In one of history’s delicious ironies, the abused wife of a psychotic drunkard turned into a tiger who destroyed her oppressor. Catherine the Great launched a palace coup from atop a war horse and wrested the throne of Imperial Russia from her incompetent husband. For 33 years, she shepherded the world’s largest empire through a time of enlightenment and revolution, a time when French philosophies she embraced brought down monarchs and threatened her rule. Skillfully leading Russia through wars with the Ottoman Empire, Sweden, Poland, and a mob of embittered peasants, Catherine alloyed lofty principles of the Enlightenment with an iron fist. Her brilliant tactics would be studied and copied by dictators like Stalin and Putin in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Actor Nathalie Emmanuel joins father-daughter history team Jon & Emily Jordan to tell the story of Catherine the Great.

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