What a woman Catherine was! Intellectually rapacious, sexually voracious, a great correspondent, a product of the Enlightenment, a socially conscious queen, coquettish and stern, motherly when the occasion demanded it, at other times filled with hauteur. Forever associated with Russia, this greatest of 18th century European monarchs was a product of her times and yet in many ways managed to transcend them.
And she wasn't even Russian. Born into a minor Germanic Protestant nobility, she was lucky enough to marry the hapless Crown Prince of Russia. Having converted to Orthodoxy and allegedly having engineered her husband's death, she ruled as absolute monarch of all the Russias for decades thereafter. This biography is a superb account of her rise, her tribulations and loves, her cultural achievements, her zenith, and the curious suppression of her fame after her death.
When your average totalitarian despot says to you that she values your opinion, you would do well to obfuscate. In Catherine's case, people actually took her at her word, and that was a complete break with the past. They could provide her facts without fear, and so her administrative drives were based on some semblance of reality. After her time, people tried to malign her reputation - calling her a slut and a thief of other people's immoral ideas. Simon Dixon shows that she did borrow much of her thoughts on governance from the great philosophers of the Enlightenment, and she, more than any other monarch in Europe, tried hard to ameliorate the lives of her subjects. In contrast to the centralising tendencies of her predecessors, she was able to delegate civil and military duties. She was successful in diplomacy and in war. For these alone she can truly be called the Great.
For those with an architectural/artistic bent of mind, Dixon provides sources and stories about the construction of many buildings and art-works of 18th century Russia. So this is not only a fine biography, it's also a good reference for art, literature and philosophy. A commendable work.
