Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman Catherine the Great is portrayed as an emotionally vulnerable empress who presided over a Russian golden age Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, by Robert K Massie, Head of Zeus, RRP£25/Random House, RRP$35, 656 pages Shortly after her accession to the throne in 1762, Catherine II of Russia found herself discussing a distant part of her empire with her senators. She soon realised that most of those present had no idea where the piece of territory in question actually was. It turned out that the senate did not even possess a map, and so Catherine got out her purse, took out five roubles and dispatched a messenger to buy one. This kind of ignorance on the part of her officials was only one of the many problems Catherine faced on seizing power from her husband, Tsar Peter III, who died soon after in suspicious circumstances. As the biographer Robert K Massie explains: "The Seven Years" War had bankrupted the treasury; Russian soldiers in Prussia had not been paid for eight months. No credit was available from abroad. There was a calamitous rise in the price of grain. Corruption and extortion had spread through all levels of government. ©Bridgeman Art Library Majestic: Vigilius Erichsen's 'Empress Catherine II before the mirror' (1779) Fortunately Catherine brought to her task great determination and an immense capacity for work, as well as a willingness to learn and a gift for picking the right people to work with. She had been waiting and planning for this opportunity for years, even if the certainty she evinced in her memoirs - "In my inmost soul there was something that never for a single moment allowed me to doubt that, sooner or later, I would become the sovereign Empress of Russia in my own right" - should not be taken entirely at face value. There are so many facets to the story of Catherine the Great that no single-volume book can hope to cover them all - though Massie, best known for his seminal 1967 biography of the last Romanovs and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Peter the Great (1980), would seem well equipped for the task. During her long reign of 34 years (unusually for Russian monarchs Catherine's death, in 1796, was from natural causes), the Russian empire expanded phenomenally in terms of both territory and power. The territorial gains were primarily in the south, achieved in two wars with Turkey; it was also under Catherine that Russia shared with Prussia and Austria in the dismemberment of Poland. Influenced by the Enlightenment philosophers (she corresponded with Voltaire and was a patron of Diderot, who even travelled to St Petersburg to converse with her), Catherine was determined to bring her "backward" country into the forefront of European culture. She achieved this by importing artistic, architectural and musical talent and by educating native Russians; the great 19th-century Russian composers, writers and artists could not have existed without Catherine having prepared the ground for them. In addition, she amassed a huge collection of art, using her ambassadors and advisers throughout Europe to seek out the best that money could buy. Domestically, Catherine was forever devising and implementing plans to educate and improve the lot of her subjects. Some problems proved intractable, however, among them the institution of serfdom; indeed, the secularisation of church lands under Catherine resulted in an increase in the number of state-owned serfs, and the nobles" fear of the peasantry engendered by the Pugachev uprising of 1774-75 put paid to any idea of fundamental reform. Catherine was also known, both during her lifetime and posthumously, as a woman with a great appetite for men. Rarely without a young male companion - and as she got older, they seemed to get younger - she exhibited a constant need to love and be loved. Massie, whose particular strengths are his readability and the way in which he places the events of Catherine's life in their national and international context, deals rather cursorily with the empress's relationships with her favourites, as well as with her grandchildren, to whom she was devoted. His sources are limited to Catherine's own memoirs, a few diaries and some letters (those, for instance, written by her mother Johanna to her spouse back in Zerbst); otherwise he relies heavily on the work of other scholars. Catherine acquired power through a coup, and one question that every biographer has to address concerns the death of her deposed husband. Massie holds to the well-established view that she was not directly involved, though she might, with forethought, have prevented the murder. Another area of uncertainty in Catherine's life is the paternity of her son, the future Tsar Paul I. When Catherine married Grand Duke Peter, the nephew and heir of Empress Elizabeth, she was just 15, her husband a year older. It took them nine years to consummate the marriage, Peter preferring to play with his toy soldiers rather than pay attention to his wife. Massie suggests that at least part of the blame for this lies with Catherine, whose horrified reaction at Peter's "hideous" appearance after a bout of smallpox destroyed what little confidence he possessed. Eventually Peter was given practical instruction from a young widow, with the result that his sexual inhibitions were overcome; meanwhile, Catherine took a lover. Consequently, when her son was conceived, Catherine herself may not have known who the father was. Paul grew up strongly identifying himself with Peter III and was in many respects rather like him but whether he was displaying his genetic inheritance or merely modelling himself on his hero is hard to determine. Massie refers to Catherine's lover, Sergei Saltykov, as "almost certainly Paul's father." The third question to intrigue biographers is whether a marriage ever took place between Catherine and the most important man in her life, Prince Grigory Potemkin. Here Massie sits firmly on the fence: "If there was a marriage, there is a widely believed version of how it happened." The central ambiguity is the apparent disjuncture between the all-powerful empress and the vulnerable woman. Catherine embarked on her 12 romantic relationships with high hopes that were nearly always dashed. Massie traces her obsessive need for love and approval back to her early childhood and her mother's lack of interest in her. No matter how many people write about her, there will always remain something mysterious about the great empress (who preferred to be known merely as Catherine II) - about how a girl from an obscure German court, with undistinguished parents and no training in statecraft, came to be one of the most successful rulers Russia has known. That she inspired such affection in many of the people who knew her adds to the fascination she still exerts more than 200 years after her death. Virginia Rounding is author of "Catherine the Great" (Arrow). Her latest book "Alix and Nicky: The Passion of the Last Tsar and Tsarina" is published in July by the Robson Press