Catherine the Great

Of all the empresses, Catherine II (later known as Catherine the Great) deserves special note. She combined an avid personal interest in Enlightenment ideas (she was quite well-read and corresponded with Diderot, Voltaire, and d'Alembert) with the unbending conviction that autocracy was the only thing that could handle Russia. Under her rule Russia experienced the "golden age of the nobility" where the aristocracy was permitted to forego state service and concentrate on their personal affairs. The Russian Empire expanded into the Crimea and, together with Prussia and Austria, partitioned Poland three times, controlling Warsaw until 1918. Under Catherine, Russia grew into the great European power Peter the Great had envisaged one hundred years before. And though it is common knowledge that she had quite a voracious sexual appetite, the legend about the horse is just not true.