Two Books: Flatland and Catherine the Great, Portrait of a Woman

You may also like...

2 Responses

  1. John T. Alexander says:

    Massie’s Catherine is certainly not great. The man doesn’t even read Russian! hat tells you how deeply it is researched. It is full of errors and poorly writte to boot. miserable book praised by amateurs and idiots. Don’t waste your time or money.

    • I’ve heard this claim with Massie. I can’t comment on it, since I’m not a Russian historian… I’m a writer, and can only report whether someone did a good job keeping and shaping their narrative. In that sense, Catherine is a great read. It could be full of historical innacuracies… I couldn’t tell you.

      That said, I heard a few of the criticisms laid at Massie’s feet when I was doing my research, and I noticed many critics weren’t talking about historical innacuracy so much as political agenda… and not even Russian political agendas… many of them were English and American political agendas, since we speak English. The one I saw multiple people attack Massie for was claiming that Thomas Jefferson had X number of children by Sally Hemmings, without even citing the controversy on the subject. So I did a preliminary pass at Wikipedia (which, I admit, is not the best source for historical accuracy, but it will do in a pinch) and, controversy aside, the DNA testing shows that there’s a 99% chance that Jefferson is the father. Since this book is about Russian History, and not American History, it seems fair to me to cut mitigating circumstances out of the narrative.

      That said, I’d be more than happy to hear specifics as to what Massie wrote that is wrong or controvertial, and I’d be happy to do more research on those claims and let the readers of my blog decide for themselves what’s fair. I am certain, however, that one does not need to know the language of a country to be fluent in that country’s history. It is dissapointing to imagine that a person who has dedicated his life writing books on Russian History would never learn Russian in his thirty year career, but claiming that makes Massie a bad historian would be attacking the man, and not his work. I’m not a big fan of using Ad Hominem to win my arguments. Do you have any complaints specific to Catherine the Great?

Leave a Reply