The Empress's Maid of Honor

Catherine, the wife of Emperor Peter the Great, must avoid everything that reminds her of her former life. There should be no reason for conversations about the empress being a former peasant, and by origin a half-serf half-German. The publicity of these facts is so undesirable that even in state documents, the peasant relatives of the empress are mentioned with half allusion - "that surname." And yet, Catherine wants to help her family, first of all - her sister Kristina and her niece Sofia Skavronskaya. Sofia remarkably resembles Catherine herself, unwittingly revealing her kinship with the empress, but Catherine makes her niece her maid of honor.
This is the plot of the novel by historian and writer Yevgeny Saliass, which narrates one version of how the fate of the "poor relatives" of Empress Catherine unfolded in an artistic form.