Book of the week: Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie

(Random House, $35)

“Talk about historical slanders,” said Deirdre Donahue in USA Today. “Mention Russian empress Catherine the Great and people start sniggering about death by stallion.” That Robert K. Massie can write a page-turning biography of the 18th-century Russian monarch without even mentioning possible zoophilia is testament to a life story that needs no embellishing. Catherine’s improbable rise to the Russian throne and 34-year reign turn out to be “better-than-any-novel” drama. Born in Germany to a minor prince, she should have foundered in obscurity. But her mother was bent on elevating the family’s status, and opportunity knocked when Russian empress Elizabeth I went looking for a wife for her 14-year-old nephew.

Massie, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has “the instincts of a novelist,” said Kathryn Harrison in The New York Times. We’re never so much contemplating a portrait of Catherine as watching through her eyes as history unfolds. Even when Catherine was 14, her spirit and intelligence made her an “ideal candidate” to wed Peter III, who himself “looked good on paper.” He was, however, a halfwit. His refusal to consummate their marriage for at least nine years eventually prompted Catherine to take a series of lovers, three of whom probably fathered her children. Peter’s six-month tenure as king was a tour de force of incompetence, ending in a 1762 coup that featured the 33-year-old Catherine donning a Russian colonel’s uniform and leading 14,000 infantrymen to arrest her doltish husband. Such a canny display of Russianness enabled her to win the trust of the populace and, though a foreigner, assume the throne as Matushka, “the mother of all Russia.”

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Massie gives her every benefit of the doubt, said Rebecca Steinitz in The Boston Globe. He explains her serial affairs as the product of the neglect she suffered as a young girl and deems her innocent of a gradual slide toward despotism. Yet Catherine did oversee a “golden age” in Russia, said Patricia Treble in Maclean’s. She expanded the Russian navy and gained access to the Black Sea. She was a pioneer in public health, built the Hermitage museum, and drafted the principles of a liberal Russian constitution. Massie gives all the details, wrapping them together in “a biography as captivating as its subject.”