Bookish’s Reviews > Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman > Status Update

Whew, what a journey! It has been an incredible two weeks with Massie's Catherine the Great.

"Poland now was reduced to one-third of its original size and a population of 4 million. When the treaties were signed, Catherine told herself that not only had she fended off the revolutionary virus spreading from France, but she was simply reoccupying lands that had once belonged to the great 16th c principality of Kiev, 'lands still inhabited by people of the Russian faith and race'"

This sounds familiar lol

Catherine is in her 40s and concerned with securing succession to her throne through her son Paul's marriage to a minor German princess. Potemkin ceases to be her primary sexual companion, though he retains a significant role in her court. Massie does this weird one paragraph comparison of Catherine's sex life with England's Elisabeth I's i.e the Virgin Queen that is unsettling, to say the least.

"None of Catherine's successors dared to summon such an assembly again until 1905, when Nicholas II was forced by revolution to sign a document transferring Russia from an absolute autocracy to a semiconstitutional monarchy - and then, in 1906, to summon Russia's first elected parliament, the State Duma" (p362).
One has to wonder what she would've thought of this, well, blockhead, and his endless series of blunders.

"It is worth noting that Catherine's writing of the Nakaz and summons to the Legislative Commission took place nine years before Thomas Jefferson wrote, and the Continental Congress voted to approve, the American Declaration of Independence. It is preceded by 22 years Louis XVI's summons to the Estates-General" (p362)

After a lovely (and mostly quiet) day reading we have Empress Catherine II. Why, oh why, does it have to be Monday tomorrow? ...

I am absolutely loving this. Dammit why do I have to get up early tomorrow :((((

This has been sitting on my shelf for a while. It even journeyed across an ocean or two unread and I am in the mood for some Russian history ... Add to that, my books on Rus and the Ukraine, and Stalin haven't arrived yet so here I go. I'm jumping back in time to a woman whose reputation proceeds her - in a massive way. I'm also getting the stink of censorship off me so Massie has a big job to do ...