catherine the great?

Question

please can some body thell me why she was a good ruler and why she was a bad ruler

Answer 1

You tell me. She ascended to the throne by engineering a coup d'état against her husband (who was later murdered by her lover's brother, although there is no evidence of her involvement in the murder), resisted all attempts to improve the lot of indentured peasants (who at the time comprised the majority of the Russian population) while at the same time giving substantial concessions to the landed gentry, stifled dissidence, both religious and political, and rewarded her lovers with crown properties. Speaking of her, lovers, one of them was Grigori Potemkin, after whom the expression "Potemkin village" was coined. Another was Stanisław Poniatowski, who was eventually (and with Russian military support) installed as a king of Poland...

Answer 2

During her reign, Catherine the Great expanded Russia's borders to the Black Sea and into central Europe.

She promoted westernization and modernization though within the context of her autocratic control over Russia and increasing the control of landed gentry over serfs.

Catherine the Great promoted education and the Enlightenment among the elite.

She kept up a correspondence with many figures of the Enlightenment in Europe.

Though Catherine the Great had the support of Peter's mother, the Empress Elizabeth, she disliked her husband and helped engineer his removal from the throne. She took power as Tsarina or Queen, calling herself Catherine II. Soon after, she may have been behind Peter's death.

Answer 3

Catherine II of Russia, called the Great reigned as Empress of Russia for 34 years, from June 28, 1762 until her death. Her rule exemplified that of an enlightened despot.
* In spite of her image as an "enlightened despot", Catherine abandoned attempts to lighten the burden of peasant serfs after the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773-75. The degree of her growing intolerance became evident in her treatment of Radishchev.
* Catherine's devotion to her favorites, particularly Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin, often blinded her to the corruption that surrounded her rule, hence the force of the metaphor of the Potemkin villages.
* Among the many crimes laid at Catherine's door the murder of Tsar Ivan VI of Russia stands out. Rumor said that Catherine had backed a plan by Vasily Mirovich to pretend to liberate the former Emperor. Whatever the plan, his gaolers killed Ivan VI, and the authorities arrested and later executed Mirovich.
* Catherine was also guilty in the death of another pretender to the throne, Princess Tarakanova, who claimed to have been Elizabeth's daughter by Alexis Razumovsky. The Empress dispatched Alexey Orlov to Italy, where he managed to seduce and capture Tarakanova. When brought to Russia, Tarakanova was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where she died of tuberculosis.
* While Catherine probably had no direct role in the murder of her own husband, Peter III, she did nothing to punish those responsible for the crime and even promoted them.

Catherine's patronage furthered the evolution of the arts in Russia more than that of any Russian sovereign before or after her. She subscribed to the ideals of the Enlightenment and considered herself a "philosopher on the throne". She showed great awareness of her image abroad, and ever desired that Europe should perceive her as a civilized and enlightened monarch, despite the fact that in Russia she often played the part of the tyrant. Even as she proclaimed her love for the ideals of liberty and freedom, she did more to tie the Russian serf to his land and to his lord than any sovereign since Boris Godunov (reigned 1598-1605).

Catherine had a reputation as a patron of the arts, literature and education. The Hermitage Museum, which now occupies the whole of the Winter Palace, began as Catherine's personal collection. At the instigation of her factotum, Ivan Betskoi, she wrote a manual for the education of young children, drawing from the ideas of John Locke, and founded the famous Smolny Institute for noble young ladies. This school would become one of the best of its kind in Europe, and even went so far as to admit young girls born to wealthy merchants alongside the daughters of the nobility. She wrote comedies, fiction and memoirs, while cultivating Voltaire, Diderot and D'Alembert — all French encyclopedists who later cemented her reputation in their writings. The leading economists of her day, such as Arthur Young and Jacques Necker, became foreign members of the Free Economic Society, established on her suggestion in Saint Petersburg. She lured the scientists Leonhard Euler and Peter Simon Pallas from Berlin to the Russian capital.

Catherine enlisted Voltaire to her cause, and corresponded with him for 15 years, from her accession to his death in 1778. He lauded her with epithets, calling her "The Star of the North" and the "Semiramis of Russia" (in reference to the legendary Queen of Babylon). Though she never met him face-to-face, she mourned him bitterly when he died, acquired his collection of books from his heirs, and placed them in the Imperial Public Library.

Within a few months of her accession, having heard that the French government threatened to stop the publication of the famous French Encyclopédie on account of its irreligious spirit, she proposed to Diderot that he should complete his great work in Russia under her protection. Four years later she endeavoured to embody in a legislative form the principles of Enlightenment which she had imbibed from the study of the French philosophers. She called together at Moscow a Grand Commission — almost a consultative parliament — composed of 652 members of all classes (officials, nobles, burghers and peasants) and of various nationalities. The Commission had to consider the needs of the Russian Empire and the means of satisfying them. The Empress herself prepared the Instructions for the Guidance of the Assembly, pillaging (as she frankly admitted) the philosophers of the West, especially Montesquieu and Cesare Beccaria. As many of the democratic principles frightened her more moderate and experienced advisers, she refrained from immediately putting them into execution. After holding more than 200 sittings the so-called Commission dissolved without getting beyond the realm of theory.
Portrait of Catherine in an advanced age, with the Chesme Column in the background.
Portrait of Catherine in an advanced age, with the Chesme Column in the background.

Under her reign, Russians imported and studied the classical and European influences which inspired the "Age of Imitation". Gavrila Derzhavin, Denis Fonvizin and Ippolit Bogdanovich laid the groundwork for the great writers of the nineteenth century, especially for Aleksandr Pushkin. Catherine became a great patron of Russian opera (see Catherine II and opera for details). However, her reign also featured omnipresent censorship and state control of publications. When Radishchev published his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow in 1790, warning of uprisings because of the deplorable social conditions of the peasants held as serfs, Catherine exiled him to Siberia.

Catherine behaved harshly to her son Paul. In her memoirs, Catherine indicated that her first lover, Sergei Saltykov, had fathered Paul, but Paul physically resembled her husband, Peter. She sequestered from the court her illegitimate son by Grigori Orlov, Alexis Bobrinskoy (later created Count Bobrinskoy by Paul). It seems highly probable that she intended to exclude Paul from the succession, and to leave the crown to her eldest grandson Alexander, afterwards the emperor Alexander I. Her harshness to Paul stemmed probably as much from political distrust as from what she saw of his character. Whatever Catherine's other activities, she emphatically functioned as a sovereign and as a politician, guided in the last resort by interests of state. Keeping Paul in a state of semi-captivity in Gatchina and Pavlovsk, she resolved not to allow her son to dispute or to share in her authority.

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