Catherine the Great

Early in the eighteenth century, the north German town of Stettin had all the grim and rigid characteristics of a frontier post. It was a border town and had long been a center...

This dumpy old lady was an elder sister of Fike’s mother, who was by contrast in her daughter’s eyes the perfect pattern of beauty, grace, and fashion. Fike herself, who was not...

It was a matter of course that the daughter of Christian August should be educated by an evangelical pastor. In her little room against the church, so close that the sound of th...

Catherine I, who had eleven children, was survived by only two of them: the melancholy Anne, married for a strip of sea-coast, and the frivolous Elisabeth, who remained unwed. T...

In the meantime Petersburg buzzed with speculation concerning the Grand Duke’s marriage. The diplomats had been taken by surprise when the Empress had produced her nephew as her...

With this one interruption, the train of thirty sleighs, each drawn by ten horses, dashed onward without pause. They intended to arrive in Moscow before the Grand Duke’s birthda...

Such was Christianity in Russia: images covered with gold and silver, pieces about a pagan named Marcus Aurelius, and outbursts of fire-works. As the pupil of Pastor Wagner, and...

As soon as she arrived home, the Grand Duchess went to find her favorite maiden Maria Petrovna Shukov, to comfort her in her loneliness. But the girl had disappeared during Cath...

Elisabeth’s capriciousness increased. Having changed her furniture and everything else in her environment that could be changed, at last she changed her favorite. The easy-going...

While the Grand Duke delighted in playing with his Holstein soldiers, he found the administration of the government, for which he had been responsible since the age of nineteen,...

It was the Empress’s last shot and still the Grand Duchess did not flinch. Elisabeth began to walk up and down the room, while Catherine and the Grand Duke fell to quarrelling w...

The conspiracy which the Grand Duchess had made during her intimacy with Poniatovsky and Williams had been more elaborate than the one in which she now engaged. In those days, t...

What actually happened at Ropsha was quite different. Peter’s tragedy came swiftly. Shut up in a bedroom and not allowed to leave it even for exercise, his existence was unutter...

When a fire broke out in the city, it was a glorious spectacle. During the first winter of her reign, the Empress watched from her window two hundred and forty wooden houses goi...

And so began the three famous Partitions of Poland. In the first partition, Poland lost four thousand square miles and the three partitioners felt equally well treated. Twenty y...

The dramatic example of the Empress did not, alas! put an end to smallpox in Russia. It meant only that the heir-apparent of the throne was now immune and the dynasty was to thi...

This was a sincere effort on the part of a sixty-year-old Empress to be truthful and candid about her past. Aside from certain obvious misrepresentations, such as saying that sh...

Catherine’s churlish lover was not poor in fancy. He could offer tributes to his lady showing an imagination of no mean order. As he composed lyrics in her honor, he could also...

There were a few things which all her lovers had in common. They were tall, well-built men and graced a military uniform to perfection. It is true that so long as they remained...

“Imagine me, who am tearful by temperament; I have seen someone die without shedding a tear. I said to myself: If you cry, the others will sob; if you sob, the others will swoon...

As a baby in the cradle, Paul was a sensitive creature, starting and trembling at every sound. He was devotedly nursed by the Empress Elisabeth and oppressed by her hysteria. Af...

There is a tradition, not well established, that her relationship with Zubov was Platonic. If this was true, the aging Empress took good care that it should not be known. She ha...

On the evening when the marriage contract was to be signed, the Empress shone like a sun on her throne. She had assembled for the occasion the whole grand world of Petersburg. C...