Bookplanet: powerful chicks in history: Indira Gandhi, Maggie Thatcher, Elizabeth I, and the freakiest of them all: Catherine the Great

More than a monumental libido
Frances Wilson reviews Catherine the Great: Love, Sex and Power by Virginia Rounding

First, to set the record straight: there was no horse. Catherine the Great died of a stroke suffered while she was on the lavatory. The rumour, which established itself immediately as historical fact, that she was fatally squashed beneath her stallion during a romantic tryst, appears to be the result of combining her two great enthusiasms: men and riding.

The empress was famously hot to trot - a joke circulated in St Petersburg that the canal which had cost the most money was Catherine's Canal - but not, it seems, keen on stable relationships. After forcing her feckless husband to abdicate (Frederick the Great said that Peter III was dethroned by his wife like a child being sent to bed), she turned a blind eye when he was murdered by her lover and his brothers. In Catherine the Great, Virginia Rounding details Catherine's relationships with 11 other lovers; gossips whispered that there were at least 289 more than that.

The wonder is that Catherine had time for any loving while being caught up in the business of washing the blood off her hands, securing her own survival, and dragging Russia into the 18th century. "What a picture!" reported the French attaché after the coup. "The grandson of Peter I dethroned and put to death… while a Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst usurps the crown, beginning her reign with a regicide." Not a good start for a woman who set so much store by reason and Enlightenment principles.

The princess, being German, was an unlikely choice as a future empress. She was selected for the job in 1744 by the redoubtable Empress Elizabeth, aunt to Peter III, who clearly saw in the 14-year-old some of her own sterling qualities. The situation then arose that a German who was devoted to the good of Russia married a Russian who was devoted to the good of Prussia: Peter III's downfall came shortly after he succeeded in halting, at the moment of victory, Russia's war against Frederick the Great. He then, to add insult to the already injured and infuriated army, remodelled it in the Prussian style.

Peter was no better at pleasing his wife than he had been his people: it took him seven years to work out how to consummate their marriage, by which point Catherine had taken up with her first lover, thus making it unclear whether her "child-husband", as she called him, was in any way related to her son.

Catherine threw herself into sorting out the Russian empire like an administrator brought in to save a dying business. There was nothing she didn't seem adept at doing: she made an attempt to sort out the law, which had not been codified for 100 years, during which time many new laws had appeared that contradicted the old ones and were unknown even to the courts. Her list of 500 maxims on how the law should operate in Russia, "The Great Instruction", was considered by Voltaire to be "the most beautiful monument of the century".

She introduced smallpox vaccinations, volunteering herself as the first to be inoculated, studied gardening, brought into Russia magnificent European paintings, and supervised the building of St Petersburg so that it could equal in splendour London or Paris. But while her rule saw the empire flourish politically and culturally, the lives of the millions of serfs on whose labour Russia survived changed not one jot. Those at the top and bottom of the scale had little idea of the other's existence.

Catherine the Great is a great thumping triumph of a book, packed with details about a world in which detail - of dress, manners, rank - was everything. The empress's often laborious life was lived almost entirely in the form of rigid public spectacle ("When I enter a room," she bemoaned, "anyone would think I was the Medusa's head. Everyone is petrified"), but Rounding is able to picture for us, through dozens of letters from Catherine to her various male correspondents, the richness of her private life and the roundness of her character. The woman who strides through these pages is a contradictory colossus with a determination to drink life to the lees.

By turns adoring, greedy, humorous, demanding, canny and disingenuous, she is always hungry for knowledge and stimulation, reading voraciously and summoning Diderot - whose private library she had bought to save him from poverty - for nightly conversations. Her serial relationships, Rounding argues, were the result of an endless search for honesty. "Catherine received no more assistance in assessing the true measure of her intellectual and literary abilities than did her late husband in understanding the limits of his musical talent. This is part of the loneliness of absolute power."