A German princess seized Russia’s throne in a coup — and ruled it for thirty-four years.
Catherine the Great (1729–1796) — born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst — was Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796, who overthrew her own husband in a coup and turned Russia into a European great power through territorial expansion, administrative reform and Enlightenment patronage.
Under her, Russia annexed Crimea, partitioned Poland three times, and pushed to the Black Sea; she wrote to Voltaire and Diderot as a fellow philosopher while tightening serfdom at home. The contradiction — enlightened abroad, autocratic at home — is the whole story of her reign.
Sophie arrived in Russia at fourteen to marry the heir, Peter — a weak, unstable man who idolized Prussia’s Frederick the Great, Russia’s enemy. She learned Russian, converted to Orthodoxy as Catherine, and out-waited him. When Peter took the throne in 1762 and promptly alienated the army, the church and the nobility, the guards regiments proclaimed Catherine empress. Peter was dead within days — almost certainly murdered.
She had no drop of Russian blood and no legal claim beyond a coup. So she became more Russian than the Russians: patron of the Orthodox Church, restorer of Peter the Great’s legacy, and tireless worker — her days ran from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on state papers.
She corresponded with Voltaire for fifteen years, bought Diderot’s library (letting him keep it for life), and wrote her Nakaz — Instruction — to a law commission, quoting Montesquieu on liberty and equality. It was the most liberal document ever issued by a Russian autocrat, and she shelved most of it when the nobles balked.
Abroad she was pure power politics: two victorious wars against the Ottoman Empire (1768–74, 1787–92) won the northern Black Sea coast and the 1783 annexation of Crimea; the three Partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) — engineered with Prussia and Austria — erased Poland from the map and added millions of subjects.
Here is the indictment: the “enlightened” empress made serfdom worse. She gave nobles the right to exile serfs to Siberia, barred serfs from petitioning against their masters, and gifted over 800,000 state peasants into private bondage. When the Cossack Yemelyan Pugachev led a massive serf revolt in 1773–75, she crushed it with exemplary savagery.
She died in 1796 of a stroke, succeeded by her son Paul — who hated her and undid what he could. Russia was a great power, its borders pushed hundreds of miles outward, its court glittering — and its peasantry more enslaved than under any tsar before her. Both halves of that sentence are true.
