February 20, 2012. Playa Royale, Mexico. Catherine The Great.

It is a book well worth reading.  The full title is Catherine The Great: Portrait of a Woman.  She was a woman of the eighteenth century and did much to begin the collection of art in Russia.  Of course, she did a lot of other things of which we do not approve, such as taking over and dividing Poland into three parts, and incorporating the Crimea into Russia.  She toyed with the ideas of the enlightenment but when the French Revolution began, she quickly retreated from any such radical ideas.

She believed in having a benevolent autocratic monarch and inherited positions, something which is not acceptable to our way of thinking.  But she was quite an amazing lady.   I knew a bit about Russian history but not much detail from the 17th and 18th centuries, so this book filled in all the gaps.   The politics of Europe was important in the book, if for nothing else than for who was going to marry which prince or princess.  It really was a ridiculous system, this system of inherited positions.  Long term, it did not serve anyone well.

I enjoyed reading about this important lady, who was a German Princess who became the Empress of Russia.  You must read the book to find out how this came about.