of Holstein in Germany, and he never disguised the fact that his tiny German home region was far more important to him than all of Russia.

Recognizing the inherent weakness of her chosen heir to the throne of Russia being a German teenager who was mentally incapable of being emperor of anything and in any case didn't want the job, Elizabeth determined to get him to produce an heir and raise *that* child as Russian.

So Elizabeth dug through whatever the 18th century equivalent of her inbox was and found letters from Sophie's mom, not-so-subtly hinting that her teenaged daughter was attractive and available for wedding to whatever nobleman needed an heir. Great! She summoned them to Russia.

Sophie's mom Johanna's dreams of a glamorous future via her daughter had been wildly exceeded and she responded by getting totally carried away. She made it the Johanna Show, featuring Sophie. At their first meeting with Elizabeth she didn't even bother to bring Sophie along.

Sophie had no agency in this at all. In fact, Johanna initially didn't even inform her why she was being carted off to Russia in haste. Once there, she met Peter and was very disappointed in him, but being informed that being empress of Russia was part of the deal she agreed.

Sophie agreed to marry a physically unattractive, mentally and emotionally immature man who showed no interest in her. Ambition for the throne clearly played a part, but also living in her backwater she hadn't had many options anyway; her prior love interest had been her uncle.

Also part of the deal: she had to convert religion to Russian orthodoxy (no problem, she wasn't very religious), learn Russian (no problem, she was an excellent student), and change her name, because "Sophia" was associated with Peter the Great's unpopular sister:

So now Sophie became Catherine. She stuck with the name for a solid 50 years, so I'm going to switch from "Sophie" to "Cathy", because it's short and I prefer to choose nicknames for royalty that they would have found at least mildly insulting.

Unlike Peter, Cathy was clever and ambitious. She immediately did as much as she could to Russianize herself, from language to religion to culture. Her servants noticed her efforts, they told their friends, and soon the people in general were endeared to her for trying.

Meanwhile Sophie's mom was getting ever more out of control. She had agreed to act as a spy for Prussia, plotted against Elizabeth, and demanded endless money from Sophie. Elizabeth got sick of Johanna and kicked her out of Russia. She would never see her daughter again.

Cathy was now aged 16, a Grand Duchess of Russia, married to the heir to the throne of Russia. But Elizabeth was still alive and kicking, so Peter 3 and Cathy would have to wait 17 long years for their turn on the throne. In the meantime, they were commanded: produce a baby.

This was trickier than you might imagine for a pair of teenagers with literally nothing else to do. By all accounts Cathy tried her best, but Peter showed no interest whatsoever. They would not sleep together, at all, for the first 9 years of their marriage.

Explanations for this vary. Peter had been horribly scarred by smallpox and was insecure about his appearance. He may have had a tight foreskin that made erections painful, corrected by a later secret surgery. But he may just have been mentally and emotionally not ready.

The most obvious sign of Peter's mental immaturity is that his primary hobby, aged 17 through 25, was playing with toy soldiers. He dressed them up (in Holstein uniforms, never Russian ones). Instructed to stop doing this, he began doing it furtively, at night, in their bed.

Peter did display some interest in women, just never his wife. The objects of his affection were noted as being physically unattractive or uneducated, the conjecture being that this made them less intimidating to him than his beautiful, intellectually superior wife.

After a solid 7 years of there being no sex whatsoever between two people whose only job was to have sex, Elizabeth took extreme measures. She hired an attractive young widow to have sex with Peter and show him how it was done, and gave Cathy a choice of two men to teach her.

Of the two men presented, Cathy chose Sergei Saltykov, this choice being made extremely simple by the fact that she was in fact already sleeping with him, having started a secret affair with him years earlier. They simply stopped pretending they weren't sleeping together.

This was to be the first of a great number of lovers for Cathy, who unabashedly cycled through attractive younger men at the rate of one every couple of years for the rest of her life. She would have children with three of them, and never any with her husband.

The first of these children was Paul. Paul was officially recognized as Peter's son and therefore, finally, Elizabeth had the Russian-born heir to the throne she'd always wanted. However, according to Cathy's own memoirs, the child's father was Saltykov.

Elizabeth was delighted to have what she openly regarded as a child of her own in Paul. She essentially kidnapped him and raised him herself. Cathy was almost never allowed to see Paul or her second child, a loss that was a source of pain for her for the rest of her life.

The birth of Paul changed the power balance between Peter and Cathy. She had finally done her duty to Russia, and was mother of the heir to the throne, while Peter remained mentally childlike, still playing with soldiers, and everyone knew the child wasn't really his.

Peter and Cathy remained outwardly cordial, but inwardly and to her memoirs she confessed that he bored the shit out of her. Other than soldiering, which she didn't care about, his other love was playing the violin. But he wasn't good at it and she hated to listen to him.

By this point both Peter and Cathy were both openly having affairs, and in fact the four of them were all friends and would hang out during the day and then retire separately to their adultery in the evening. By the standards of Russian royal court life this not too unusual.

Peter's father in Holstein had died, making Peter Duke of that tiny area. He soon discovered that actually running a government was a lot of work, so Cathy persuaded him to let her do it. She did this efficiently and well, and it became well known she was the real power there.

Cathy's reputation as a capable administrator, in contrast to Peter's inadequacy, became suddenly relevant when Elizabeth died of a stroke. Peter, aged 34, was now emperor of Russia. He remained mentally a child; he played a prank at Elizabeth's funeral, horrifying everyone.

Peter immediately made a number of extremely unpopular decisions. A protestant, he started attempting to modernize the Russian orthodox church. A German, he started pivoting foreign policy to that of his hero, Frederick the Great, still alive at that time:

Peter further burned bridges with the nobility and the public at large by making all church property state property, giving up recent territorial gains in war in exchange for his beloved Holstein, and taking a loud, unattractive mistress whom he threatened to make empress.

Peter upped the tension by publicly screaming at his wife at a banquet, calling her a fool, and demanding she be arrested. He was dissuaded from this at the last minute by his uncle -- who, because Peter and Cathy were cousins, was also Cathy's uncle, her former love interest.

Peter, never popular with the Russian public in the first place, thus engineered his own downfall. The people knew they had a capable and enthusiastically Russian ruler waiting in the wings in the form of Cathy, and after six months of Peter, they got tired of waiting.

Cathy's plans to overthrow Peter were complicated by the fact that she was pregnant with her third child, this one from her latest lover. In a sign of quite how little attention Peter was paying to his wife, she had managed to conceal this pregnancy from him entirely.

In a truly remarkable display of loyalty, as Cathy entered labor her valet Vasily Shkurin set his own house on fire. Peter loved watching fires, and this successfully distracted him from noticing that his wife was giving birth. Like I said, Peter: not that smart.

Meanwhile, Cathy's lover and father of this latest child, Grigory Orlov, had been laying the groundwork for a coup. He and his brothers had been buttering up the troops, handing out money and favors to ensure their loyalty.

Matters came to a head when it looked like the plot had been discovered. The Orlovs decided it was now or never. They fetched Cathy from her summer palace and drove her to St Petersburg in the dead of night in a hastily rented carriage with horses bought from a passing peasant.

The military, prepped with bribes, immediately swore loyalty to Cathy as she entered the city. Faced with military and public support and nobody being a fan of Peter in the first place, within 24 hours nearly everyone abandoned Peter and swore loyalty to Cathy.

Cathy was now empress, aged 33. This is pretty remarkable! She was a German lady with distant Russian roots whose claim to the throne was being mother of a child who was allegedly but not in fact related to Peter the Great. It is a testament to her talents that she pulled it off.

There were two primary threats to her rule: the first was Peter himself, now under house arrest. Conveniently -- and extremely suspiciously -- he died just 7 days after she took the throne. Consensus is that she didn't order this directly, but her supporters did it for her.

The other threat to her throne was Ivan 6, remember him? The baby Elizabeth had stolen the throne from? He was now 24, and had been kept in captivity his entire life, uneducated, which had left him mentally childlike. He too suspiciously met his end soon after she gained power.

But Cathy was just getting started. Only halfway through her life, she was going to reign for another 34 years, kicking off what is regarded as a golden age in Russian history. A student of the Enlightenment, she spent the next 2 years trying to modernize Russian government.

This was mostly unsuccessful. She wrote a book of laws inspired by enlightenment ideals, including ending the near-slavery of serfs, and summoned a national assembly to vote on it. Confused and unclear what they were being asked to do, they instead voted to name her The Great.

Giving up, her next act was foreign policy. She conspired with Prussia and Austria to place one of her many ex-boyfriends, Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, on the throne of Poland as a Russian puppet. Together they slowly carved away pieces of Poland until it ceased to exist.

Poniatowski, incidentally, was pretty ungrateful about all this. Heartbroken, for the rest of his life he tried to rekindle his romance with Catherine, and regarded being king of ever-shrinking Poland as never anything more than a consolation prize. She was that good.

Not content with these territorial gains, she turned her sights south. Allying with Britain, she went to war with Turkey and won, gaining more territory and finally achieving Peter the Great's dream of access to the Black Sea. She also annexed Crimea.

She was determined to turn these vast new southern territories into fully Russianized, productive parts of her empire. She poured money into this project and to make sure it was capably administered she put one of her favorite ex boyfriends in charge: Grigory Potemkin.

You may have heard the phrase "Potemkin Village", meaning a fake cardboard village full of actors paid to look happy and prosperous. In fact this was a slander by Potemkin's political enemies; the cities he administered for Cathy really *were* prospering and relatively happy.

Of all her many lovers Potemkin was the one Cathy probably loved the most. It's likely that she even married him, but secretly. But eventually she lost sexual interest in him, and he himself helped select a suitably sexually athletic replacement, Pyotr Zavadovsky.

She continued this pattern for the rest of her long life. She would pick a favorite, shower him with wealth and titles, sexually exhaust him, then give him a golden handshake and a firm goodbye, to be replaced with a younger model. Her last, Zubov, was 40 years younger than her.

When Potemkin was dying, Cathy tried to ease his final days by hiring the pre-eminent foreign musician of the day to play for him on his deathbed. However, Mozart was busy and did not want to make the long trip to Russia.

In between fucking her endless parade of boy toys Cathy also got a lot of capable administration done. She founded orphanages and improved the state of public health, including hiring public doctors and personally inoculating herself with smallpox to prove the technique worked.

She advanced Russian architecture and spent vast sums to become Europe's greatest collector of art. She put down a rebellion by a backcountry general who claimed to be her dead husband Peter 3. She refused to loan King George Russian troops to put down the American revolution.

She died aged 67, still popular, and her son Paul took the throne. All three of her children did well, dynastically speaking. Her descendants sit on thrones in Denmark, Spain, Sweden and more. The royal family of the UK are descendants of Catherine via Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

It's all truly remarkable for a German teenager hired as a womb for rent by the illegitimate empress of Russia. Cathy got shit done, wrapped men and nations around her little finger, and got consistently laid while doing it. Honestly, she was pretty great.

P.S. The "prank" was: walking behind her coffin in a mourning robe that had a long train being carried by elderly noblemen. He would stop, let the coffin get ahead of him, then walk quickly to catch up. They could not keep up with him, so they fell over.

P.P.S. Catherine is currently being portrayed in the hilarious and well-written The Great on Hulu. It bears very little relationship to reality but it's VERY entertaining and I recommend it.