Catherine the Great Born: Russia's Transformative Empress

Catherine the Great was German. Born Princess Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst in Stettin, Pomerania on May 2, 1729, she was brought to Russia at fifteen to marry the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Peter. She learned Russian with obsessive dedication, converted to Russian Orthodoxy, and renamed herself Yekaterina. She spent the next seventeen years navigating a court that was lethal to the politically careless. Her husband Peter III became tsar in January 1762 and immediately alienated the army by withdrawing from the Seven Years' War, returning all territory Russia had gained from Prussia, and openly admiring Frederick the Great while showing contempt for Russian traditions. Catherine cultivated the Imperial Guard regiments. Six months after Peter took the throne, she led a coup. Peter was forced to abdicate, was arrested, and died in custody eight days later. The circumstances of his death remain ambiguous. She ruled for 34 years, from 1762 to 1796. She expanded the empire south and west, annexing Crimea in 1783 after a war with the Ottoman Empire and participating in three partitions of Poland that divided the country among Russia, Prussia, and Austria. By the end of her reign, Russia's borders had expanded by approximately 200,000 square miles. She corresponded with Voltaire, Diderot, and other Enlightenment philosophers, presenting herself as an enlightened monarch committed to reason and progress. She founded the Free Economic Society, established schools and hospitals, expanded the Hermitage art collection into one of the world's great museums, and modernized Russia's administrative and legal systems. She also presided over a serf economy that she never dismantled, and the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773-75, a massive peasant uprising, was crushed with extreme brutality. She had at least twelve lovers over the course of her life, several of whom held significant political roles. The salacious stories about her death, particularly the one involving a horse, are entirely fabricated, originating as propaganda from her political enemies. She died of a stroke on November 17, 1796, at 67, at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.