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agitated for transferring rule to Paul, Catherine’s son became a double-edged sword in her career, important for her legitimacy on the one hand and a potential (though never actual) threat to her power as he grew older and became independent. Catherine quashed several conspiracies, and after she put down Pugachev’s armed revolt in 1774, her hold on power became reasonably secure.
    Catherine was above all a working ruler, unlike Elizabeth. In the memoirs, Catherine criticizes Elizabeth, who let her advisers and favorites write up papers based on what she said, and often did not follow through on matters. In contrast, Catherine did her own writing, had a good memory for details, delegated well, and expected things to get done. As Empress, Catherine wrote and read every day, adapting her ideas, which she acquired through reading classical, French, German, and English political philosophy, to what was possible in Russia. She inherited a country that Peter the Great had dramatically turned in the direction of modern European statehood at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Reforms, however, had remained incomplete. After Peter’s death, in 1725, the six rulers who followed did not build significantly or systematically on his reforms. Intelligent, well-read, energetic, and ambitious, Catherine, like Peter, applied herself to all aspects of Russian politics, society, history, and culture, and had a profound and lasting impact on Russia and Europe.
    Histories of her reign and biographies tend to mention Catherine’s writing separately from her life and rule. Though as Grand Duchess she had written, and could write safely, relatively little, with her coup, Catherine unleashed a sudden deluge of what she called “scribbling.” 34 From the very beginning of her reign, Catherine’s writing was everywhere intertwined with her reading, her thinking, and her reign. Barely a month after the coup, having written manifestos proclaiming her rule, she sent one to the French philosophe and celebrity Voltaire (1694 –1778) to initiate a literary, political, and philosophical correspondence of mutual flattery and usefulness that lasted until his death. Throughout her reign, she corresponded constantly with statesmen and women, the
philosophes,
her ministers, historians, and favorites. Aside from letters and state business, her daily writing included extensive notes on her reading and marginalia in her books. To the leading Enlightenment
salonnière
Madame Geoffrin (1699–1777), Catherine elaborates on her routine:
    I regularly get up at six A.M., I read and I write all alone until eight; then someone comes to read the news to me, those who have to speak to me come in one by one, one after the other, which can take until eleven or later, and then I dress. On Sundays and feast days I go to mass, on other days I go into my antechamber, where a crowd of people usually awaits me, and after a half- or three-quarter-hour conversation, I sit down to lunch . . . and I bring my papers. Our reading, when it is not interrupted by packets of letters or other hindrances, lasts until half past five, when I either go to the theater, or play cards, or else chat with the early comers until dinner, which ends before eleven when I go to bed, to do the same thing tomorrow, and this is as fixed as the lines on a sheet of music. 35
    The emphasis on the regularity of her day, in contrast to her description in the memoirs of Empress Elizabeth’s bohemian lifestyle, reflects Catherine’s perception of regulated time as European and enlightened. 36 Like her favorites, writing and reading were a daily part of her life and rule.
    To treat Catherine’s writing as either a personal or a cultural or a literary or an intellectual exercise diminishes the breadth and context, not to mention the significance, of her work. As one Soviet literary historian starkly summarizes the paradox her writings present, “Her work rarely meets the standard even of the average