February 9, 1934: The film The Rise of Catherine the Great premieres. Produced by Alexander Korda, and directed by Paul Czinner, the screenplay was based on the 1912 play The Czarina, by Lajos Bíró and Melchior Lengyel. All were Hungarian.
Czinner's wife, Austrian actress Elisabeth Bergner, played the title role. She remained a prominent Broadway and film actress through the 1930s and 1940s, and is believed to have been the basis for Anne Baxter's title character in All About Eve. She lived until 1986.
Catherine was born on May 2, 1729 at the Ducal Castle in Stettin, Prussian Pomerania (now Szczecin, Poland) as Princess Sophie Auguste Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg, daughter of Christian Augustus, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst. She was taught to speak French and Russian, as well as her native German.
The film begins in 1744, when Sophie is presented to the court of Empress Elizabeth of Russia (played by Flora Robson), daughter of Peter the Great (Czar Peter I), as a potential wife for the heir to her throne. As she has no children, that heir is her nephew. Grand Duke Peter (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), who was also her second cousin. She was given the name Catherine, after Elizabeth's mother.
Given that there were over 300 separate principalities in what was then the Holy Roman Empire, which included much of present-day Germany. So it helped their princes to marry their children off to each other, and even, if they were lucky, to bigger powers such as Russia.
The film accurately portrays Peter as mentally unstable and misogynist. His bride observes Elizabeth, who had obtained power by overthrowing her nephew, Czar Peter II, and learns from her how to, as we would say now, "play power politics." But it took 9 years for Catherine and her husband to have a child, and when Paul was born, Elizabeth took charge of directing his upbringing. Peter didn't mind, as he didn't care; Catherine did, and took offense.
Elizabeth died on January 5, 1762, making her nephew Czar Peter III. By this point -- with the approval of Elizabeth, who was no stranger to that sort of thing -- Catherine was having an affair, with an artillery officer named Grigory Orlov.
She had previously had one with a Polish diplomat, Stanislaus Poniatowski, who went on to become Stanisław II August, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, monarch of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was believed to be the father of Catherine's daughter, Anna, who died in 1759 at the age of 15 months. At the time she became Czarina, but just consort to the Czar, Catherine was pregnant again, with Orlov the father. Their son, Aleksey, was born on April 11.
According to the film, one night, Peter went one step too far in publicly humiliating his wife. She supported a planned coup d'état. The following morning, July 9, 1762, Peter was arrested, and Catherine was declared Empress of All the Russias. The film showed Peter being murdered the next day. In reality, it happened 8 days later, on July 17. It was against her wishes, so the film got that right. In the film, Orlov explains that everything has a price, and the crown has the highest price of all. The film ended with Catherine in tears on her throne, while the cheers of the crowds were heard outside.
The film only details her rise, not her reign. Like Elisabeth before her, Catherine attempted to modernize her country. Unlike Elizabeth, who was in the middle of the Seven Years' War at the time of her death, she admired Elizabeth's enemy, King Frederick II of Prussia, a.k.a. Frederick the Great. The war was brought to a close, with Russia, Prussia and Britain all strengthened, and France weakened. Frederick and Catherine never met, but corresponded, and became mutual admirers.
With her husband dead, Catherine thought nothing of having affairs. She made little effort to hide them from the public. And when she was done with a man, she usually "paid him off," with land and a pension. After Orlov, her best-known boyfriend was General Grigory Potemkin. In 1775, Elizabeth was born to Catherine and her General, who raised her in his household.
Catherine improved things for women, especially in the area of education. She won 2 Russo-Turkish Wars, 1768-1774 and 1787-1792, which pushed the Ottoman Empire back, gave Russia access to the Black Sea and Eastern trade routes, and made Russia enough of a power in the Balkans that Bulgaria and Serbia still use the Cyrillic alphabet to this day. She also supported America in its Revolution with Britain, and won a war Persia in 1796.
She was hardly glamourous.
But not everything went well. A war with Sweden in 1788-90 was pretty much a stalemate. And poverty still ran rampant. In 1787, Catherine visited the Crimea. It was alleged by historian Georg von Helbig that Potemkin had ordered thousands of peasants to "put on a show" for her, to make the buildings and life in the villages look a lot better than they were, to make it look like her reforms were succeeding. However, Charles-Joseph Lamoral, 7th Prince de Ligne, a member of the Austrian delegation on the trip, did his own exploring on the trip, and said von Helbig lied.
And she treated Russia's Jews terribly, and oversaw the Partitions of Poland, with Prussia and Austria, in 1772, 1793, and 1795. Since these actions covered about 75 percent of my ancestry, I find it hard to accept either her or Frederick as "Great."
She died on November 17, 1796, at the age of 67, from the effects of a stroke the day before. Soon thereafter, her enemies spread a rumor across Europe that she had died from overexertion -- by having sex with a horse. Another rumor said that, while she was naked at the time of her death, it was from having a stroke during a bath.
In addition to Bergner, among the actresses to play Catherine the Great are Pola Negri in the 1924 silent film Forbidden Paradise, Marlene Dietrich later in 1934 in The Scarlet Empress, Mae West (herself known for her sexploits) in 1944 in her own play Catherine Was Great, Tallulah Bankhead (ditto) in 1945 in A Royal Scandal, Julia Ormond in 1991 in Young Catherine, Helen Mirren as an older Empress in the 2019 HBO miniseries Catherine the Great, and Elle Fanning as a younger one in the 2020-23 Hulu series The Great.
In 1968, Jeanne Moreau starred in the film Great Catherine. In 1995, she played Empress Elizabeth in the A&E film Catherine the Great, with Catherine Zeta-Jones in the title role. In 2016, Meghan Tonjes played her in an episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History, opposing the 1st Czar (or "Tsar") of Russia, Ivan IV, a.k.a. Ivan the Terrible, played by "Nice" Peter Shukoff. It was a "battle royale," with Zach Sherwin playing Alexander the Great, "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist playing Frederick the Great, and comedy writer Mike Betette playing ancient Roman politician Pompey the Great.
Apparently, 1934 was a good year to play a horny female monarch: In addition to 2 films about Catherine the Great being released, Claudette Colbert starred in Cleopatra, defining the character until Elizabeth Taylor nearly 30 years later.
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February 9, 1934 was a Friday. This was also the day that New York City had its lowest recorded temperature ever: 15 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. I have a separate entry for that event.
Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And no games were scheduled in the NHL. Therefore, there were no scores on this historic day.
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