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Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

Biographer Robert K. Massie gives us a Catherine the Great who is ever interesting and intelligent 鈥 but not necessarily admirable.

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman By Robert K. Massie Random House 656 pp.

Robert K. Massie, whose "Peter the Great" won a Pulitzer Prize 30 years ago, is about as comfortable a biographer as I know.

He never seems flustered or tied down to academic details. He鈥檚 got his sympathies in place and a story to tell. His simple and straightforward thesis? 鈥淸Catherine] and Peter the Great tower in ability and achievement over the other fourteen tsars and empresses of the 300-year Romanov dynasty.鈥 Elizabeth I of England, meanwhile, was 鈥渢he only woman to equal [Catherine] on a European throne.鈥

While Massie is smitten with Catherine (1729-1796), who 鈥渂eneath her title and her diamonds ... was only a little German girl brought to Russia for the sole purpose of providing the son of the house with an heir,鈥 the reader, sympathetic or not with some of the grown-up empress鈥檚 pragmatic inaction and actions, will always be fascinated. That she wrested the crown of all Russia from her husband, Peter III, and with the help of her lover placed it on her own head, and then tried to keep it from her son鈥檚 head and place it on her grandson鈥檚, is forgivable 鈥 or at least, understandable 鈥 in the context of the Sopranos-style skullduggery and double-crosses and murders that characterize royal history.

Maybe all idealized politicians, from Peter the Great to Lincoln to Lenin to Obama, disappoint when we realize that they鈥檙e playing the dirty game of politics. And then we humbly resign ourselves to witnessing the exciting and fateful contests.

Massie is so familiar with the figures of the Russian court that he (and consequently we) never feel lost. Among the personalities he presents, the Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great鈥檚 daughter, is especially engaging. She had been placed on the throne through a coup that imprisoned the 鈥渞ightful鈥 tsar, the infant Ivan VI, and for the next 20 years indulged herself in privilege, a couple of wars, and fitful slackness (she habitually put off governmental business). She proved a positively queenly ruler, but was childless, so she coerced one of Peter鈥檚 grandsons, Peter III, to leave his beloved German state of Holstein and come to Russia and marry and impregnate the German princess Sophia (renamed Catherine by Elizabeth). Contrary to the amusing and kitschy Josef von Sternberg movie of Catherine鈥檚 life, "The Scarlett Empress," starring Marlene Dietrich, Peter III was not a half-wit. Peculiar, yes, but he had plenty of marbles and being Lutheran and culturally German, his distaste for Russian customs and religion are understandable.

From girlhood to power-player, Catherine is ever interesting and intelligent; she鈥檚 usually likable though not necessarily admirable. The basis of the first half of Massie鈥檚 biography is Catherine鈥檚 own memoir. She wrote lucidly and remarkably candidly about her miserable life as the wife of Peter III, who it seems never once slept with her: 鈥淣ever did two minds resemble each other less. We had nothing in common in our tastes or ways of thinking.... I was constantly left to myself and suspicions surrounded me on all sides.鈥

Bookworms, however, always have some consolation, as Catherine would observe in her self-penned epitaph: 鈥淓ighteen years of boredom and loneliness gave her the opportunity to read many books.鈥 Peter, an adolescent himself when he arrived in Russia and perhaps the victim of a penile condition that made sex painful, preferred playing toy-soldiers in bed: 鈥淭he absurdity of what they were doing, often until two in the morning, sometimes made Catherine laugh, but usually she simply endured.鈥 Eventually, with impatient foster-grandma Elizabeth鈥檚 knowledge or indifference, Catherine took a court chamberlain as a lover and became pregnant with Paul, who was legally regarded as Peter the Great鈥檚 great-grandson.

Once Catherine gave birth, she was treated as if she had lost her use and was only rarely allowed to see her son: 鈥淔or ten years [Elizabeth] had been keeping [Catherine and Peter] at the expense of the state. Thus, the child, required for reasons of state, created by her command, was now, in effect, the property of the state 鈥 that is, of the empress.鈥

It鈥檚 important to remember that Catherine herself had no legal or blood-relation claim on the throne 鈥 but when has fact ever hindered political ambition? Upon Elizabeth鈥檚 death, Peter III made one botch after another, the main one being that he never stopped thinking of himself as German and the disciple of Frederick the Great of Prussia, with whom the Russians were at war. Peter III immediately tried to refashion the army in the Prussian military image and boldly challenged the privileges and abuses of the Orthodox church.

Catherine, meanwhile, had in the eyes of the Russian court been doing almost everything right. She had learned Russian and, though an Enlightenment freethinker, had converted to Russian Orthodoxy and become Russian enough so that after only six months of her husband鈥檚 rule the people and the church supported a coup by the army, led by the warrior family of Orlovs (Catherine would have a son by one of them), and forced Peter to abdicate. Frederick the Great, shaking his head in disgust at Peter鈥檚 behavior, remarked, 鈥淗e allowed himself to be dethroned like a child being sent to bed.鈥

Peter begged his wife to let him and his girlfriend return to Holstein; instead, Catherine kept him locked up until one of the Orlov brothers 鈥渁ccidentally鈥 killed him. Catherine got herself crowned Empress, despite the fact that her son had been designated the heir-apparent by Empress Elizabeth. Once Ivan VI was also murdered in a failed rescue attempt, Catherine felt relatively secure, notwithstanding her nervousness about her son鈥檚 eagerness to rule. (Yes, more crime-family flashbacks.)

After becoming empress, Catherine was too busy working to spare much time for her serial lovers, whom she disposed of as nicely and comfortably as a fond aunt would. Her three children were fathered by three impressive beloveds. Only later, when she was older and less attractive and had less need to be secretive, did she raise eyebrows by her happy flings with army officers. Massie refutes the rumors of Catherine鈥檚 wanton sexuality. (She was only indulgent, he argues 鈥 perhaps like Elizabeth Taylor).

Catherine had big ambitions for Russia鈥檚 enlightenment but 鈥 to the disappointment of those expecting her to be heroic聽 鈥 she turned out to be a shrewd and practical politician. 鈥淚t is not as easy as you think,鈥 she told an aide. 鈥淚n the first place, my orders would not be carried out unless they were the kind of orders which could be carried out... I examine the circumstances, I take advice, I consult the enlightened part of the people, and in this way I find out what sort of effect my laws will have.鈥

Though 鈥渋ntellectually opposed鈥 to serfdom, she sold out any kind of reform for half of Russia鈥檚 population. When the illiterate peasant Pugachev inspired a bloody uprising by the serfs in the Urals, she clamped down in a fashion that would have made dictators ever since proud: 鈥淭here would be no further talk of eliminating serfdom. Landowners were encouraged to treat their serfs and peasants humanely, but the empress now was convinced that enlightenment could not be bestowed on a nation of illiterates until the people had been prepared with education.鈥 She did not fund any education initiatives.

She also cynically placed her second lover, Stanislaus Poniatowski, on the throne of Poland, whose territory over the next few decades she cut up like a roast chicken for Prussia, Austria, and herself. 鈥淎fterward Catherine repeated that she had annexed 鈥榥ot a single Pole,鈥 and that she had simply taken back ancient Russian and Lithuanian lands with Orthodox inhabitants who were 鈥榥ow reunited with the Russian motherland.鈥 鈥 So, thanks to Catherine, for the next 126 years 鈥渢he people and culture of Poland did not possess a nation.鈥 No love lost there or to the south, where her ambitions for access to the Mediterranean led to war with Turkey.

She probably secretly married the savvy and irascible Gregory Potemkin, whom she called 鈥渙ne of the greatest, most bizarre, and most entertaining eccentrics of the iron age.鈥 The hot-tempered and capable Potemkin became and, even after their love affair extinguished itself, remained her right-hand man: he helped her extend Russia鈥檚 vast boundaries, which in the grand scheme of world history has benefited and gratified Russia and no one else.

Catherine was brilliant and always fascinating and may have been educationally enlightened (though her French philosopher friends Diderot and Voltaire watched sadly as during her 34-year reign she tightened her authoritarian grip and implemented stupefying censorship). She was certainly cultured (her art collection became the basis for the marvelous Hermitage Museum), but she saw fit to keep herself in power by any means possible, even at her son鈥檚 expense, not to mention at the expense of the freedom of millions of serfs. She kept Paul out of the way and sitting on his hands until she died of natural causes in 1796, at which time Paul the First asserted a new law of primogeniture that ensured there would never again be a woman on Russia鈥檚 throne.

In spite of her queenly power-plays, her selfishness, her self-justifications, her criminality, she was a major player in the 18th century and, if we have to take what we get, she at least wasn鈥檛 as bad as any of the tsars before or after her. In the absence of real democracy in 21st-century Russia, it鈥檚 probably about time for a female counterweight to Putin.

Bob Blaisdell edited "The Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Documents and Selected Federalist Papers."

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