How Did Catherine II Modernize Russia

Catherine II was a woman of many talents and abilities, which were used during her thirty years of ruling over Russia. During her reign, she was able to accomplish much. Catherine’s goal was to modernize Russia and bring it out of the medieval slump that it had been suffering from. She believed that it could and would become one of the great powers in the world. Before her noble ambitions could be achieved, would first need to become Czarina. This task would prove to be difficult for her and would require a large amount of political skill and wit to achieve. Several obstacles arose that tested her ability to navigate the dangerous political waters. The first was her lack of connection to the throne. She was a German princess, who at the time was not a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, and was plucked from an obscure royal family from an even more obscure branch of that family. She was picked by Elizabeth to be the wife of the future Czar, Peter III. He would become one of the first obstacles in her

Sumner. He is a historian born in London that has written four different books about Russian history called, Tsardom and Imperialism in the Far East and Middle East, 1880-1914 (1942), A Short History of Russia (1943), Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire (1949), and Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (1950). Sumner appears to be interested in Russian history eras ranging from Peter the Great to the rise of the Soviet Union. Throughout his writing of A Short History of Russia, there were no blatantly apparent biases. The reader could wonder whether there are implicit biases due to World War II going on during the writing of this book, and the negative feelings the English may have had towards Russia during this time. B.H. Sumner is a very credible source who completed a sizable amount of research to produce this book due to the large history that he was trying to consolidate into less than five hundred