Barbara Stocking on Catherine the Great
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2018
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Catherine the Great assumed power in a St Petersburg coup, extended the empire into Crimea, Ukraine and Alaska. is Russia's longest lasting female ruler, and wasn't even Russian herself. All of this intrigues Dame Barbara Stocking, former head of Oxfam, who admires Catherine's leadership style. Biographer Virginia Rounding provides the details of her background and her lovers, and Matthew Parris presents.
The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde.
Transcript
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| 0:31.0 | This is the BBC. In the long-lit June of 1762, the British Ambassador in St. Petersburg wrote a note. |
| 0:41.0 | I was preparing to go to Peterhoff to meet the Emperor, he began, when one of my servants |
| 0:46.9 | came running in with a frightened countenance and told me there was a great uproar at the |
| 0:51.4 | other end of the town, that the guards had mutinied and talked |
| 0:54.8 | to nothing less than dethroning the emperor. Well, coups in Russia were not unknown, but this one |
| 1:01.5 | was led by a woman. |
| 1:03.4 | Joining me in the studio is Dame Barbara Stocking, one-time chief executive of Oxfam |
| 1:08.6 | GB and current president of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, whom have you chosen, Barbara? |
| 1:16.0 | Well, Catherine the Great, because she is so absolutely fascinating, and I really can't understand why you haven't had her on before. |
| 1:22.0 | It's shocking, I'm sorry. The thing that |
| 1:24.0 | about her is just what she managed to achieve and it's the intriguingness of how she |
| 1:28.4 | managed this. So if I can maybe take two examples. The first example is |
| 1:32.0 | exactly what you're talking about |
... |
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