Catherine the Great intrigued me for a long time. She was a powerful woman monarch. She was an immigrant to Russia. She was the best empress Russia has ever had. And—to me born and raised in Poland—she was also the empress who wiped Poland off the map of Europe and turned my ancestors into the reluctant subjects of the Russian tsars.
An irresistible combination.
As soon as I decided to write about Catherine the Great I began reading her letters and memoirs in search for inspiration. In one of the letters Catherine wrote to Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, a British ambassador to Russia, I came across the following sentence: Three people who never leave her room, and who do not know about one another, inform me of what is going on, and will not fail to acquaint me when the crucial moment arrives. “Her” meant Elizabeth Petrovna, the empress who invited Catherine to Russia as a prospective bride to her nephew Peter. “The crucial moment” meant Elizabeth’s much awaited death which Catherine saw as her big political chance. But who were the three spies Russia’s Grand Duchess kept in the imperial bedroom? And what stories and secrets could they reveal?
Whoever they were I couldn’t stop thinking about them and the kind of lives they must have led: dangerous and filled with betrayals.
The Winter Palace begins in 1744 when a fourteen year old German princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst arrives in Russia. One of the palace spies, Varvara, a Polish orphan who is trying to assure her own survival, befriends the newcomer from Zerbst and for the next twenty years watches how Grand Duchess Catherine turns herself into the empress and sole autocrat of All the Russias.
Listen to me, Varvara says, I know.
The one you do not suspect is the most dangerous of spies.
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