She was a wonderful writer, clear, direct, self-aware, able to criticize herself and praise herself as well, with an eye for detail and more than a little touch of humor. In this pursuit, Massie has the great help of Catherine herself. Instead, in this biography, he is interested in the person of Catherine - in what it felt like to be her, in what made her tick. Yet, those great accomplishments are not Massie’s focus. Catherine magnified that power, and advanced the nation toward a culture that, during the century that followed, produced among others: Derzhavin, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Petipa, and Diaghhilev.” Catherine persuaded them to be inoculated against smallpox. “Peter,” Massie writes, “shaved off the beards and truncated the long robes of his leading noblemen. She also commissioned “The Bronze Horseman,” a monumental equestrian statue of Peter by French sculptors Étienne Maurice Falconet and Marie-Anne Collot, considered one of the masterpieces of Russian art.Īnd, to sooth the nerves of Gregory Potemkin, her former lover (and also probably her husband), she even came close to importing a pianist-composer from Germany - by the name of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Today, it contains the largest collection of paintings in the world, and is considered one of the greatest art museums on earth. Petersburg and its original collection of art by such luminaries as Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Raphael and Titian.

Indeed, Catherine created the Hermitage Palace in St. “Catherine brought European moral, political and judicial philosophy, literature, art, architecture, sculpture, medicine and education.” “Peter imported technology and government institutions,” Massie writes. That’s saying a lot since Peter was the man who, four decades earlier, had dragged his nation out of the Middle Ages and into modern eighteenth-century Europe to play a significant role in world affairs. On the final page of the book, Massie makes the argument - hard to dispute - that Catherine was the greatest monarch of her era and the equal to her predecessor, Peter the Great.

This 574-page biography is the portrait of a person - one who happens to have been a woman and who happens to have been the empress of Russia for more than thirty years in the late 1700s. Massie’s “Catherine the Great” is “Portrait of a Woman.” But that’s too limiting.

Peter the Great by Robert K. Massie