Welcome to Russian History Retold, Episode 233, an interview with William Clark of the

Grey History about Catherine the Great. Today we're going to have an interview that I did

with William Clark of Grey History's podcast. It was about Catherine the Great and kind

of like her relationship to the Enlightenment, where she was discussing things with Voltaire

and Dito Row. And this has to do with William Clark's podcast, which is looking at the French

Revolution. We did discuss a few very interesting things that I hadn't discussed before on this

podcast. So enjoy and we'll see you later. Bye. Hello everybody and welcome to this special joint

episode between Grey History, the French Revolution and the Russian rulers' history podcast.

My name is Will Clark and I'm the host of Grey History and joining me today is Mark Shals of

the Russian rulers' history podcast. How are you going Mark and how excited are you to discuss

one of the greatest Russian monarchs of all time? I love it. Catherine is one of my absolute

favorites. There's so much to her personality in this rule that it's always exciting to talk

about. She's like I find it not only one of the most fascinating Russian monarchs, but just one

of the most fascinating monarchs in European history more broadly. For those people who aren't

you know, intimately familiar with Catherine the Great, one of the things that they might discover

early on and might surprise them is the fact that this Russian Empress is not in fact Russian.

Are you able to give us a bit of background as to who Catherine was where she came from and how

she found herself not only in Russia, but on the Russian throne? Sure. Catherine was born in 1729

in Staten, which is in the province of Pamirania and the Kingdom of Prussia, which was part of the

Holy Roman Empire. And her birth name, nice long one, is Sophia Federica Augusta, an unhelt

Dornberg. She was German and her parents were in nobility, but they were relatively poor nobles.

They were nobles in name. And she would meet her future husband, who is also her second cousin.

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