muscle for Catherine’scoup d’état in 1762, and in the early years she was indebted to them and dependent enough not to want to alienate them. But there were three loci of power in eighteenth century Russia: the imperial guards (where the Orlov strength lay), the Senate (seat of the leading families), and the court parties. Haslip gives the impression that Catherine did not believe she could rule without the support of the Orlovs, which falsely diminishes her stature. While no ruler could act effectively without the cooperation of these three institutions (as Peter III learned too late), Catherine was an astute politician who well understood how to manipulate this political configuration and keep its various elements in check.

Perhaps the biggest problem with popular history is its uncritical acceptance of any good story. Haslip’s first chapters rely heavily on Catherine’s famous memoirs, a source written with an obvious political purpose and reworked several times. Haslip simply accepts it as a true account, not merely repeating Catherine’s self-serving portrayal of her husband as a dangerous madman, but even elaborating on it with a little popular psychology of her own. Yet there is no evidence that Peter was deranged. He was a drunkard, and his boorish and occasionally even silly behavior is fully explained as the actions of a drunken man. Catherine’s effort to convince us otherwise by recounting each incident in lurid detail does not succeed, even if we can sympathize with her need to justify an act of usurpation and regicide.

At one point, however, Haslip declares her independence of Catherine’s interpretation. This is on the issue of the paternity of her son Grand Duke Paul. Despite Catherine’s hints that the real father was not Peter Ulrich but Sergei Saltykov (her first extramarital lover), Haslip grants the honor to Peter on grounds of supposedly similar physiological and personality traits. She adds the interesting suggestion that Catherine denied Peter’s paternity in order to exonerate herself before her grandchildren for having condoned her husband’s murder. Haslip may be right about Catherine’s conscious bending of the truth here, but the empress’ motives were no doubt different. One of the chief elements in Catherine’s justification of her power seizure was the need to protect her son Paul, whom, she argued, Peter intended to get rid of. Raising doubts about Peter’s fatherhood made the threats to Paul more credible. As for the question of paternity, it is far from clear that Catherine herself knew who the real father was.

The superficial treatment of most events described in this work leads to some serious misrepresentations of the workings of Russian politics. An obvious example, and one that scarcely requires any special analytical ability, is the cliché about Alexis Orlov acting for Catherine in killing Peter III, the implication being that Catherine had all but ordered the killing. In fact, Catherine had no need to do or say anything about Peter’s fate. His continued existence posed a greater threat to the Orlovs and other conspirators than it did to Catherine, since his return would certainly have brought them to the scaffold and probably only landed Catherine in a convent. Peter’s end would therefore have come soon enough without any complicity on Catherine’s part.

Most distressing, on any issue of real importance to the social and political development of Russia, Haslip falters, if indeed she tells us anything at all. In regard to the secularization of church property, a major reform begun by Peter III, she speaks of a “storm of protest from all classes of people,” when in fact what was most striking about this reform was the virtual absence of any protest. By the late eighteenth century the church stood in such abject dependence on the state that protest from within was unthinkable. Nor could an institution that provided little by way of social, intellectual, or even spiritual refuge expect the defense of its interest by other classes. About the only reaction to the reform came from the enserfed peasantry, which saw the “liberation” of ecclesiastical peasants (as well as the freeing of the nobility from obligatory state service, which occurred in the same year) as a harbinger of their own emancipation from bondage to the landed nobility. When this promise failed to materialize, the serfs interpreted the overthrow of Peter III as a plot by the “evil boyars” to suppress the manifesto granting their freedom, and, not surprisingly, they soon discovered Peter III’s (twenty-three of them, in fact) living in the villages and ready to lead the serfs to victory over the usurpers.

The most successful Peter III was Emelyan Pugachev, whose peasant war of 1773-1774 engulfed vast areas of central-eastern Russia and threatened to ignite rebellion in Moscow itself. This last great social upheaval of the early modern era—Haslip inexplicably calls it the first—destroyed the walls protecting Catherine’s compulsive personality. It is a tribute to the quality of Catherine’s public relations that Haslip could be led to assert that during the crisis “only the empress kept her head.” In reality, she came altogether unglued, babbled about leading the gentry on the battlefield, and then sank into a period of prolonged despondency.

Much to Catherine’s credit, after recovering she quickly polished up and began implementation of a major reform of the provincial administration, a measure she had been perfecting for more than a decade. The reform was her crowning achievement as a ruler. With it she did what Peter the Great had long struggled in vain to accomplish: create a domestic administration separate from the armed forces. This meant that the next time Russia went to war its provincial administration did not evaporate and with it the government’s capacity to collect taxes, muster recruits, and, not least, to contain peasant insurgencies and thus forestall another Pugachev rebellion. Catherine’s government reforms established the basic framework of Russian administration until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

These reforms were not Catherine’s only claim to greatness. Her tolerance and encouragement of public discussion, even to the point of subsidizing independent journalism, gave impetus to a budding intellectual life and provided Russia with the greatest freedom of expression it was to enjoy at any time prior to 1905. She also granted to the nobility and towns corporate rights, which, however fragile and circumscribed, were the first recognition in modern Russia of the notion that citizens could exercise rights against the state. Finally, there was Catherine’s remarkable ability to select the ablest field commanders (P. Panin, Suvorov, Rumiantsev, Repnin, Kutuzov) and some of the most skilled government ministers (N. Panin, Viazemskii, Teplov, Bezborodko) of modern Russia. These were the true sources of Catherine’s greatness and her legitimate claim to that title. Any history that neglects these aspects of her work and dwells on her supposed need to be physically subjugated by men, her insatiable sexual demands, her art collecting and monumental building projects greatly diminishes its subject and misses much of the point of studying the life of Catherine II.