** 28th book of 2021: Power Politics **
I started my career watching Iraqi political brawls punctuated by assassinations, and now spend my days plotting personalities and reactions in the modern corporate version of a royal court, so I find royal courts endlessly fascinating. In pre-modern royal courts, social capital was not only the raw expression of human relationships unconstrained by economics or equality, but a life-or-death struggle of rumors and intrigue.
Catherine, or Sophia as she was originally known, started out as a pawn on the Russian court chessboard. Sophia was a suitable wife for a suitable heir only recalled to Moscow as the side effect of a previous coup. Unfortunately, when the gods tossed the coin between madness and greatness on Peter, Sophia’s husband-to-be and future emperor, the coin landed on madness. He turned out to be a young Russian Donald Trump, ready to dismantle Russian institutions, make concessions to Russia’s enemies, and imprison his orthodox wife. With the help of the Orlov brothers, the military’s antipathy for Peter, and Russia’s precedent for female rulers, Catherine seized the moment and imprisoned Peter instead. Peter soon died while imprisoned under dubious circumstances, and Ivan, another heir to the throne died in an escape attempt. The pawn crossed the board and became a queen.
Catherine was well read, and the 18 years she spent in court left her with much time to learn and read. In that time she developed both a scathing wit and some of the early humanistic tendencies that became hallmarks of her rule. * I do not know as a child that I was ugly, but I was often told that I was, and I must therefore strive to show inward virtues and intelligence … I had seen a portrait painted of myself when I was 10 years old, and that is certainly very ugly, and if that resembled me, they told me nothing false. * She tried to free the surfs, and tried to end corporal punishment, but ended with a checkered history on both. Through her regents, she annexed parts of Poland, Ukraine, established a Russian port on the Black Sea (Odessa) and led to a general strengthening of the Russian Empire.
Two things that struck me as odd: First, the subtitle. Massie’s Peter the Great is not subtitled ‘Portrait of a Man’, and I feel sad that womanhood is what Massie thinks of as Catherine the Great’s defining characteristic. Second the focus on the relationships Catherine had with the men around her, rather that the policies and priorities that she had as a leader of the empire for 30+ years. Focusing on individual relationships made sense when Catherine’s sphere of influence was limited and her personal memoirs were available, but nobody would take seriously a book about Julius Caesar written to focus exclusively on his love affairs throughout his life, so I feel like I got half of the story of Catherine the Great, and will have to look elsewhere for the entire thing.