Catherine the Great vs Mao Zedong

In the winter of 1796, as Catherine the Great lay dying in her gilded bedchamber at the Winter Palace, she could look back on a reign that had transformed Russia from a peripheral power into a European colossus. One hundred and eighty years later, in September 1976, as Mao Zedong’s embalmed body lay in state at the Great Hall of the People, China was emerging from a decade of chaos, its ancient civilization reborn as a nuclear-armed communist state. These two figures—a German princess who became Russia’s longest-ruling female monarch, and a peasant’s son who became the founding father of modern China—never met, never corresponded, and inhabited worlds that seemed galaxies apart. Yet their lives trace a strange parallel: both seized power in moments of crisis, both wielded ideology as a weapon, and both left legacies so vast and contradictory that historians still argue over their meaning.

Catherine ruled Russia for 34 years. She called herself an "enlightened despot," and she meant it. She corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, bought their libraries, and invited them to St. Petersburg. She founded the Hermitage Museum, which began as her private art collection and today houses one of the world’s greatest treasures. She reformed education, established the first state-funded school system for girls, and tried—though largely failed—to codify Russian law along Enlightenment principles. She expanded Russia’s borders dramatically, annexing Crimea, partitioning Poland, and pushing into the Caucasus. Under her, Russia became a great power. But Catherine’s enlightenment had sharp limits. She never abolished serfdom—in fact, she extended it, giving nobles even more power over their peasants. When the Pugachev Rebellion (1773–75) threatened her rule, she crushed it with savage brutality. She believed in reason and progress—but only so long as they did not threaten her throne. She was, above all, a pragmatist. Mao ruled China for 27 years after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. His vision was far more radical. Where Catherine sought to modernize within the existing social order, Mao sought to smash it entirely. He launched the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), a crash industrialization program that led to the deadliest famine in human history—estimates range from 15 to 45 million deaths. Then came the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a decade-long purge of intellectuals, bureaucrats, and anyone suspected of "bourgeois tendencies." Mao mobilized millions of young Red Guards to destroy the "Four Olds"—old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. Temples were ransacked, books burned, teachers beaten. Mao believed that revolution must be permanent, that only constant struggle could prevent the return of class oppression.

Today, Catherine’s Russia is remembered with ambivalence. She is celebrated as a patron of the arts and a modernizer, but also criticized for expanding serfdom and autocracy. Her name adorns streets, palaces, and even a brand of vodka. In China, Mao’s legacy is officially revered—his portrait still hangs in Tiananmen Square—but privately debated. The economic reforms that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty after his death were a direct repudiation of his policies. Yet his role as the unifier of modern China is undisputed. What unites them is this: both were outsiders who remade their nations in their own image. Catherine, the German princess who became more Russian than the Russians. Mao, the peasant’s son who became the father of a new China. They wielded power with absolute authority, for better and for worse. And they remind us that history is not made by systems or classes or economic forces alone—it is made by individuals, flawed and brilliant, who seize the moment and bend the world to their will.