Article: Catherine the great: a personal view.(Critical Essay)

Isabel de Madariaga looks at the personality and achievement of the controversial Empress of Russia.

SINCE I FIRST TOOK Catherine seriously as a ruler, some forty years ago, I have grown to like her very much. This is not therefore going to be an exercise in debunking, it is a personal portrait of someone who has become a close friend.

For nearly two hundred years the Empress Catherine II of Russia (1762-96), or Catherine the Great, as she is known, has had a very bad press as a German usurper from a minor ducal family, without any claim to the Russian throne. Women on the throne were an anomaly and it was expected that they would rule through favourites ...

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