Catherine the Great did indeed use her gender to aid her politically; she was almost forced to. As a German princess brought in by the Empress Elizabeth, she was not related to Peter the Great, and had no legitimacy to the throne of the Russians in her own right.

Following on from this, then, one might almost see the first act of gender mixing with power as her marriage to Peter (later Peter III) and bearing him a son. This (along with carefully orchestrated public piety to the Orthodox Church) created a space in which she was legitimate - as the mother of the future Tsar, and the dutiful wife. Her apparent whole-hearted adoption of Orthodoxy and her publicly learning the Russian language also helped make her "Russian" in a way Peter himself did not appear. (Peter was truly obsessed with Prussia, but that's another story.)

Unhappily, by most accounts Peter III was an extremely unpleasant man, with a violent temper and no fondness for his wife. Catherine therefore started to take carefully politically selected male lovers and favorites, initially to achieve limited goals - probably the most spectacular effect of this careful selection was via Gregory Orlov, one of two important Orlov brothers. Both men were guardsmen, and they were the hands which brought about the palace coup toppling Peter III and replacing him with Catherine. The older brother, Alexis, was the man who murdered Peter while in prison.

These lovers and favorites often acted like Catherine's hands; like a personal executive outside the bureaucracy of Peter the Great. In such a geographically large country, Russia had traditionally been decentralised; the local Prince or Boyar had held authority over his lands and serfs, and so long as tax flowed then everything was fairly gravy. But when things did go wrong, personal intervention came in the form of someone with a personal relationship with the Tsar being sent to the trouble-spot to quieten it back down. Peter the Great had done away with this ad hoc system, strongly centralising and Europeanising the Russian state, establishing the bureaucracy and funneling the Boyars (the old court aristocrats) into it. The old system of personal relationships getting things done was overlaid with this new system.

You can almost see a forced return to the old system in Catherine; while the boyars and bureaucrats were never her allies, seeing her as a challenge to their power, lovers like Potempkin could be granted extraordinary authority to make decisions, and then sent all over what then comprised Russia to personally exercise Catherine's wishes. Tied to her by sex and/or dependent on her for largess, she could trust them to act in her interests. Their ties to her made them legitimate organs of government, without which they would have had no authority to act. Catherine is actually an excellent example of the political system of Russia clearly allowing her to made great public and political use of her favorites without serious censure.

It's important to remember that Catherine's legendary promiscuity is probably exaggerated, and favorites were just as important for her in exercising her rulership. The story of the horse, for example, is scurrilous rumor meant to slander. I think Catherine is an example of working with what you've got in an intelligent way, rather than anything else.

More reading: I am a massive Nancy Kollman fan. She has easily the most coherent understanding of how Russian politics worked in Moscovite times, and it clearly flows through post Peter the Great. I highly recommend her.

Bibliography

Alexander, J. Catherine the Great; Life and Legend, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Dixon, S. Catherine the Great, New York: Longman Books, 2001.

Kollman, N. By Honour Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia, London: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Kollman, N. Kinship and Politics; The Making of the Muscovite Political System 1345-1547, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.

Kollman, N. [Ed] Major Problems in Early Modern Russian History, New York: Garland Publishing, 1992.

Maroger, D. [Ed] The Memoirs of Catherine the Great, New York: MacMillan Company, 1955.

Rounding, V. Catherine the Great: Love, Sex, Power. New York: St Martin's Press, 2007.

Smith, D. [Ed] Love and Conquest; Personal Correspondence of Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin, DeKalb (Il); Northern Illinois University Press, 2004

Wortman, R. Scenarios of Power; Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. Vol I. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Wortman, R. Scenarios of Power; Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. Vol II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

EDIT: Spelling.

MY TIME TO SHINE!

So I just (as in, yesterday) got done reading Robert Massie's "Catherine the Great," which is a great book and pretty comprehensive, as everything I've read by Massie tends to be.

So what's your AP Euro teacher really claiming here? That Catherine used her femininity to help her rule russia? That's kind of a nebulous thing to state, honestly.

My opinion would be, honestly not. I mean it's not like she went around, hinting that she'd sleep with people to get her way. She had about 6 lovers in her whole life. But she did promote her lovers, and place them into important positions, especially two: Grigory Orlov, who, with the help of his brothers, helped her usurp the throne from Peter III; and Grigory Potemkin, whom she may have secretly been married to. Another former lover of hers, Stanisław August Poniatowski, she placed on the throne of Poland, in order to better control her eastern neighbor.

I am going to talk a little bit about Potemkin, as he was by far Catherine's longest and most-favorite lover, and the one she gave the most titles and money to. She even built the Tauride Palace for him!

Potemkin in particular was a very powerful man during, and after, his romance with Catherine. She obtained very many domestic and foreign titles for him, not limited to but including Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Prince of the Russian Empire, Grand Admiral of the Russian Fleet, etc etc. She showered him in titles and responsibility.

However, Potemkin was a very able soldier and administrator. in 1774, she made him Governor-General of Russia's new southern province, which they had just acquired in a war with the Ottomans, and which Potemkin had complete control over. He built entire ports and cities from scratch, including Sevastopol and Odessa. He created the beginnings of Russia's Black Sea Fleet. His rule in this area is also associated with the term "Potemkin Village," which would be a fake village built for the benefit of visiting dignitaries (and Catherine herself, on a grand tour of the new southern provinces via Kiev in 1787. However, Massie, at least, dismisses the theory of the villages being fake and claims this was a slander made up by his enemies. Later in life, Potemkin would be Commander-in-Chief of all Russian forces during the war with Turkey that broke out in 1787, in which he acquitted himself well, receiving the further title of "Grand Hetman of the Black Sea and Yekaterinoslav Cossack Hosts."

So, what does all this about Potemkin and his success have to do with Catherine and her "sex?" I would say that it shows us that Catherine was good at taking care of her lovers, but also that she was a keen judge of character (she did, after all, maintain a long correspondence with Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert, and other Enlightenment thinkers). After all, Potemkin succeeded because he was intelligent and able, not just because he was Catherine's lover. One does not successfully prosecute sieges, build entire cities from scratch, and create a brand new fleet all on the back of being the monarch's lover.

I think that Catherine may have put those close to her in positions of power, but then what ruler doesn't do that, even up to the present day? I would say it it a gross over-simplification for your AP teacher to say that she "used" her "sex" to control the country; on the contrary, she simply gave positions of power to those she trusted; which in some cases, especially Orlov, Potemkin, and Poniatowski, tended to be her lovers or ex-lovers. It's perfectly normal for a ruler to only put people they trust in such positions of power. Thus, to say that she ruled her country by using her sex would be incorrect.

And if my AP Euro teacher from way back in High School heard your AP Euro teacher make such a gross over-simplification, he would be kinda pissed off, I can tell you right now!

Sources:

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Random House, 2011) by Robert K. Massie, ISBN 978-0-679-45672-8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Potemkin