Until the historian Isabel de Madariaga, who has died aged 94, wrote Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (1981), relatively little attention had been paid to what was achieved during the empress's reign. Catherine herself was dismissed as a foreign adventuress, a German princess who became Russian ruler by seizing the throne from her husband and was remembered primarily for her numerous lovers. However, Isabel demonstrated the central importance of the period from 1762 to 1796 for modern Russian history, pointing to the seizure of vast territories from Poland-Lithuania, partitioned out of existence, and from the Ottoman Empire, defeated in two wars.
The country emerged as a leading European power, a status it has never lost. Its culture became more European than hitherto, notably in architecture and art, including the numerous portraits of Catherine herself, while the Enlightenment movement of western and central Europe stimulated major reforms in government, law, religion, education and economic life. The only remaining change to the essential character of pre-revolutionary Russia came with the emancipation of the serfs during the 1860s.
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