Catherine the Great presented one face to her empire and quite another to the world behind closed doors. The woman who championed Enlightenment ideals and modernized Russia also kept a secret collection of erotic furniture in a private cabinet beside her room. Her reign was built on blood, ambition, and betrayal, and she earned her title not through birth but through a relentless pursuit of power. She was not born Catherine, and she was not Russian.
She entered the world in 1729 as Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, the German daughter of Prince Christian and Princess Johanna. Her mother dreamed of greatness for her, but even Johanna could hardly have predicted how far her daughter would go. At the age of ten, Sophie caught the attention of Peter, the heir to the Russian Empire and her second cousin. Even then, she disliked him.
Peter was pale, sickly, and obsessed with toy soldiers, and he already showed signs of a drinking problem. Despite her German origins and lingering accent, Sophie threw herself into learning Russian, sometimes walking barefoot through her bedroom at night practicing pronunciation. In August 1745, at barely sixteen, she married Peter and officially became Catherine Alexeievna. The marriage quickly soured.
Catherine found her new husband dull beyond measure and turned to books for escape, devouring the works of Voltaire and absorbing the political lessons of Tacitus. The couple established their court at the Russian royal palace, surrounded by handsome nobles from across the empire. Before long, Catherine’s restless gaze settled on Sergei Saltykov, and the pair began an affair. Catherine soon took a series of lovers, while Peter pursued his own extramarital interests, most notably courting Elizaveta Vorontsova.
Rumors circulated that Peter wanted to divorce Catherine and marry Elizaveta. Catherine gave birth to a son in 1754 and then a daughter, Anna, in the late 1750s. Peter refused to acknowledge the girl as his own, remarking that God only knew where his wife got her pregnancies. The child lived only fourteen months, and Catherine rarely mentioned her again.
In 1762, Peter ascended the throne as Peter III, with Catherine as his consort. The couple moved into the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, but within months they were living in separate residences. For years, Catherine had quietly cultivated allies among the court, preparing for a coup.
On July 9, 1762, she moved. Learning that Peter had detained one of her supporters, she decided the attack had to come immediately. She went to a Russian regiment and, playing the helpless woman, begged the soldiers to save her from her unstable husband. Then she proceeded to another barracks, where clergymen were already waiting to declare her sole ruler of the Russian Empire.
Catherine was not finished. She had Peter detained and forced him to abdicate. On July 17, 1762, while in captivity, he fell ill and died at the suspiciously young age of thirty-four. The official autopsy recorded a stroke, but darker rumors swirled.
Given the convenient timing, many historians believe Catherine had a hand in ensuring her husband would never reclaim the throne. That was not her only act of ruthlessness. Another claimant to the throne, Ivan VI, a young man who had been imprisoned since infancy because his royal blood threatened the crown, was also killed. Catherine’s personal life remained as complicated as her political maneuvers.
Months before she plotted Peter’s downfall, she had given birth to a third child, a son named Alexei, in April 1762. There was no confusion about this child’s paternity. He was clearly Peter’s son, and Catherine named him after his true father, her lover Grigory Orlov. Over the years, Catherine took so many lovers that she developed a system for managing them.
She would seduce them, promote them to high positions, and when she tired of them, she pensioned them off with land and servants. Her lover Grigory Potemkin went further than most. When their romance faded, he happily vetted her replacements, selecting men for their looks and intelligence. Catherine never remarried after removing Peter from the throne.
This was a calculated decision. She was already empress of Russia, and she saw no reason to hand the crown to any man. Her relationship with her eldest son, Paul, was deeply strained. Whether because he resembled his father or because she saw him as a threat, Catherine never offered him a chance to co-rule.
When Paul had a son of his own in 1777, Catherine made plans to make her grandson Alexander her official heir instead of her grown son. Determined to prove herself, Catherine set out to transform Russia into an enlightened powerhouse. She waged wars to expand the empire and modernized its cities, introducing classical architecture. But her ambitious projects sometimes failed spectacularly.
One of her greatest embarrassments came when she pushed for her granddaughter Alexandra to marry King Gustav IV of Sweden. She threw a lavish engagement ball, only for Gustav to never appear. Worried about Alexandra’s willingness to convert religions, he fled back to Sweden, leaving Catherine humiliated. The past continued to haunt her.
In 1773, a peasant rebellion broke out, led by Emelian Pugachev, who claimed to be Catherine’s late husband Peter III, resurrected and seeking vengeance. After a year of rebellion, Catherine raised an enormous force and crushed the uprising. She captured Pugachev, imprisoned him in a metal cage for public display, had him decapitated in a Moscow square, and then drawn and quartered. No one experienced the full range of Catherine’s favor and fury quite like Stanisław Poniatowski.
When he was in her good graces, she gifted him the kingdom of Poland itself, installing him as its ruler. But when Poniatowski began rallying for Polish independence, his former lover turned against him. Catherine forced him to abdicate as punishment for his disloyalty, and Stanisław was fortunate to escape with his life. Catherine was also a genuine modernizer.
In 1762, with smallpox raging through Russia, she promoted the then-radical method of inoculation. To demonstrate her confidence, she personally received the vaccine from the English doctor Thomas Dimsdale. It worked, and the example set by the empress encouraged others to follow. On November 16, 1796, Catherine’s life took its final turn.
She rose early, sipped her morning coffee, and told her lady’s maid she had enjoyed the best sleep she had experienced in a long time. She began signing papers. Just after nine in the morning, her servants found her lying on the floor, her face a lurid shade of purple. Her pulse fluttered, her breathing was ragged, and she quickly fell into a coma.
She died soon after. Years before her death, an aide had found an undated will among her belongings. In it, Catherine requested that her body be dressed in white with a golden crown inscribed with her Christian name. She asked that mourning dress be worn for no longer than six months, noting that the shorter the better.
Her funeral proved even more lavish than she had requested. Mourners dressed her in silver brocade rather than simple white and decorated her coffin in gold fabric. Her body lay in state for six weeks, and visitors came to kiss the rotting flesh of her hand. When Catherine died, her son Paul finally became emperor.
His reign was short and deeply unpopular. Only a few years later, he was killed, making way for the heir Catherine had intended all along, her grandson Alexander. After her death, rumors spread that Catherine had died in a shocking manner, reportedly after intimate relations with a horse. The story was false.
Her autopsy revealed that she had died of a stroke, the same ailment officially recorded for her late husband. The unsavory legend persisted nonetheless, like so many of the scandals that followed the empress. Catherine’s public and private images remained two very different things to the very end.