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Catherine's great passion was for Prince Potemkin and he became her closest confidant and supporter. Catherine had flirted with the liberal values of the European Enlightenment, but a popular uprising sent her scuttling back to the harshest forms of autocracy.

Alexander Pushkin's classic tale, The Captain's Daughter, captures the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Pugachev Revolt in which hundreds of thousands of peasants, factory workers and serfs turned against their masters. Landowners were massacred and their estates ransacked. It was a foretaste of the revolutionary terror that was about to sweep away the monarchy in France and it gave Catherine nightmares.

But, unlike revolutionary America or France where the people were demanding ever more radical changes to society, in Russia the spark for revolt was a reaction against reform, and Catherine the great reformer became the great reactionary, abandoning ideals of liberty, equality and rule of law.

Instead of giving power to the people, as Voltaire and Diderot had hoped, Catherine finally endorses the old system of autocracy - uncontrolled authority in the hands of one person, namely herself. Martin Sixsmith argues that this is the nub of Russian history, "that Russia is too big and too unruly ever to be suited to democracy, and that only the iron fist of uncompromising, centralised autocracy can keep such a disparate centripetal empire together and maintain order among her people. It's the same rationale," he says, "enunciated by Rurik and Oleg, by Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great ... that would later be used by the nineteenth century tsars, by the Communist regime in the twentieth century and by Vladimir Putin in the twenty first.

Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking

Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown
A Ladbroke Production for 麻豆约拍 Radio 4.