Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

by Robert K. Massie

The terminal illness of a king determined that her first objective would be Poland. The Polish Commonwealth, which merged the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania, was as large as France. It stretched east to west between the Dnieper and the Oder, and north to south from the Baltic to the Carpathians and Turkey’s Balkan provinces on the Danube. The frontier between Poland and Russia meandered north and south for nine hundred miles. In earlier centuries, under native kings, Poland had been one of the most powerful states in Europe; in 1611, a Polish army had occupied the Kremlin. More recently, the tsars had won back some of these lost lands—Smolensk, Kiev, and the western Ukraine were Russian again—but large areas of western Russia populated by Orthodox Slavs still remained a part of Poland.