Catherine the Great was not Russian. She was born Sophie Friederike Auguste in the German principality of Anhalt-Zerbst, a place so small that most maps of Europe do not bother to label it. She was brought to Russia at fourteen to marry the heir to the throne, a man she would later describe as an idiot. She learned Russian, converted to Orthodox Christianity, changed her name, survived twenty years of a miserable marriage, then overthrew her husband in a coup and ruled Russia for thirty-four years. She did all of this in a century when most European women could not own property.

She Read Voltaire and Then Rewrote Russian Law

Catherine came to power in 1762 after a military-backed coup against her husband Peter III. He had been emperor for six months, had managed to alienate the army, the church, and the aristocracy simultaneously, and was rumored to be planning to divorce Catherine and marry his mistress. Catherine's allies in the Imperial Guard arrested Peter. He died a few days later under suspicious circumstances that Catherine spent the rest of her life not discussing. With the crown secured, she immediately began the project that would define her reign: the modernization of Russia along Enlightenment principles. She corresponded with Voltaire, Diderot, and d'Alembert. She purchased Diderot's library when he was broke. Historians at the Hermitage Museum have documented that she amassed one of the largest art collections in European history, laying the foundation for what is now the largest museum in the world. Her Nakaz, the legislative instruction she wrote in 1767 to guide Russian legal reform, ran to over 500 articles and drew heavily from Montesquieu and Beccaria. It argued against torture, for religious tolerance, and for the idea that the purpose of law was to protect citizens rather than punish them. European intellectuals were astonished. A Russian empress was articulating principles of governance more progressive than anything most Western European monarchs had attempted.

She Expanded Russia More Than Peter the Great Did

Catherine fought two major wars against the Ottoman Empire and won both. She annexed Crimea in 1783, gaining Russia permanent access to the Black Sea. She participated in the partitions of Poland, absorbing vast territories into the Russian empire. By the end of her reign, Russia was approximately 200,000 square miles larger than when she started. Research from the Russian Academy of Sciences Department of History has calculated that Catherine's territorial acquisitions exceeded those of Peter the Great, the ruler she explicitly modeled herself after. She named cities. She built palaces. She established the first state-funded educational institutions for women in Russia. Here is the thing nobody tells you. She did all of this while managing a court that was actively trying to undermine her. She was a woman, a foreigner, and someone who had taken the throne by force. Every ambitious nobleman in Russia was waiting for her to fail. She responded by working harder, reading more, governing more effectively, and outlasting every single one of them.

The Reputation Survived Everything Except Male Insecurity

Catherine the Great's legacy is inseparable from the scandalous stories that were invented about her, mostly by men, mostly after her death. The slanders were so extreme and so persistent that historians have spent centuries sorting fact from fabrication. The facts are sufficient. She had twelve documented lovers over the course of her reign. By the standards of male monarchs, this was unremarkable. Louis XV of France had more mistresses than Catherine had lovers, and nobody reduced his entire legacy to his bedroom. Research from the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York has argued that the disproportionate focus on Catherine's personal life represents one of the most sustained campaigns of historical sexism in European scholarship. She died on November 17, 1796, of a stroke. She was sixty-seven. She had ruled Russia for thirty-four years, longer than any other woman in Russian history. She left behind an empire that was larger, more culturally sophisticated, and more internationally powerful than the one she had inherited from the husband she overthrew. The German girl who arrived in Russia with nothing became the most consequential female ruler in modern European history. The men who wrote the histories could not forgive her for it.