Volume 28, Number 9 · May 28, 1981
Catherine Was Great
By Henry Gifford
Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great
by Isabel de Madariaga
Yale University Press, 673 pp., $40.00
Some years after the empress's death in 1796 the conservative historian Karamzin declared that 'should we compare all the known epochs of Russian history, virtually all would agree that Catherine's epoch was the happiest for Russian citizens.' Almost two centuries later, on the evidence of Isabel de Madariaga's extensive and judicious survey of the period, we may be inclined to think the same. Happiness is notoriously the commodity in shortest supply for Russian citizens. There was a spending spree of ill-founded hopes in the spring and early summer of 1917, but for most of their history the Russian people have schooled themselves to endurance. However limited though Karamzin's view was—he had in mind the novel freedom of the upper classes, no longer in bondage to the state, or at the mercy of arbitrary decisions by a ruler accountable only to himself—the age of Catherine still glows with some of the benign light in which Europe basked until the hurricane of the French Revolution.
Review, 3477 words
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