A review by rheren
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie

3.0

I like reading biographies of great people. Catherine was one of the great movers and shakers of the world in her day, and did things that affect even to our day now, but this book seemed to try to focus more on her as a person rather than her policies and what was going on around her, although it does give larger context when necessary. I think I would've liked more about what she did for Russia and less about her lovers and her private life. I feel like maybe it was too intimate of a portrait: most biographies I end up admiring the subjects for their gifts and courage and charisma, even while it's clear that they're not perfect and have significant defects, but I really didn't feel that admiration for Catherine the Great. I felt sorry for her, certainly, but her desperate parade of short-term flings and her opulence and her disillusionment with classical liberalism and reversion to authoritarianism didn't give me much that I felt like I admired about her by the end. The fact that she repeated with her son every single one of the things that she acknowledged made her life so miserable when she was young was especially disappointing.