Hutchinson £20 pp566

In August 1785, Catherine II, Empress of all the Russias, did something most extraordinary. She called a carriage and had herself driven from her summer home at Tsarskoye Selo to St Petersburg. Just like that. Everyone, Catherine herself included, was amazed. “I passed by like a tomcat, without anyone noticing,” she wrote gleefully. Her court, she went on, was consequently in turmoil, all the “hollow dreamers and politicians” struggling to find an explanation for her astonishing behaviour.

To help the reader appreciate how bizarre that impulsive journey seemed, here are a few details of some of Catherine’s other removes. When, as a 15-year-old Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, she arrived in Russia to be sized up as the possible consort for the heir to the imperial throne, her escort was itemised by her mother in a list which, as Virginia Rounding remarks, reads like “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. It includes: item 1: a detachment of cuirassiers; item 2: the chamberlain Prince Naryshkin; item 9: a man to make the coffee; item 10: eight footmen; item 13: “I don’t know how many sleighs and stable hands”. As empress, Catherine travelled around her realm with a suite of 2,000 people. When she visited the newly annexed Crimea, 560 horses were in readiness at each staging post to drag her entourage’s coaches and sleighs. At each stop she was housed in a newly purpose-built palace in which she hosted a ball, and her most important companions were each provided with a mansion complete with staff, porcelain, silver and wine cellar. This was, as Rounding puts it, “a life of processions”.

It was a life of many other things besides. Catherine was Voltaire’s correspondent and Diderot’s patron; she was, in large part, the builder of St Petersburg; she was the collector whose purchases fill the Hermitage. She presided over the overhaul of the Russian legal system and was an ambitious politician who deposed her husband and condoned his murder. She greatly expanded her empire and her unrealised “Greek project” would have seen Byzantium revived under Russian rule. “A few more years of Catherine,” wrote a French diplomat in 1786, with a mixture of anxiety and admiration, “and Europe will be transformed.”

Such a life is too big for any one book, declares Rounding. In this enjoyable biography she has limited herself to writing about “Catherine the woman”. This still leaves plenty of material. Catherine’s peers were awed by her capacity for work, but she believed that time must be made for leisure, and make it she did. She wrote light comedies that she and her inner court performed, she spent three hours a day with her grandsons when they were small, she indulged in bouts of “plantomania” during which she planned the gardens of her palaces. And, notoriously, she made love. “The trouble is,” she wrote, “My heart is loath to remain even one hour without love.” It hardly ever did. Three of her lovers were men of considerable distinction. Others were simply fortunate that their looks (Catherine was particularly susceptible to a well-arched eyebrow) were striking enough to win them a stint as her ami followed by an arranged marriage and a generous pension.

What she did when alone with these young men we will never know. Rounding plausibly suggests that sex may not have been as important to Catherine as her contemporaries imagined. During the war with Sweden in 1790, Catherine (aged 61) and Platon Zubov (aged 23) were disturbed by a cannonade clearly audible from her private apartments, but the activity interrupted by the noise was irreproachable: the couple were busy translating Plutarch into Russian.

Catherine was a woman of the Enlightenment who ruled a realm organised on medieval lines. Most of her life was passed in surroundings of fabulous grandeur and yet she endured hardships, too: after the birth of her first baby she was left alone for hours, lying on bloody sheets on the floor of her icy-cold room because nobody dared help her into bed without express orders. She could be haughty, but she adored Grigory Potemkin because he made her “laugh fit to burst”. She snubbed the Prince de Ligne when he recited some risqué verses, but she admitted that her first meeting with the Holy Roman Emperor brought her out in a sweat. She was a prolific and entertaining letter writer, a character bound to dominate any book about her as easily as she dominated her court full of watchful ministers and wayward nobles.

Rounding vividly evokes the transitional world — at once exotically archaic and bracingly modern — through which her subject moved. There is little here about the partition of Poland or the condition of the serfs: this is a biography, not a history book. But Catherine was not only the holder of great power, she was a person of immense ambition and appetite, and this book is written with vigour and intelligence enough to do justice to its prodigious subject.

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