This is not a biography as one might expect at first glance, but a potted history of Catherine’s reign as Empress. The focus here is on her reforms and policies, and how Russia rose to be a great power in the 18th century as a consequence. The book is aimed at a general audience in the UK/US, has no footnotes and elegantly avoids confusing readers with the first name+patronymic system of Russian names by mostly using initials. The author often refers to Britain and France, thus putting a new and informative light on the overall history of the continent in the run-up to the French Revolution. ( )

I always like multiple sources, so when I found another biography of Catherine the Great in a used bookstore I snapped it up – especially when it was by Isabel de Madariaga, whose biography of Ivan the Terrible I reviewed earlier. This turns out to be quite different from the Virginia Rounding biography which was my first Catherine book; in fact it’s not really a biography at all but more of a history of Catherine’s time. There isn’t anything about Catherine’s life before becoming Empress; we start right out with her seizure of power in 1762. After that, the narrative switches between history and the social situation. I was impressed by the amount of effort Catherine put out; she worked hard writing laws, setting up policies, etc. Economics for the average Russian improved considerably during her reign; the infamous “Potemkin villages” attributed to her lover Grigory Potemkin seem to have been largely a Soviet-era myth. The complexity of Russian administration, with separate systems for Nobility, “townsmen”, and serfs, remained but some things did get straightened out. Newspapers thrived, although there was some censorship; unfortunately Catherine was greatly disturbed by the French revolution and cracked down somewhat.


Overall a quite readable and interesting history and goes very well with the Virginia Rounding book mentioned above. I was a little critical of de Madariaga’s book on Ivan the Terrible because of her unnecessary use of Russian terms; there’s very little of that here.
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good read ( )

A compotent and quick biography. ( )