Catherine the Great
NGM 1998/09
Photographs by Sisse Brimberg
Text by Erla Zwingle
She wasn't even Russian; she was German. She had absolutely no legal claim to the Russian crown. She endured 16 excruciating years waiting for her cruel, mentally subnormal husband to become Tsar; six months later she overthrew him in a coup; a week later her guards murdered him. She claimed to espouse the ideals of the European Enlightenment, yet she tightened the grip on the serfs so far that they rebelled in the greatest Russian uprising ever before 1917. Claiming to love peace, she over saw seven wars and masterminded the complete dismemberment of Poland. And there were the lovers.
Yet Empress Catherine II ruled for 34 years, one of the longest reigns in Russian history, and not long after her death in 1796 a Russian historian wrote to her grandson: "Should we compare all the known epochs of Russian history, virtually all would agree that Catherine's epoch was the happiest for Russian citizens; virtually all would prefer to have lived then than at any other time."
Today judgement is considerably more mixed.
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