Well, Catherine II relied on a tried and true method when it came to overthrowing her husband Peter III: guard regiments. These elite formations could easily dispose of any reigning monarch and had done so several times prior to Catherine II's coup. The Polish-born Catherine I and her favorites/faction used guard regiments to seize power in 1724 after Peter I's death. Likewise, Elizabeth Petrovna, who was Catherine II's political mentor in more than a few ways, came to power at the head of Preobrazhensky Regiment in 1741. Succession in the eighteenth-century Russian Empire was not a mere given but could be quite violent; a cabal of assassins murdered Catherine II's son Paul I quite possibly with the assent of his son Alexander I. This pattern of violent succession and coups imparted to Russia an unsavory reputation in Western Europe, but the coup leaders all framed their actions as necessary for the political power and stability of the Empire. Catherine II would be no different in this regard and her political success was due to both ideal circumstances meeting up with a very canny political savvy on the part of Catherine II.

It certainly helped Catherine II's ambitions that her husband Peter III was not a particularly successful autocrat. To be fair to Peter III, he was not quite the unmitigated failure his wife painted him out to be after her coup. The charter for nobility freeing the Russian nobility from service, which Catherine II systematized, had begun under her husband's reign. And for all of the hand-wringing within the court over Peter III's early exit from the Seven Years' War, it is not too hard to fault Peter III for this decision. The war was an extremely expensive undertaking and while Russia's exit from the war may have saved Prussia, it was not entirely clear what Russia stood to gain from continued belligerence. Nonetheless the optics of the Prussophile Peter III leaving a war which Russia had spent so much for only to continue on a fight for the minor Danish duchies were quite bad. This helped seed the ground for Catherine II's coup as the Guards regiments became a hotbed for malcontents and the court was not particularly enamored with their current monarch.

One of the advantages Catherine had in her favor was that she knew how to work this malcontent into a formidable political machine during the coup and early reign. Catherine did have a series of lovers and sometimes used sex early in her reign to secure her position. For example, Grigory Orlov led the coup that overthrew Catherine's husband, Tsar Peter III and was one of Catherine's lovers. It should be noted too that Peter III had done much to alienate the Romanov court, so Catherine's coup was not unsurprising even without the romance backstage. Catherine II's lovers like Potemkin also became her personal agents throughout the empire. In addition to sex, she would employ all sorts of stratagems to tie them together with bonds of affection and loyalty such as hand-sewing herb-filled pillows for them when they traveled. Thus the term "Catherine's lover" must be understood as something greater than just a sexual relationship. These men were often from middling noble status and her patronage led to a considerable up-jump in ranks and privileges. The downside for them was that they were very much dependent upon the success of their patron to keep this status.

When dealing with Catherine the Great, it is very hard to parse out what what might be construed as her sexual or romantic appetite from her position as empress. Being a female ruler in a vast empire like Russia necessitated a degree of dependency on her male servitors and she was very canny about choosing able ones. This was of crucial importance in a polity the geographic size of Russia.

Catherine II also understood what Richard Wortman has termed the "scenarios of power," of the Romanov rule. She knew how to alternate between appealing to traditional Russian mores such as Orthodoxy and the autocratic modernization of her predecessors. In the former case, Catherine II was very much aided by Anna and Elizabeth Petrovna, who had set precedents for Orthodox coronations of women that fused religious awe with imperial splendor. Ironically, one of the most frequent charges Catherine II's partisans laid on Peter III's feet was that he was too foreign and too German to rule Russia.

Catherine II's coronation set a precedent for her self-presentation. While she basked in the trappings of traditional Russia, she also celebrated the successes of a select group of Romanov predecessors. By doing so, she was able to present herself as both the culmination of and continuation of a conscious imperial state-building process. This included creating new cities wholesale and like Peter I, naming them after herself such as Ekaterinburg. This state-building also gave a number of nobles a job to do, especially ones that were ambitious. Although the Charter had eliminated compulsory service, this freed up the imperial apparatus to (well-born) men of talent. While Peter III's brief reign had saw him neglect the internal politics of the court, Catherine II proved to be an astute student of Elizabeth Petrovna as she maintained a style of rule that strengthened her position as an icon of both increased power and stability.

This is not to say though that Catherine II's reign was a foregone conclusion. Her German-born origins were a liability and she did deal with several pretenders claiming to be her husband. The Empress's relationship with the Old Believers was quite tense. There was an ever-present danger that the same conditions that vaulted her to power could topple her. Just as Peter III's Prussophillia had been used against him, so too could Catherine II's modernization be used as rallying cry by malcontents. That was one of the reasons why while Catherine II pursued an aggressive foreign policy, she was also quite repressive domestically. For all of her reputation as a monarch of the Enlightenment, the ideals of French philosophes had their limits within the Empire. Most of the Russian-based opposition to Catherine II seldom focused on her gender or her origins, but her tyranny. She strengthened the state powers of censorship and the prerogatives of autocracy became sacrosanct under he reign.

While Catherine II's reign might seem unlikely from the vantage point of 2018, her non-Russian origins were at best a handicap to her reign. The imperial state itself was very much a transnational institution. Baltic Germans were an important servitor class within the eighteenth century and a large portion of the Empire's military officers were non-Russians. "Nationality" itself was quite plastic in this period and it was much easier for a non-Russian like Catherine II to selectively adapt traditional Russian motifs to their advantage. Anna and Elizabeth Petrovna had done much to prepare the ground for active autocratic woman to seize power. These two Empresses had already created precedents for smoothing over the problems of a woman arriving at the apex of the imperial state. But Catherine II also built on the legacies of her predecessors, including her husband, such as strengthening the centrality of the court, improving the army, and binding the nobility far closer to the Romanovs. Yet she also managed to accomplish a quite expansive territorial expansion without the type of long, drawn-out wars that characterized her predecessors' conflicts. Catherine II may have had a number of liabilities going into her reign, but she actively worked to minimize them or use them to her advantage. Catherine II earned the title "great" because nothing succeeds like success.

Sources

Bartlett, Roger. Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment: Essays for Isabel De Madariaga. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

De Madariaga, Isabel. Catherine the Great: A Short History. New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2002.

Leonard, Carol S. Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Meehan-Waters, Brenda. "Catherine the Great and the problem of female rule." The Russian Review 34, no. 3 (1975): 293-307.

Wortman, Richard. Scenarios of power: myth and ceremony in Russian monarchy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.