Catherine the Great

Among the rulers of Russia, Empress Catherine II, or Catherine the Great (1729–1796), occupies a special place. A German by birth, lacking any dynastic rights to the Russian throne, she seized it in a coup and ruled the vast empire autocratically and firmly for thirty-four years. Her reign is referred to as the “golden age” of the Russian nobility. Two victorious wars with Turkey and one with Sweden, the annexation of Crimea and the colonization of New Russia, the partitions of Poland, during which the Orthodox Ukrainian lands became part of the Russian state—all these are also brilliant achievements of Catherine's “golden age.” But there remain many mysteries in the biography of the empress herself. Many of them—the conspiracy of 1762 and the true role of various actors in it, the mystery surrounding the death of Emperor Peter III and the involvement of his wife, the numerous romances of Catherine and her secret marriage to Potemkin, her views on pressing issues of Russian reality and her real policies on peasant and other matters, correspondence with philosophers and relationships with Freemasons—are vividly and engagingly told in her book by the well-known researcher of 18th century Russia, Olga Eliseeva, drawing on all available (including archival) sources.