Massie, biographer of the tsars, who brings great authority to this sweeping account of Catherine and her times. She wrote diligently, to her lovers, to her diplomats, to friends, and left detailed memoirs, all put to good use by Robert K. She ruled for 34 years, going to bed at 10 p.m., rising at 6 a.m., drinking black coffee and getting to work, running her empire until she died of a stroke on Nov. She herself led 14,000 soldiers to arrest him, charging along on a white horse, in uniform, a sword at her side. A gown in the Kremlin Armory testifies to her amazing waist - whisper-thin when she was young.Ĭatherine the Great ascended to the Russian throne when her husband, Peter III, was removed in a coup in 1762. She rewrote Russia’s laws, expanded its borders and powers, made America’s John Paul Jones briefly an admiral in her navy and became Europe’s greatest art collector. She was pen pals with Voltaire, a hard-working single mother who always kept a lover - 12 of them over the years.
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