Massie’s portrait of Catherine the Great turns on the conflict between her Enlightenment ideals and the realities of the structures of Russian state power in the 18th century. The books shows Catherine’s belief in reason, legal reform, and human dignity runs into the limits of a system built on serfdom and on the support of a cautious nobility. Massie presents this contradiction as a struggle with realpolitik rather than simple hypocrisy on Catherine’s part: The same power structures which enable Catherine’s early attempts to reform will later block her from making more significant social and political changes, especially the abolition of serfdom.

Catherine’s iterations of the 1767 Nakaz—Instruction—for a new legal code is used by Massie to detail her intentions and the resistance she encounters. In it, drawing on Montesquieu and Beccaria, Catherine argues for equality before the law, the end of torture, and reduced use of capital punishment. Massie follows Catherine as she comes across the boundaries of her own powers to enact change: When she shares the draft with her advisors and the nobility, they react with alarm. Panin tells her she has written “axioms which will bring down walls” (348). Catherine accepts their edits and watches them strike “out more than half of what I had written” (349), especially the passages hinting at relief for enserfed people. Massie shows that the Nakaz moves forward as only a gesture toward reform, emphasizing her disappointment as the version she once hoped for disappears under pressure from entrenched interests.

The Pugachev rebellion (1773-1775) is a major turning point in the book, terrifying the nobility and reminding Catherine how fragile her position is. To restore control, she backs the landowners’ authority over enserfed laborers, a major volte-face from her previous political ideals. Massie notes that after the revolt she “concentrated on what she believed to be Russian interests within her power to change: the expansion of her empire and the enrichment of its culture” (410). In following Catherine setting aside incremental reforms in order to maintain her own power, the biography shows her following in the pattern of both autocratic and constitutional European authorities at this time, responding to popular uprisings or calls for radical change with reactionary efforts to maintain control.

Massie also explores the dynamic between Catherine’s political ideals and the real actions of her reign through her approach to Alexander Radishchev. Although his book, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), condemns serfdom in ways that echo her own early thoughts, in the febrile political climate following the French Revolution, she sees him not as a partner in reform but as a threat. When Catherine calls him a “rabble-rouser, worse than Pugachev” (552) and exiles him to Siberia, Massie uses this moment to show how the experiences of autocratic rule—and desire to maintain it—have reshaped Catherine’s inner beliefs by 1790. The ruler who once sought the company of the philosophes reacts to Radishchev as a censor instead of an ally, and the ideals of her youth fade under the demands of survival.

Catherine the Great emphasizes Catherine’s personal struggle to balance her search for romantic love and partnership with the isolating demands of absolute power, especially in a world where gender norms weighted a power imbalance in sexual or romantic relationships toward men over women. Massie links Catherine’s lifelong search for affection to her childhood, especially her mother Johanna’s rejection, presenting Catherine’s long list of lovers as an effort to fill that early void, although other readings are applicable.

Massie uses Catherine’s personal papers to make this search for love clear, especially the 1774 account titled “A Sincere Confession,” which she wrote to Gregory Potemkin. This retrospective account is a request for his understanding of her previous attachments as she tries to maintain Potemkin’s trust, characterizing her affairs with Sergei Saltykov and Alexander Vasilchikov as growing out of necessity or “desperation.” As Massie emphasizes, this document is a self-presentation yet revealing of the 44-year-old Catherine’s lasting emotional vulnerability, “her earnest, apologetic, almost pleading tone” (423) casting her as the supplicant in their relationship. Although their sexual affair appears to have ended within two years, it continued as a great friendship and political partnership: Massie’s biography highlights the confluence of the political, sexual, and romantic in Catherine’s relationships, and how difficult it is to retrospectively ascertain the feelings and intentions of the parties involved when political and financial favors were combined with sexual intimacies.

The secrecy of Catherine’s possible—“likely”—marriage to Potemkin highlights the impossibility for her in entering into a conventional, acknowledged marital relationship as, for a woman at the time, this would mean personal and legal subjugation to a man. Yet, the possibility that she did secretly marry Potemkin reveals her romantic idealism, ultimately incompatible with her role as empress.

After the Potemkin affair, Massie describes Catherine’s pattern of choosing handsome young Guards officers for lovers as an effort to find the “intelligent, loving companionship” (459) she lacked as a child, rather than a focus on sexual pleasure, although he does not give a reason for this. Catherine’s “procession” of favorites in “extreme youth,”—in their 20s to her 40s and 50s—was considered shocking in the 1770 and 1780s, but more for its overt expression of female sexual desire, than for inappropriate age or power differentials, which were common between male European rulers and their mistresses. Massie ties Catherine’s behavior to the “elemental creature warmth that her brother—but not she—had been given by her mother” (7). Catherine’s romantic life, as Massie frames it, becomes an effort to ease a “loneliness” that began in childhood and grew larger after the emotional and sexual failure of her arranged marriage to Peter. Massie’s biography seeks to use non-sexual, emotional justifications for the middle-aged Catherine’s affairs with young men in a way which perhaps reflects entrenched attitudes toward older female sexuality and desire at the time of his writing.

Although stating that Catherine’s taking of lovers was accepted by the court and society at large, Massie emphasizes that “the love of power and the power to attract love were not easy to reconcile” (449). As a female ruler who had to maintain her power rather than submit to the authority conferred by social norms onto a male partner, the shortness of Catherine’s affairs perhaps reveal the challenges and compromises made necessary by her extraordinary position.