Portrait of a WOMAN, not an empress, not an autocrat. In his own highly talented way, Pulitzer Prize winner Massie is going to tell us what made Catherine tick underneath the ermine. Massie feels a huge kinship to the House of Romanov, because his son, Robert K. Massie IV, has hemophilia, the disease that devastated many royal families, the most famous sufferer being Alexei, the only son of Tsar Nicholas II. If you've read "Nicholas and Alexandra" "Peter the Great" and other Massie biographies you know how beautifully he writes about Russian royalty and the reader feels that part of Massie's heart is in Russia. He understands and appreciates the handsome and captivating Catherine well as he brings her to life in this splendid biography.
We are going to see a fourteen year old unknown German princess, Sophia of Anhalt, the future Catherine, morph herself into a ship of state with enormous powers. If it is possible for a royal personage to pull herself up by her own bootstraps, Sophia did.
Sophia was ignored by her own mother, Johanna, who wanted a boy, until Johanna realized Sophia was marketable as a bride and peddled her around Germany and later Russia. Massie points out that Sophia-Catherine, denied love as a girl, had a psyche that was seriously wounded, and as an adult and empress she would demand both love and admiration perhaps to an excessive degree. Nevertheless, at fourteen years old Sophia was astonishingly mature and participated with relish in the search for a husband.
That husband would be Peter, nephew of the Empress Elizabeth. The Empress was the daughter of Peter the Great. Massie deals sympathetically with Peter, but a less prepossessing child would have been hard to find with his thin, straggling blonde hair, his protuberant eyes, his weak chin, his lack of being good at anything. A fearsome attack of small pox left his face horribly scarred. A less attractive bridegroom could hardly be imagined but Sophia, who had learned Russian and converted to Orthodox, determined to do her best and the new Catherine was born. The new Catherine with a mind like a steel trap and ambition to match.
Empress Elizabeth wanted an heir and she was obsessed. After their wedding neither Peter nor Catherine seemed to know what they were supposed to do. At night they lay side by side like two logs for days, for weeks... for nine years. Massie discusses the physical problem Peter may have had that prevented him from sexual performance, marveling that France's Louis XVI may have had exactly the same problem. Simple surgery corrected the abnormality in Louis' case and very likely in Peter's, too. At any rate, after nine barren years Catherine gave birth to a boy. Empress Elizabeth as Massie says "kidnapped" the baby, installed him in her own apartments and brought him up as her own.
More or less off the hook as a baby-producer, although she had other children by her lovers. Catherine embarked on the first of the twelve affairs she would have in her life. She also began reading everything penned by Enlightenment philosophers. She corresponded with the famous thinkers of her time, including Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Marie Antoinette and would you believe John Paul Jones?
Catherine, when still very young, learned to keep her head in the treacherous atmosphere of the Romanov court. Back-biting, spite, jealousy, greed, all mingled together in a horrible stew in which a person could be on the top of the pot one day, on the bottom the next and very likely dead, too.
When Empress Elizabeth died on Christmas Day in 1761 Peter was crowned as Peter III and nobody was happy about this except perhaps one of his mistresses. Peter was a total disaster with few if any redeeming points. In a complicated but bloodless coup Peter was overthrown and imprisoned and a few days later strangled. Whether Catherine had any complexity in her husband's murder is argued to this day, but it is quite possible she was innocent.
"She sat on the throne of Peter the Great, and ruled an empire, the largest on earth. Her signature...was law, and if she chose could mean life or death for any one of her twenty million subjects."
Catherine's friends, enemies, lovers, family, generals parade across the Russian panorama and author Massie integrates them into Catherine's life with great skill. Catherine brought Russia out of the dark ages in a massive plan of "Westernization". The government, foreign policy, cultural affairs, the squashing of a huge rebellion by an illiterate peasant imposter who claimed to be Peter III, the massive problem of serfdom were all in her dainty hands.
But governing for Catherine wasn't enough. She thirsted for love and her twelve lovers, all Guards officers are described in detail. These relationships were rocky, filled with accusations on both sides. Catherine's husband, Peter III had not touched her for nine years, her own mother used her as a pawn to advance herself. As Catherine aged, the men became younger and younger as Catherine tried to find love and retain her youth.
The most famous of her lovers was Gregory Potemkin who was the most important person in her life for seventeen years and was it was possible that they married secretly. He was in everything but name co-ruler. When the couple's ardor waned, Gregory found young handsome Guards to fill the void in Catherine's life while remaining on friendly terms with Catherine There were a lot of ménage a trois.
One of the last dramas of Catherine's life concerned her son Paul, who had been taken from her at birth. There was some doubt that Paul was Peter III's son. He was an odd-looking boy with features rather like a pug dog. Paul and his mother hardly knew one another and there was no love lost between them. But Paul gave Catherine many grandchildren, and she doted on them and named the first two boys herself, Alexander and Constantine.
Catherine had assembled the greatest art gallery in Europe, the Hermitage and she commissioned the statue of Peter the Great, "The Bronze Horseman" who still rides his rearing horse near the Winter Palace. She established schools and orphanages and hospitals. She had herself inoculated with the new vaccine for smallpox as an example, which took courage. Massie believes that Catherine as a female ruler had only one equal: England's Elizabeth the first. She died November 6, 1796 and she passed into history beside Peter the Great as Russia's two greatest rulers.
