Catherine the Great.
BIO 360
M. Muñoz · AI-narrated by Martin (from Google)
headphones
Audiobook
4 hr 21 min
Unabridged
family_home
Eligible
info
text_to_speech
AI-narrated
Want a free 26 min sample? Listen anytime, even offline.
Add
About this audiobook
She arrived in Russia at the age of fourteen speaking no Russian, carrying almost no money, and possessing no political power beyond her availability as a dynastic match for a man she had never met. She died sixty-seven years later as the most powerful ruler in the world, having governed the largest empire on Earth for thirty-four years, expanded its territory on three fronts, built one of the greatest art museums in history, corresponded with the finest minds of the European Enlightenment, and transformed a country that Western Europe had regarded as a barbarian periphery into a major force of civilization. Catherine the Great: Empress of Russia and Architect of an Empire is the definitive biography of one of history's most extraordinary individuals, a woman who reinvented herself completely in order to conquer the world she found herself in. This book traces the full arc of her astonishing life: from the modest garrison town of Stettin where Sophie Friederike Auguste was born in 1729, through the treacherous court of Empress Elizabeth where she spent seventeen years learning survival, to the night of June 28, 1762, when she rode to the barracks in borrowed clothes and talked a regiment of guards soldiers into making her Empress of all the Russias. It follows her through thirty-four years of governance that produced the annexation of Crimea, two victorious wars against the Ottoman Empire, the partitions of Poland, the founding of the Hermitage, and a correspondence with Voltaire, Diderot, and the philosophes that defined the intellectual life of her era. Written with rigorous historical scholarship and accessible narrative clarity, this biography does not shy away from the moral complexities of her reign: the serfs she kept in bondage, the nation she helped erase, the revolutionary ideas she suppressed in her final years. It offers instead an honest portrait of a woman of genius operating in the world as she found it, making choices that were simultaneously brilliant and imperfect, building something genuinely great at a cost that honesty requires us to acknowledge. For readers who love history, power, ideas, and the enduring fascination of extraordinary human lives, this is essential reading.
She arrived in Russia at the age of fourteen speaking no Russian, carrying almost no money, and possessing no political power beyond her availability as a dynastic match for a man she had never met. She died sixty-seven years later as the most powerful ruler in the world, having governed the larg...
Discover more
Rate this audiobook
Tell us what you think.
Listening information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
