On July 16, 1762, the deposed Emperor Peter III of Russia died in captivity at the age of thirty-four. The official autopsy attributed his death to a stroke, but the timing could not have been more convenient. Only days earlier, his wife had seized the throne in a bloodless coup and forced him to sign an abdication. Darker rumors have swirled ever since: that Catherine had a hand in his death to ensure he could never reclaim the crown.
Whatever the truth, the man who had been emperor for barely six months was gone, and his wife now ruled alone. She would go on to be remembered as Catherine the Great, an enlightened monarch who expanded the Russian Empire and transformed its cities. But the woman who built that legacy was also defined by ambition, scandal, and ruthlessness, and her path to the throne had been paved with calculated moves and carefully chosen alliances. Catherine was not born Russian, nor was she originally named Catherine.
She came into the world in 1729 as Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, a German princess, the daughter of Prince Christian and Princess Johanna. Her mother had grand ambitions for her, and those ambitions found a target when Sophie caught the attention of Peter, the heir to the Russian Empire and her own second cousin. Even as a child of ten, she disliked him. Peter was pale and sickly, a boy of eleven who still played obsessively with toy soldiers and had already developed a troubling fondness for drink.
Still, Sophie understood the stakes. She worked tirelessly to master Russian, practicing pronunciation by walking barefoot through her bedroom late at night, though she never fully lost her German accent. On August 21, 1745, at barely sixteen years old, she married Peter and officially became Catherine Alexeievna. The marriage was unhappy from the start.
Catherine was quick-witted and curious, while she found her new husband dull beyond measure. She turned to books to escape her boredom, devouring Voltaire and absorbing the political lessons of Tacitus. At court, surrounded by the empire’s most vibrant nobles, her eyes eventually wandered. She began an affair with the handsome Sergei Saltykov, the first in what would become a long and infamous series of lovers.
Peter, for his part, pursued his own extramarital interests, most notably courting Elizaveta Vorontsova. There was even talk that he wanted to divorce Catherine and marry her. Catherine gave birth to a son in 1754 and then a daughter, Anna, in the late 1750s. Peter refused to accept that the girl was his.
God knows where my wife gets her pregnancies, he reportedly said. The child lived only fourteen months, and Catherine almost never mentioned her again. When Peter ascended to the throne in 1762 as Peter III, Catherine became his consort and the couple moved into the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.
Less than half a year later, they were living in separate palaces. For years, Catherine had been quietly cultivating allies among the court, preparing for a coup. By mid-1762, she was ready to act. On July 9, 1762, word reached Catherine that Peter had detained one of her allies.
The attack had to come now. She went to the Russian regiment, presented herself as a helpless woman, and begged the soldiers to save her from her unhinged husband. She then moved to another barracks, where a group of clergymen was already waiting to proclaim her the sole ruler of the Russian Empire. Peter was detained and forced to abdicate.
A week later, he was dead. The coup did not stop with Peter. Another claimant to the throne, Ivan the Sixth, had been locked away since infancy because his royal blood threatened the crown. The twenty-three-year-old, by then mentally broken, had to be eliminated as well.
Catherine had him killed too, removing every obstacle between herself and absolute power. With the throne secured, Catherine set about proving herself. She waged wars to expand the empire, modernized its cities, and reshaped their architecture in a classical style. She also embraced the ideals of the Enlightenment in ways that set her apart.
In 1762, with smallpox ravaging Russia, she promoted inoculation, then still a radical and widely feared method. To set an example, she personally submitted to the procedure under the care of English doctor Thomas Dimsdale. It worked, and the empress’s willingness to put her own life on the line helped legitimize the practice across the empire. But her reign was also marked by brutality.
In 1773, a rebellion broke out among peasants, led by Emelian Pugachev, who claimed to be Catherine’s late husband Peter III, miraculously resurrected and hungry for revenge. The revolt lasted a year before Catherine’s forces crushed it. Pugachev was imprisoned in a metal cage for public ridicule, then decapitated in a Moscow square and drawn and quartered. The message was unmistakable: no one threatened Catherine’s throne without facing the full weight of her fury.
Her relationship with Stanisław Poniatowski, a former lover, showed both her generosity and her ruthlessness. In her favor, she gifted him nothing less than the kingdom of Poland, installing him as its ruler. But when Poniatowski began rallying for Polish independence, Catherine took the crown back. She forced him to abdicate as punishment for his disloyalty, and he considered himself lucky to escape with his life.
Her private life was a constant source of scandal. She took a remarkable number of lovers and even developed a system to manage them. She would seduce a man, promote him to high rank, and when she grew tired of him, pension him off with land and servants. One lover, Grigory Potemkin, went further than any other.
When their own romance cooled, he took on the task of vetting her next partners, handpicking them for good looks and intelligence. Catherine never remarried after removing Peter from the throne, and that too was a calculated decision. Why hand the crown to some man when she was already empress of Russia? Her relationship with her eldest son, Paul, was deeply difficult.
Whether because he resembled his father too closely or because she saw him as a threat, Catherine never offered him a chance to co-rule. The tension worsened after Paul had a son of his own in 1777. Catherine, unwilling to extend kindness to her grown son, began planning to make her grandson Alexander her official heir instead. There were also public humiliations.
Catherine pushed hard to marry her granddaughter Alexandra to King Gustav IV of Sweden and threw a lavish engagement ball in their honor. The guest of honor never appeared. Gustav, worried about religious differences, fled back to Sweden, leaving Catherine humiliated. In private, Catherine’s tastes were a far cry from her public image as a chaste, enlightened empress.
She secretly collected erotic art, including Giulio Romano’s sensual painting Two Lovers, kept in her basement. During World War II, German forces raided the Winter Palace and stumbled upon an old boudoir of hers, full of sensual furniture decorated in ways that shocked them. She also employed full-time foot ticklers, a tradition among Russian royalty, who would sing bawdy ballads while feathering the empress’s feet to relax and arouse her. November 16, 1796 began like any other day.
Catherine rose early, drank her morning coffee, and told her lady’s maid she had enjoyed the best sleep in a long time. Then she got to work signing papers. Just after nine that morning, her servants found her lying on the floor, her face a lurid purple. Her pulse was fluttering, her breathing ragged.
She slipped into a coma and died soon after. Rumors spread almost immediately, including the infamous claim that she had died during an intimate encounter with a horse. The autopsy told a different story. Catherine the Great had died of a stroke, the very same ailment officially blamed for her late husband.
The ridiculous tales of her death endured nonetheless, overshadowing a more intimate find made a few years earlier. One of her aides had discovered an undated will among her belongings. In it, she requested a simple white dress, a golden crown inscribed with her Christian name, and mourning lasting no more than six months. The shorter, the better, she wrote.
Her funeral was even more lavish than she had asked for. Mourners dressed her in silver brocade rather than white, decorated her coffin in gold fabric, and displayed her body for six full weeks in one of the grandest rooms of her palace. People came to kiss the hand of the rotting empress until the burial finally came. Her son Paul survived his difficult childhood to take the throne after her death, but he met the same fate as his father.
Just a few years into an unpopular reign, he was killed, clearing the way for the heir Catherine had intended all along: her grandson Alexander. The empress’s public and private selves had always been two different things, and only after her death did the full scale of both become clear.