Catherine the Great

Review by Martin A. Miller

Robert Massie has established a special place for himself in the world of Russian cultural history. He has had a lifelong fascination with the Romanov dynasty that ruled over the vast Russian landscape that has inspired him to fashion a number of widely read biographical studies. His book about Peter the Great has sold more copies than all the scholarly biographies of Russia’s first emperor in English combined. His portrait of the last emperor and his wife, Nicholas and Alexandra, has attracted a following that has permitted the book to remain in print for decades.

In his latest effort, he has turned his considerable biographical skills on the extraordinary personality and career of Catherine the Great. Undeterred by the seemingly endless spate of books on Catherine, Massie has once again demonstrated his ability to write in a way that will attract a wide audience. Readers will doubtless forgive his need to take us on a 579-page journey before we stand figuratively before Catherine’s graveside because of the rich and florid description he displays throughout the long book.

How could such a long and productive reign dominated by such a complex personality be dealt with otherwise? The contradictions of her authoritarian reign still retain their attractive force. She became the empress of Russia, the largest country in the world at the time, despite the fact that she herself was German. She was one of Russia’s most intelligent rulers, a product and missionary of the French Enlightenment who sought to transform her subjects into Europeans as Peter the Great had ordained.

Yet, as an enlightened autocrat, her limits became clear and transgressing them led to severe censorship and repression. She expanded the boundaries of her empire in every direction for Russia’s benefit, including incorporating a large portion of the dismemberment of Poland, while refusing to release the vast majority of her population from the bondage of serfdom. She began her reign with a flurry of innovative edicts that promised to alter the rigid autocratic power structure in line with her admired intellectual mentors, Montesquieu and the leading French philosophes, and was in correspondence with Voltaire, Diderot and the brothers Grimm in Switzerland.

This had little influence when the alarming news of the French Revolution reached her, which she saw as the unexpected outcome of the critique raised by the Enlightenment thinkers. She took immediate action by taking out her rage against the writer, Alexander Radishchev, whose 1790 travelogue containing conversations of peasant complaints of authority she imagined as the specter of revolt in her own country. The culture she once so adored had produced what she now called “the French madness.”

This is the challenging content of Massie’s descriptive canvas, full of both invented conversations and colorful descriptions of Catherine’s struggle to fulfill her own personal and very private passions as well as her desire to make Russia a major player among the powers of Europe.