You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient.

Unfortunately Empress that I am I write on the susceptible skins of living beings. Empress

Catherine II. Welcome to Russian history re-told. Episode 188, Catherine the Great and Peter the Third, a reassessment.

Last time we covered the end of the Russian Civil War, one of the greatest human-caused catastrophes of all time.

Today I'm going to do a reassessment of Peter III and his wife, Catherine II,

also known as Catherine the Great.

When I first covered Catherine,

I went over her life from the time she was known

as Princess Sophia Frédrique ore von Anhau Zerbs Dornberg, or as her father liked to call her,

fiction, all the way to her death at the age of 67 as the longest ruling female in Russian history.

Her reign has been oft times glamorized but not criticized nearly enough

as I'm going to do in this podcast.

Mind you I'm not going to diminish all of her achievements,

and there are many. Instead, I want to use the 2020 hindsight that history allows us to point out things that she put into place

that was to harm the autocracy and Russia through the era of the Soviet Union

and even up to today.

With the criticisms come heaps of praise for what she did for her adopted country.

Many consider her reign the Zenith of Russian culture and prestige. As for Peter all I gave

him in March of 2011 was a mere slapshot review which I felt at the time was just about what he deserved.

Peter was almost universally disliked by those in the court of the Zaur.

Though I have to admit his reign and his life history may have been put into a more

negative like by his wife Catherine to make him look worse than he really was and

...