Great Catherine by Carolly Erickson

read by Davina Porter

Let’s get one thing straight: I could listen to Davina Porter narrate her grocery list. All day. The woman has a voice on her. And that’s how I found this book: I was searching Audible for more books she has narrated. (Thankfully she’s narrated quite a few.) I wasn’t looking for history or biography in particular, and definitely not about Catherine the Great. All I knew about the Russian empress was the (apocryphal) story about her and the horse… and if you haven’t heard of it and you have delicate sensibilities, do *not* Google it. Trust me.

So, with that unpromising start, I dove in because I trust Ms. Porter’s taste. And because it was available as a downloadable audiobook at my library, so I didn’t even have to use my Audible credits for it. And I was not even a little bored or disappointed with the writing. In fact, this is a delightful book from beginning to end.

Ms. Erickson walks the reader through the life of the Russian autocrat from *her* unpromising start, which went on for years and years, through her glory days as a powerful and (mostly) benevolent philosopher-empress who refused to either forsake men or be ruled by one (thus earning the rabid distrust and scurrilous rumors of the world), to her final days, beset by ill health and scheming courtiers. And it’s a grand, sweeping epic, as its subject matter demands—though not especially long, at 381 pages, considering the amount of territory it covers. (See what I did there? Territory? Russia? Oh, never mind, you had to be there.)

Empress Catherine II of Russia began life as the not-especially-pretty but very well-educated Princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst. Which sounds like a grand title and a fine start in life, and so they should have been, but nevertheless her parents were far from certain they’d be able to make a good marriage for her. Nonetheless they took a gamble and tossed her name in the imperial marriage hat, so to speak.

Young Sophia was immediately swimming for her life in a sea of intrigue, and there was no guarantee she wouldn’t drown in it. She had, for one thing, to somehow win the trust and approval of her fiancé’s paranoid mother, Grand Duchess Anna Petrovna, who ruled the court with every dirty trick imaginable when her iron fist didn’t quite seem sufficient. 

Then, once Catherine finally married, her husband, Peter III, was an insecure, abusive, controlling petty tyrant (in addition to being emperor of all the Russias). Fortunately for her, his rule was brief; he was completely unsuited to lead Russia or Russians (whom he despised and whose language he barely spoke) and was assassinated after just six months. (Just how much Catherine herself had to do with that is open to debate; Ms. Erickson has an opinion on the subject.) And incredibly, even with such suspicions roiling about amongst the populace, Catherine managed what amounted to such a tremendous PR campaign that she was swept onto the throne by overwhelming popular support.

What followed was a tremendously successful rule—they don’t call just *anyone* “The Great,” after all—during which she greatly expanded Russian territory, kept up a regular correspondence with Voltaire, and popularized the newly-available smallpox vaccine by having first herself and then her son, the imperial heir, inoculated. She also, as I intimated earlier, went through a succession of men. Serial monogamy was very much not the done thing amongst female rulers in that place and time, and female rulers who themselves weren’t ruled by men were terrifying to men generally, so this earned her a lot of very nasty rumors. Including that horse thing.

This book is beautifully researched, relying quite a lot on Catherine’s own diaries and other primary sources. It’s also a very skillful condensation of a very large life lived in a very complex time.

Verdict: read it.