Catherine the Great

Catherine II ruled Russia for thirty-four years, the longest reign of any Russian empress. She was born Sophie Friederike Auguste, a princess of the small German house of Anhalt-Zerbst, at Stettin in Pomerania in 1729. Selected as a bride for the Russian heir, she arrived in Russia in 1744, converted to Orthodoxy under the name Ekaterina Alekseevna, and in 1745 married Grand Duke Peter, a grandson of Peter the Great through the house of Holstein-Gottorp. The marriage was unhappy, but Catherine used her years at court to master the Russian language and cultivate political allies.

Her husband succeeded as Peter III in January 1762 and rapidly alienated the army and the church. In June of that year Catherine, supported by the guards regiments, deposed him in a bloodless coup; he died in custody days later. Crowned in Moscow, she presented herself as a reforming sovereign in the spirit of the Enlightenment, corresponding with Voltaire and Diderot and convening a Legislative Commission in 1767 guided by her Nakaz, an instruction drawing on Montesquieu and Beccaria.

In practice her rule rested on the nobility, whose privileges she confirmed in the Charter of 1785, and serfdom expanded during her reign. The great peasant rising led by Yemelyan Pugachev in 1773-75 was suppressed with severity. Abroad, Catherine's armies won two major wars against the Ottoman Empire, annexed Crimea in 1783, and joined Prussia and Austria in the three partitions that erased Poland-Lithuania from the map by 1795, vastly enlarging Russian territory.

Catherine founded the Smolny Institute for the education of girls, assembled the art collection that became the Hermitage, and promoted town-building and inoculation. Her son Paul, born in 1754, was raised largely apart from her, and relations between them remained cold. She died of a stroke at the Winter Palace in November 1796 and was succeeded by Paul I, from whom all subsequent Romanov emperors descended.