Catherine the Great, Imperial Expansion, and the Legacy of Tsarist Russia

The decades after Peter the Great's death were marked by dynastic instability and the growing political power of the imperial guard, with rulers such as Catherine I, Peter II, and Anna Ivanovna succeeding one another before Peter III was deposed in a 1762 palace coup led by his own wife, who then took the throne as Catherine II. Of German origin, Catherine "the Great" (1762–1796) converted to Orthodoxy, maintained an intellectual correspondence with Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot, and convened a Legislative Commission in 1767 to debate reforms inspired by Montesquieu and Beccaria, though it was ultimately dissolved without producing a new legal code. Despite this early Enlightenment rhetoric, Catherine reinforced serfdom in practice: her 1785 Charter to the Nobility consolidated the legal privileges of the landed aristocracy, and the major peasant and Cossack revolt led by Emelian Pugachev (1773–1775), who posed as the murdered Peter III, was harshly suppressed and its leader publicly executed.