Catherine the Great Dies: Russia's Enlightened Empress

Catherine the Great came to power by deposing her own husband in a military coup and then ruled Russia for 34 years, longer than Peter the Great. She was born Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst in Stettin, Pomerania (now Szczecin, Poland) on May 2, 1729, a minor German princess selected by Empress Elizabeth of Russia to marry the heir to the Russian throne. She arrived in Russia at fifteen, converted to Russian Orthodoxy, learned the language with obsessive dedication, and renamed herself Yekaterina (Catherine). Her husband, Peter III, was erratic, possibly mentally impaired, and conspicuously pro-Prussian at a time when Russia was at war with Prussia. He alienated the army, the church, and the court. In July 1762, six months after Peter took the throne, Catherine led a coup with the support of the Imperial Guard regiments. Peter was arrested, forced to sign an abdication, and died in custody eight days later. Whether he was murdered on Catherine's orders, murdered by her allies without her explicit consent, or died of natural causes has never been definitively established. She ruled from 1762 to 1796. She expanded Russia's borders dramatically, annexing Crimea in 1783 and participating in three partitions of Poland that erased the country from the map of Europe. She fought two wars against the Ottoman Empire and won both. Her foreign policy made Russia one of the great powers of Europe. Domestically, she corresponded with Voltaire, Diderot, and other Enlightenment philosophers, promoted education, founded the Russian Academy, established the Hermitage Museum's art collection, and encouraged the modernization of Russian institutions. She also presided over a serf economy that she never dismantled, despite her philosophical commitment to liberty. The Pugachev Rebellion of 1773-75, a massive peasant uprising, was crushed with extreme violence. She died on November 17, 1796, of a stroke, at her desk in the Winter Palace. She was 67. The apocryphal story about her death involving a horse is entirely fabricated, a piece of misogynist propaganda that has persisted for over two centuries.