She would not find them with Peter, the German-born nephew and heir of Russia’s childless Empress Elizabeth.
Massie, an engaging practitioner of traditional history focused on individual personalities, suggests that throughout her life, “even as Empress Catherine,” she yearned for the warmth and love she missed as a child.
She was born Sophia Augusta Fredericka on April 21, 1729, the offspring of a minor German prince and his bored teenage wife, who displayed little affection for her clever, fun-loving daughter. Catherine shared some of these hopes, but she was able to promulgate only limited change in the face of opposition from the Russian nobility, whose support was imperative for a foreign-born usurper plagued by revolts aiming to restore a male Romanov to the throne. She cultivated it by patronizing French Enlightenment philosophes Voltaire and Diderot, who viewed her as a model of the kind of benevolent autocrat they hoped would rationalize and reform the 18th century’s ossified, oppressive kingdoms. “A majestic figure in the age of monarchy,” as Massie rightly puts it, Catherine was also a proto-modern politician who understood the value of good publicity.
Massie’s latest foray into imperial biography (following the bestselling “Nicholas and Alexandra” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Peter the Great”).īorn into the provincial German nobility, Catherine rose to seize the Russian crown from an unpopular husband and rule her adopted homeland for 34 years, confirming it as a major European power with victories over the Ottoman Empire and three ruthless partitions of Poland. Yet “Catherine the Great” was indeed an apt sobriquet for the subject of Robert K. She rejected the title by which posterity knows her, preferring always to conceal her steely ambition and regal pride under a mask of modesty and service.
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