Episode 9: Catherine the Great: Russia’s Black Sea Expansion

Dr Kelly O’Neill, an historian of Russia at Harvard University, and the author of Claiming Crimea: A History of Catherine the Great’s Southern Empire, joins Beatrice and Paul for this episode.

Coming from an aristocratic family of the Holy Roman Empire, Catherine II married the heir to the Russian imperial throne, but upon his accession, managed to seize power and reigned in her own right from 1762-1796. She plunged into European great power politics with great talent and sweeping strategic moves. Previously, Russia had not had access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean trade beckoning beyond it. Catherine even had her eye on Constantinople, and dreamed of freeing it from Turkish occupation to restore it to Christendom under the rule of her grandson, fittingly named Constantine. While this did not come to pass, by the end of her reign, Russia had occupied a large part of the Polish Lithuanian empire, dominated the Black Sea and was a European great power. It was said that no cannon in Europe could be fired without her leave, a line that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov currently likes to use in his speeches: clearly, his master would like to restore this situation.

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O’Neill, Kelly: Claiming Crimea: A History of Catherine the Great’s Southern Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017)

Kamenskii, Alexander. "Catherine the Great’s Foreign Policy Reconsidered." Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography 12.1 (2019), pp. 169-187.

Vanderbroeck, Paul, and Paul Vanderbroeck. "Catherine the Great: Leading Strategic Growth." In Paul Vandenbroeck (ed.): Leadership Strategies for Women: Lessons from Four Queens on Leadership and Career Development (Springer, 2014), pp. 69-91.

Hilburgh, Adam W. "Catherine the Great: A Case for Operational Art." The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 27.2 (2014): 283-295.