The man who would one day die in her shadow sat across from her at the wedding altar, a pale, sickly boy of eleven who still played with toy soldiers and drank too much for his age. Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst was barely sixteen, a German princess with a thick accent and a mother who had pushed her into this marriage with dreams of Russian power. Sophie hated him on sight. She would spend the next several decades proving exactly how much.
She was not born Catherine the Great. That name came later, along with the crown, the bloodshed, and the secrets she kept behind locked doors. But even as a young girl, she understood the game: learn the language, walk barefoot on cold floors at night to practice pronunciation, charm the nobles, and never let anyone see the ambition burning behind her eyes. She married Peter, the heir to the Russian Empire and her second cousin, on August 21st, 1745.
She became Catherine Alexeievna, and she quickly discovered that her dull, cruel husband was even worse than she had feared. Peter was obsessed with toy soldiers and his own pleasures. He spent his time courting beautiful women, most famously Elizaveta Vorontsova, and openly talked about divorcing Catherine to marry her. Catherine, meanwhile, turned to books to survive the boredom, devouring Voltaire and Tacitus, learning the art of power.
And then she turned to other things. Her court at the Russian royal palace was filled with handsome, lively nobles, and soon Catherine’s gaze settled on a man named Sergei Saltykov. Their affair was the first of many. She gave birth to a son in 1754.
Peter refused to believe the boy was his, though the child looked just like him. A few years later, she had a daughter, Anna. Peter sneered, “God knows where my wife gets her pregnancies. ” The little girl died at fourteen months.
Catherine rarely spoke of her again, whether out of coldness or grief, no one could say. In 1762, Peter finally ascended to the throne as Peter the Third. Catherine was his empress consort, but within six months, they were living in separate palaces. She had been quietly building alliances for years, planting loyalists among the court, waiting for the right moment to strike.
When she heard that Peter had detained one of her allies, she knew the time had come. She marched to the Russian regiment, playing the helpless, frightened woman, begging the soldiers to save her from her unhinged husband. Then she went to another barracks where clergymen were already waiting to crown her sole ruler of the empire. Peter was detained and forced to abdicate.
He was held captive, and on July 17th, 1762, he died at the age of thirty-four. The official autopsy said a stroke. The rumors said Catherine’s hand was in it. The timing was too convenient for anyone to believe otherwise.
Just months before she seized the throne, Catherine had given birth to her third child, a boy she named Alexi. This time, there was no ambiguity about the father. The child was definitely Peter’s. But Catherine, bold as ever, named him after his true father—her lover, Gregory Orlov.
Getting rid of Peter was not the only blood she spilled that year. Another claimant to the throne, Ivan the Sixth, had been locked away since infancy because his royal blood threatened the crown. He was twenty-three years old, mad from a lifetime of isolation, and Catherine had him killed too. Her appetite for power matched her appetite for lovers.
She developed a system: seduce a man, promote him to high rank, and when she grew bored, pension him off with land and servants. But Grigory Potemkin was different. When their affair ended, he stayed close, handpicking her future lovers for good looks and intelligence. He served her far beyond the bedroom.
She never remarried after removing Peter. Why share the crown when she could keep it all for herself? Her relationship with her eldest son, Paul, was a disaster. She refused to let him co-rule, a common practice in Russia at the time, and she never showed him kindness.
When Paul had a son, Alexander, Catherine decided to make the boy her official heir instead of her grown son. She would rather have her grandson on the throne than Paul. Catherine wanted to prove she belonged on that throne. She modernized Russia, expanded its borders, and redesigned its cities in classical style.
She promoted education and culture, trying to transform a backwater into an enlightened power. But she also took big swings that sometimes missed. When she tried to marry her granddaughter Alexandra to King Gustav IV of Sweden, she threw a lavish engagement ball. The guest of honor never showed up.
Worried about Alexandra’s religion, Gustav fled back to Sweden, leaving Catherine humiliated in front of her entire court. In 1773, a ghost from her past returned. A peasant rebellion rose up, led by a man named Emelian Pugachev, who claimed he was Peter the Third, resurrected and seeking vengeance. Catherine crushed the rebels with an enormous army.
When Pugachev was captured, she had him imprisoned in a metal cage for public ridicule, then decapitated in a Moscow square and drawn and quartered. No one learned the extremes of her nature better than Stanisław Poniatowski, her Polish lover. She gifted him the kingdom of Poland, installing him as king. But when he started rallying for Polish independence, she forced him to abdicate.
He was lucky to escape with his life. Even her modernizing efforts had a ruthless edge. When smallpox ravaged Russia, she promoted inoculation, a radical idea at the time. She proved her faith in it by getting vaccinated herself with the help of an English doctor.
It worked. November 16th, 1796 began like any other day. Catherine got up early, sipped her coffee, told her lady’s maid she had slept better than she had in a long time, and began signing papers. Just after nine in the morning, her servants found her on the floor, her face purple.
Her pulse fluttered, her breathing was ragged. She fell into a coma and died soon after. The rumors started immediately. People claimed she had died in a bizarre accident involving a horse.
It was nonsense. The autopsy revealed the truth: she had suffered a stroke, the same ailment that supposedly killed Peter III. Before her death, an aide had found an undated will among her possessions. She asked to be dressed in white with a golden crown, and she wanted mourning to last six months, no longer.
“The shorter, the better,” she wrote. Her funeral was more lavish than she requested. She got her golden crown, but they dressed her in silver brocade instead of white, and her body lay in state for six weeks while people kissed her hand. Her son Paul became emperor after her death, but his reign was short and hated.
A few years in, he was killed, and the crown passed to Alexander, the grandson Catherine had intended all along. Even in death, her private life haunted her legacy. During World War II, German forces raided the Winter Palace and found a hidden boudoir full of sensual furniture, chairs and objects decorated in ways that would shock anyone. She also employed foot ticklers, a tradition among Russian royalty, who sang bawdy songs while feathering her feet for relaxation and arousal.
Catherine the Great was a woman of contradictions. Publicly, she was the chaste, enlightened empress. Privately, she was a woman who collected erotic art, took lover after lover, and climbed to power over a trail of bodies.
She earned her title through blood, lust, and ultimate betrayal.
