In this newly-translated excerpt from his five-volume "Course", Kliuchevsky (1841-1911) provides a colourful description of Russian court life in the 18th century, a dramatic narrative of the coup d'etat that brought Catherine II to power, a portrait of the empress herself, and an analysis of her foreign conquests and her major internal initiatives. While Kliuchevsky is critical of Catherine, he draws upon her memoirs and other writings and the accounts of her contemporaries to achieve a well-rounded and deeply human analysis of her character and personality. It is an extraordinary act of historical re-creation of the sort that brought Kliuchevsky such renown in his own time, and it remains so lifelike that it fairly leaps off the page. Kliuchevsky's examination of Western influence in Catherine's reign leads him to questions that were of urgent significance for Russia's development in his own day, and have remained so ever since: how to use Western ideas and practices to improve and enrich Russian life, without turning them into idle fashions or political bludgeons, and where to find the social leadership capable of performing such a delicate task.

About the Author

Vasily O. Kliuchevsky (1841–1911) was the most eminent Russian historian of his day―a pathbreaking scholar, a spellbinding lecturer, an engaging stylist, and a great synthesizer whose works have stood the test of time. He was a long-time professor of Russian history at Moscow University before his death. His lectures, published as A Course in Russian History, have exerted a powerful influence on Russia’s conception of its national history, not only before 1917 but in the Soviet period and to the present day. This is the first reliable translation of the section of the Course on Catherine the Great., >Marshall S. Shatz is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He is the author of Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective (1980) and Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia and Socialism (1989). He has also edited and translated a number of works on Russian intellectual history, including (with Judith E. Zimmerman) Vekhi (Landmarks), published by M.E. Sharpe in 1994.

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