Terrible tsarinas

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Another Catherine! to match her ideal, to polish it without distorting it.

From the first Catherine to the second, the morals of the land had imperceptibly evolved. The robust oriental cruelty had already given way, in the salons, to false airs of European culture.

The new tsarina was determined to encourage that metamorphosis. But her next ambition was to make everyone forget her Germanic origins, her German accent, her former name of Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, and to have all the Russians accept her as the most Russian of sovereigns, the Empress Catherine II of Russia. She was 33 years old, and had her whole life before her to prove her merit. And that is more than one needs when one has, as she had, faith in one’s own star and in one’s country. What difference did it make that this wasn’t her country by birth - it was her country by choice. What could be more noble, she thought, than to build a future independent of the concepts of nationality and genealogy? And isn’t that why she would one day be known as Catherine the Great?