Catherine the Great wasn’t Russian. She came into the world on April 21, 1729 [May 2 in the Western calendar] as the first child of a minor Prussian noble and was christened Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst. Her father, Christian August, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, was the third son of the ruler of a small Prussian principality. Her mother, Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, was a younger daughter of another minor principality ruler, but was a cousin of the Russian heir — Grand Duke Peter von Holstein-Gottorp.
Peter the Great ’s daughter Elizabeth had become Empress of Russia in 1741 after deposing the infant Tsar Ivan VI . Empress Elizabeth had once been engaged to Catherine’s maternal uncle, who had died of smallpox before they could wed. Seizing the opportunity afforded by the empress’s fond memories of her dead fiancée, Johanna wrote to congratulate Elizabeth when she came to power. After an exchange of portraits and much kowtowing on Johanna’s part, she was invited to bring her daughter Sophie to the Russian court to meet the heir to the throne as a potential bride.
Sophie had already been introduce to Peter four years prior while he was still living in Prussia, and had gotten along well with him. Whatever would happen between them later, Sophie and Peter were initially allies. Although Peter told his bride-to-be that he was only marrying her to please the empress and that he loved another girl, he also assured her that he liked her and that he was glad to have someone to talk to in German. Catherine herself would later affirm that her fiancée did everything he could to help her adjust to the new life into which she had been thrust, in spite of her mother’s cruelty and interference.
Sophie had to convert to the Orthodox Russian Church before she could marry the heir to the throne, but, happily, this did not prove to be a difficulty for her. The day after her conversion the formal betrothal of the grand duke Peter and the newly renamed Catherine took place. Empress Elizabeth now had total control over Catherine’s life. Elizabeth could disinherit Peter and/or send Catherine packing in ignominy on a whim. For the next twenty years Catherine would have to work harder to please the empress than she would anyone else, including her husband Peter.
The date of Catherine and Peter’s marriage was set for the summer of 1742, but the bride was anything other than excited about her impending nuptials. The thought of her wedding made her “melancholy” and she wrote that she “often burst into tears without really knowing why.” Elizabeth was warned by court physicians that Peter, although 17 years old, was too physically immature and unhealthy to be married, but the empress was determined to have the couple wed that summer no matter what. As a sexual enthusiast herself, Elizabeth assumed that — the doctors’ warnings of immaturity or not — once Peter was put to bed with his pretty bride then nature would take its course and more heirs would be added to the Russian court. The empress failed to take into account her nephew’s nervousness and delayed puberty, as well as the fact that the bride was utterly and completely clueless about any possible seduction techniques she could use to encourage the groom.
Trapped in a sexless marriage with a man she was increasingly growing estranged from, Catherine was emotionally, physically, and psychologically vulnerable for an affair. Sure enough, in the late summer of 1752 she was seduced by an experience and handsome womanizer named Sergei Saltykov. Most of Europe assumed that Saltykov was the man responsible for the grand duchess’s first three pregnancies. Although Catherine miscarried twice, on September 20, 1754 she gave birth to a son, the future Paul I of Russia.
The Empress Elizabeth seized the newborn, not even giving Catherine a chance to hold him once, and took complete charge of his care and upbringing. Catherine was able to see her son only on rare occasions. By the spring of 1755 she had only seen her baby three times; she couldn’t even ask about him lest it be “interpreted as casting doubt on the care the empress was taking of him.” Never allowed to bond, Catherine and Paul would have an antagonistic relationship for the rest of their lives.
Meanwhile, Catherine’s marriage had gone from bad to hellish. Peter, who had fallen in love with Elizaveta Romanovna Vorontsova, had started treating Catherine horribly. When Empress Elizabeth died on 5 January 1762 , making Peter the Emperor of Russia, Catherine’s position became tenuous. Encouraged by his uncouth mistress, Peter had been treating Catherine worse daily and threatened to divorce her. At the end of the month, Peter drove the nail into his own political coffin by publicly humiliating Catherine. During a state dinner Peter called his empress “dura!” (fool) in front of everyone present and then drunkenly ordering her arrest. Catherine burst into tears from embarrassment and begged a nearby count to tell her something funny so she could recover. That same night a rumour swept through the courtiers that Peter had only been dissuaded from arresting his wife by his field marshal Prince Georg Ludwig of Holstein-Gottorp, who happened to be the empress’s uncle.
Catherine was livid, and using Peter’s unpopularity with the military against him, she staged a coupe. When Peter left her in St Petersburg to go on holiday with his Holstein-born courtiers and mistress to Oranienbaum, Catherine made her move.
On 28 June (8 July by the Western calendar) 1762 Catherine left the palace and went to the barracks of the Izmailovskii Guards, where she convinced them to overthrow Peter in her favour. Colonel Kyril Razumovsky, a fierce Cossack warrior, knelt before her to swear his loyalty to her, and then administered the same oath of allegiance to his fellow guardsmen. The Semyonovsky guards quickly joined her cause as well. The troops escorted her as she rode to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan on the Nevsky Prospekt, where the Archbishop of Novgorod proclaimed her the ruler of Russia. Catherine then marched with crowds of her adherents to the Winter Palace to proclaim herself sole ruler of the state.
Dressed as an officer of the Preobrazhensky Guard, Catherine led her ad hoc army of followers to Oranienbaum to confront her husband. When Peter III heard that Catherine was marching toward him with a large number of soldiers, he sent away everyone but Vorontsova (who would not abandon him) and wrote Catherine a letter of apology promising to share power with her. When he didn’t get a prompt response, Peter wrote again to Catherine offering to abdicate if she would let him and Vorontsova flee to Holstein. Catherine sent him a message that she needed him to give her his abdication in writing before she would let him go. Either credulous enough to think Catherine would let him go or just desperate, Peter wrote his abdication and allowed himself to be taken hostage.
She had taken a very shaky claim to the crown and put herself on the throne via a mixture of will-power, military might, and political manoeuvring. It wasn’t a very nice thing to do to her husband, but people don’t survive at the epicentre of power by being nice, and Peter had not exactly endeared himself to her at the best of times. However, there is no evidence to support that she had any idea that her co-conspirators were planning on killing him, which they did just eight days later. Catherine, hoping to quell accusations and censure, proclaimed that Peter had died of haemorrhoid colic. Very, very few people in Europe believed her story, but even with the cloud of murder hanging over her she was one of the strongest and most capable rulers Russia, and the world, has ever known.
By sheer force of personality she dragged Russia into its place as a modern European state. She restructured the Russian economy on more progressive, capitalist lines, and got leading economists such as Arthur Young and Jacques Necker to join her Free Economic Society in Saint Petersburg. She also rationalised and reformed Russian law and government. She instituted the Charters of the Nobility and the Townspeople in 1785. The Charters were significant. Although “restricted to the upper and middle classes, the Charters were the first fruit of Enlightenment though about the rights and duties of the citizen to be enacted into Russian law” (Bushkovitch, 2011).
Additionally, the empress revolutionised educational systems in Russia. She wrote a manual for the education of young children, as well as founding libraries and academic journals that were the admiration of universities throughout Europe. Prominent scientists Leonhard Euler, Peter Simon Pallas, and Anders Johan Lexell were all enticed to come work and teach in St Petersburg by the charming empress.
Catherine also kicked off the Russian Enlightenment almost single-handedly. She not only encouraged literacy and reading, she wrote several works of fiction and philosophy herself, earning the praise of French encyclopedists such as Diderot and d’Alembert. The French writer and philosopher Voltaire — who hated nearly everyone on the planet — adored her and her work, calling her “The Star of the North”. Moreover, she built the Hermitage Museum and multiple other public works for the edification of the people in art and culture, becoming the “greatest collector and patron of art in the history of Europe” (Massie, 2011).
Catherine was also profoundly concerned with child health and life expectancy among her subjects. She wrote, “If you go to a village and ask a peasant how many children he has he will say ten, twelve, and sometimes even twenty. If you ask how many of them are alive, he will say, one, two, three, rarely four. This mortality should be fought against” (Massie, 2011). To combat this problem Catherine exponentially increased the number of schools and hospitals in her country, and introduced institutional orphanages in Moscow and St. Petersburg. She founded Russia’s first College of Medicine in 1763 and attempted to lure European doctors to the country by offering them lavish salaries and benefits.
Furthermore, Catherine embraced the new technology of vaccination. She made Russia one of the first countries in the world to inoculate its populace. To prove its safety she allowed Dr. Thomas Dimsdale to inoculate her with the smallpox vaccine in 1764. The whole of Russia waited to see what would happen, and after “two weeks of fearful waiting … Catherine did not succumb to the dreadful disease … special prayers of thanksgiving were offered in Russian churches” (Gorbatov, 2006). Catherine’s courageous efforts to popularise inoculations against smallpox saved countless lives.
She was also an able military strategist. Her armies trounced the Ottoman Empire twice, subjugated the Cossacks, and took the Ukraine as well as huge swathes of Poland. Catherine’s able minister, Potemkin, negotiated so well with Turkey that Russia was able annex the Crimea without firing a shot. There, with Catherine’s blessings, Potemkin created prosperous villages and fortified cities. Although these would be mocked by his enemies as “Potemkin Villages” painted on cardboard, the settlements were very real (Massie, 2011). Russian land acquisitions gave the country easy access to the Black Sea; Catherine financed Potemkin’s yen for a naval force, thereby enabling Slavic domination of the area for decades. Russian ships did well in the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea as well, beating the Swedish navy like a drum. During the Russian-Swedish war, Catherine “showed the steel nerves that had brought her to the throne … Hearing the guns of the Swedish fleet from her palace windows, she continued to work without giving them any notice” (Bushkovitch, 2011).
She was brilliant, and capable, and a visionary … yet what is this remarkable woman most remembered for? Her lovers and her mythical, infamous dalliance with her own horse. People remember her for having had sex with younger men more than they remember her advances in science, medicine, and literature. This dynamic and world-changing ruler is slut shamed much more often than she is lauded, and that is a misogynistic atrocity as well as a crying shame.