Catherine II (born ; 2 May 172917 November 1796), known as Catherine the Great, was Empress of Russia from 9 July 1762 until her death in 1796. Before her accession, Catherine had been a royal consort as the wife of Emperor Peter III, whom she overthrew in a coup d'état. Her reign of over 34 years saw an era of prosperity during the Enlightenment in which many new cities, universities and theatres were established; large-scale immigration from the rest of Europe occurred; and the Russian Empire was recognised as a great power of Europe.
Born a German princess, Catherine married Peter, a grandson of Peter the Great, at the age of 16. Peter became Emperor of Russia in 1762, reigning for seven months before his deposition and possible assassination at the hands of Catherine. During her reign, she often maintained close alliances with noble favourites such as Count Grigory Orlov and Grigory Potemkin. She appointed and worked with several highly successful generals such as Alexander Suvorov and Pyotr Rumyantsev and admirals such as Samuel Greig and Fyodor Ushakov. She governed at a time when the Russian Empire was expanding rapidly by conquest and diplomacy. In the west, she installed her former lover to the throne of Poland, which was eventually partitioned. In the south, the Crimean Khanate was annexed following victories over the Bar Confederation and the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War. With the support of Great Britain, Russia colonised the territories of New Russia along the coasts of the Black and Azov seas. In the east, Russians became the first Europeans to colonise Alaska, establishing Russian America.
Many cities and towns were founded on Catherine's orders in the newly conquered lands, most notably Yekaterinoslav, Kherson, Nikolayev, and Sevastopol. An admirer of Peter the Great, Catherine continued to modernise Russia along Western European culture. However, military conscription and the economy continued to depend on serfdom, and the increasing demands of the state and of private landowners intensified the exploitation of serf labour. This was one of the chief reasons behind rebellions, including Pugachev's Rebellion of Cossacks, nomads, peoples of the Volga, and peasants.
The Manifesto on Freedom of the Nobility, issued during the short reign of Peter III and confirmed by Catherine, freed Russian nobles from compulsory military or state service. The construction of many mansions of the nobility in the classical style endorsed by the empress changed the face of the country. She is often included in the ranks of the enlightened despots. Catherine presided over the age of the Russian Enlightenment and established the Smolny Institute of Noble Maidens, the first state-financed higher education institution for women in Europe.
Early life
Catherine was born on 2 May 1729 as Princess Sophie Auguste Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg, in the city of Stettin (now known as Szczecin) within the Province of Pomerania in the Kingdom of Prussia. She was delivered in her family's residence in the neoclassical building at the current 1 Farna Street (then Große Domstraße 1), where she resided for the first few years of her life, before her family moved to the Ducal Castle in Stettin. Her mother was Joanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp. Her father, Christian August, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, belonged to the ruling German family of Anhalt.Ferdinand Siebigk: Christian August (Fürst von Anhalt-Zerbst). In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Band 4, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1876, S. 157–59. He failed to become the Duke of Courland and Semigallia and, at the time of his daughter's birth, he held the rank of a Prussian general in his capacity as governor of the city of Stettin. However, because her second cousin Charles Peter Ulrich converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, her mother's brother, Adolf Frederick, became the heir to the Swedish throne and two of her first cousins, Gustav III and Charles XIII, became Kings of Sweden. ch 37.
In accordance with the prevailing custom among the ruling dynasties of Germany, she received her education chiefly from a French governess and from tutors. According to her memoirs, Sophie was considered a tomboy and trained herself to master a sword.
Catherine found her childhood to be uneventful; she once wrote to her correspondent Baron Grimm, "I see nothing of interest in it". Although Sophie was born a princess, her family had little money; her rise to power was supported by her mother Joanna's wealthy relatives, who were both nobles and royal relations. The more than 300 sovereign entities of the Holy Roman Empire, many of them small and powerless, made for a highly competitive political system in which the various princely families competed for advantages over one another, often by way of political marriages.
For smaller German princely families, an advantageous marriage was one of the best means of advancing their interests. To improve the position of her house, Sophie was groomed throughout her childhood to become the wife of a powerful ruler. In addition to her native German, Sophie became fluent in French, the lingua franca of European elites in the 18th century. The young Sophie received the standard education for an 18th-century German princess, concentrating on etiquette, French, and Lutheran theology.
In 1739, when Sophie was 10, she met her second cousin who would later become her husband and Peter III of Russia. She later wrote that she immediately found Peter detestable and that she stayed at one end of the castle and Peter at the other. She disliked his pale complexion and his fondness for alcohol.
Marriage and succession
The choice of Sophie as wife of the future emperor was a result of the Lopukhina affair, in which Count Jean Armand de Lestocq and King Frederick the Great of Prussia took an active part. The objective was to strengthen the friendship between Prussia and Russia, to weaken the influence of Austria, and to overthrow the chancellor Alexey Bestuzhev-Ryumin, a known partisan of the Austrian alliance on whom the reigning Russian Empress Elizabeth relied. The diplomatic intrigue failed, largely due to the intervention of Sophie's mother, Joanna Elisabeth.
Contemporary and later accounts present Joanna as a figure of strong will and ambition, often involved in court affairs. Her efforts to secure her daughter’s advantageous marriage in Russia brought her into conflict with Empress Elizabeth, who ultimately expelled her from the country amid allegations of espionage on behalf of King Frederick. Elizabeth knew the family well and had intended to marry Joanna's brother, Charles Augustus (Karl August von Holstein). He died of smallpox in 1727 in Saint Petersburg, just before the wedding could take place. Despite Joanna's interference, Elizabeth took a strong liking to Sophie, and Sophie and Peter were eventually married in 1745.
When Sophie arrived in Russia in 1744 at age 15, she spared no effort to ingratiate herself not only with Elizabeth, but also with Elizabeth's lover Alexei Razumovsky and with the Russian people at large. She zealously applied herself to learning the Russian language, rising late at night to repeat her lessons in her bedroom. She became ill with pneumonia, but survived and recovered. In her memoirs, she wrote that she made the decision then to do whatever was necessary and to profess to believe whatever was required of her to become qualified to wear the crown. Although she was able to learn Russian, she spoke with a heavy accent, and made grammatical errors. In most circumstances Catherine II spoke French in her court. In fact the use of French as the main language of the Russian imperial court continued until 1812, when it became politically incorrect to speak French in court due to the French invasion of Russia.
Sophie recalled in her memoirs that as soon as she arrived in Russia, she fell ill with a pleuritis that almost killed her. She credited her survival to frequent bloodletting; in a single day, she received four phlebotomies. Her mother's opposition to this practice brought her the Empress's disfavour. When Sophie's situation looked desperate, her mother wanted her confessed by a Lutheran pastor. Awaking from her delirium, however, Sophie said, "I don't want any Lutheran; I want my Orthodox father [clergyman]". This increased her popularity with the Empress and her court as a whole. Elizabeth doted on Sophie and their relationship grew stronger after this.
Sophie's father, a devout German Lutheran, opposed his daughter's conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy. Despite his objections, on 28 June 1744, the Russian Orthodox Church received Sophie as a member. It was then that she took the baptismal name Catherine (Yekaterina or Ekaterina) and the (artificial) patronymic Алексеевна (Alekseyevna, daughter of Aleksey), so that she was in all respects the namesake of Catherine I, the mother of Elizabeth and the grandmother of Peter III. The following year, on 21 August 1745, the long-planned dynastic marriage between Catherine and Peter finally took place in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, Saint Petersburg. Catherine had recently turned 16. Her father did not travel to Russia for the wedding.
The bridegroom, then known as Peter von Holstein-Gottorp, had become Duke of Holstein-Gottorp (located in the north-west of Germany near the border with Denmark) in 1739. The newlyweds settled in the palace of Oranienbaum, which remained the residence of the "young court" for many years. From there, they governed the small duchy to obtain experience to govern Russia.
In all other aspects, the marriage proved unsuccessful; it remained unconsummated for years due to Peter III's mental immaturity. After Peter took a mistress, Catherine became involved with other prominent court figures. She soon became popular with several powerful political groups that opposed her husband. Unhappy with her marriage, Catherine became an avid reader of books, mostly in French. She disparaged her husband for his devotion to reading on the one hand "Lutheran prayer-books, the other the history of and trial of some highway robbers who had been hanged or broken on the wheel".
It was during this period that she first read Voltaire and the other philosophes of the French Enlightenment. As she learned Russian, she became increasingly interested in the literature of her adopted country. Some years later, in 1754, Catherine read the Annals by Tacitus, which caused what she called a "revolution" in her mind as Tacitus was the first intellectual she read who understood power politics as they are, not as they should be. She was especially impressed with his argument that people do not act for their professed idealistic reasons, and instead she learned to look for the "hidden and interested motives".
According to Alexander Herzen, who edited a version of Catherine's memoirs, Catherine had her first sexual relationship with Sergei Saltykov while living at Oranienbaum, as her marriage to Peter had not yet been consummated, as Catherine later claimed. Nonetheless, Catherine would eventually leave the final version of her memoirs to her son, the future Paul I, in which she explained why Paul had been Peter's son. Saltykov was used to make Peter jealous, and she did not desire to have a child with him; Catherine wanted to become empress herself, and did not want another heir to the throne; however, Empress Elizabeth allegedly blackmailed Peter and Catherine to produce this heir. Peter and Catherine had both been involved in a 1749 military plot to crown Peter (together with Catherine) in Elizabeth's stead. As a result of this plot, Elizabeth likely wished to deny both Catherine and Peter any rights to the Russian throne. Elizabeth, therefore, allowed Catherine to have sexual lovers only after a new legal heir, Catherine and Peter's son Paul, born in 1754, survived and appeared to be strong.