Catherine the Great

She was not born Russian, and she was not born great. In 1729 she was Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, the daughter of a minor German prince, one of dozens of small aristocratic families scattered across the German lands. Her family had a title but little money and no real power. What the young Sophie did have was a sharp, restless mind and an ambition far larger than her circumstances.

At fourteen she was chosen as the bride for Peter, the awkward, immature heir to the Russian throne. She travelled to a country whose language she could not speak and whose religion was not her own. But she set about the task of belonging with astonishing discipline: she learned Russian late into the night, embraced the Orthodox faith, took the Russian name Catherine, and made herself, by sheer effort, more Russian than the Russians. Her marriage, however, was cold and unhappy from the start.

For eighteen long years she waited — reading widely, watching the court, making allies. When the old Empress Elizabeth died in 1762, Catherine's husband finally became Emperor Peter III. He was a disaster on the throne. He admired Russia's enemy, Prussia, threw away hard-won victories, insulted the powerful Orthodox Church, and alienated the army and the nobility within months. Catherine, watching quietly, understood that his weakness was her opportunity.

By the summer of 1762, Catherine had built a network of allies among the palace guards and the officers who despised her husband. Chief among them were the Orlov brothers, ambitious young soldiers loyal to her. The plan was to strike before Peter could act against her — and in July the moment came, when one of the conspirators was arrested and Catherine realised she could wait no longer.

Before dawn she left the palace and rode to the barracks of the guards regiments. There she stood before the soldiers and asked them to protect her and support her claim. Regiment after regiment came over to her side. Dressed in a military uniform, she rode at the head of her troops toward the capital. Peter, isolated and abandoned, found that no one would fight for him. Within a day the coup was complete: he was forced to abdicate, and Catherine was proclaimed sole ruler — Empress Catherine II of Russia.

Days later, in custody and away from the capital, the deposed Peter died. The official announcement blamed illness; many at the time and since have doubted it, and the shadow of his death would follow Catherine for the rest of her reign. She herself almost certainly did not order it, but she took the throne it left empty. She had arrived in Russia as a powerless foreign girl of fourteen. Now, at thirty-three, she ruled the largest country on earth, with no legal claim to it beyond the loyalty of the men who had raised her up.

Catherine ruled for thirty-four years, the longest reign of any woman in Russian history. She had grown up on the ideas of the Enlightenment and corresponded for years with French thinkers such as Voltaire and Diderot. Early on, she summoned a great commission to write a new legal code and produced a famous document of guiding principles that spoke of tolerance, reason and the rule of law. She founded schools, including one of Europe's first state institutes for the education of girls, championed the arts, and built the vast collection that became the Hermitage museum.

Yet the empire she governed rested on serfdom, and here the reformer met her limits. Catherine's power depended on the nobility who had put her on the throne, and she dared not turn against them. Under her, the condition of the serfs grew harsher, not gentler. In the 1770s a huge peasant uprising led by Pugachev swept across the empire before her armies crushed it — and afterwards her reforms grew more cautious and her rule more conservative.

Abroad, she was formidable. Her armies defeated the Ottoman Empire and won Russia the northern coast of the Black Sea; she annexed Crimea, and through a series of agreements with neighbouring powers she absorbed vast territories to the west. By the time she died in 1796, Russia was larger, richer and more respected in Europe than she had found it. Catherine had never had a drop of Russian blood or any right to the throne by birth — yet she left behind an empire transformed, and a reputation, fiercely debated ever since, as one of the great rulers of her age.