This diploma paper, after brief depiction of the reign of her male and female predecessors, of whom the most important are Peter the Great and Elizabeth, depicts the overall portrait of the empress of the Russian Empire Catherine the Great, born in 1729 in the Prussian part of Pomerania in Stettin as Sophia Augusta Fredericka, Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst. As a teenager, owing to the machinations of the Prussian king Frederick the Great, the Russian empress Elizabeth and her mother Johanna, she married her distant cousin, the Russian heir to the throne and Grand Duke Peter Fedorovich in order, with the help of her lover Sergei Saltykov, to give birth to her son Paul Petrovich, who continued the Russian imperial Romanov dynasty. After empress Elizabeth's death, Peter Fedorovich became the Russian emperor Peter III, but Catherine dethroned him in her coup d'état in 1762 in order to rule until her death in 1796. In that period, Catherine endorsed great changes and achieved great things which enabled the Russian Empire to thrive, and those are: her confiscating lands and serfs from the Russian Orthodox Church, her military and naval reforms, her populating the Russian Empire's vast expanses with the foreign population, her legislative actions, which include her Great Instruction, Legislative Commission, and nakazy, the First Partition of Poland, in the alliance with Austria and Prussia, the First Russo-Turkish War, the relations with the Republic of Dubrovnik during the War, which also include the Treaty of Livorno, then struggle for the improvement of health care and health-care conditions of Russian Empire, fight against the various plots aimed against her regime, the suppression of Pugachev's revolt, another attempt of the codification of the Russian laws, which also included the endorsement of the police administration to the Russian Empire, the proclamation of the Charter to the Nobility and the Charter to the Towns, then annexation of the Crimean Khanate, The Second Russo-Turkish War, in the alliance with Austria, which also includes the new relations with the Republic of Dubrovnik, which include the Austria's mediation in the Russo-Dubrovnik relations and opening of the Russian consulate in Dubrovnik, then the Russo-Swedish War, the Second Partition of Poland, in the alliance with Prussia, French Revolution and the possible revolutionaries in the Russian Empire, ''Warsaw Jacobins'' and the Third Partition of Poland, in the alliance with Austria and Prussia, the description of the empress's last years, the description of her relationships with her romantic and political favorites, of whom the most important were Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, the future Polish king Stanislaus II Augustus, with whom she had daughter Anna Petrovna and who, as the Polish king was actually her puppet, Grigorii Orlov, with whom she had a son born out of wedlock and named Aleksei Grigor'evich Bobrinskoi, and Grigorii Potemkin, who may have been her secret husband, but in reality the first-class instrument for achieving her conquering ambitions, then the description of her dynastic affairs by which she strove to secure her succession, then her relationship with her son Paul, the future emperor Paul I, her relationship with her grandsons and granddaughters, especially with her grandsons: Alexander Pavlovich, for whom she wanted to become the heir to the throne of the Russian Empire instead of his father Paul and who was the future emperor Alexander I, then Constantine Pavlovich, for whom she had great plans regarding her the so-called ''Greek Project'', i.e. she wanted him to be the emperor of the Greek Empire after the possible destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and Nikolai Pavlovich, who was born near the end of her life, and who would succeed Alexander I as Nicholas I, and finally, the brief description of Catherine's educational and economic reforms and her cultural actions, which, among the other, include her establishing of Smolny Institute, Free Economic Society, Free Russian Society and Hermitage. Besides her great conquests, wars and the successful actions in the overall eighteenth-century politics, in history, Catherine has also remained known by leading herself by the ideas of the French Enlightenment and by her enlightened absolutism, which had all led to the conversion of Russia from the primitive feudal and barbaric state into the modern European country, and by the overall devoted care to the preservation of the Peter the Great's legacy, for the welfare of the Russian Empire, its territorial expansion, especially towards the south and the Black Sea, and for the enlargement of its glory in the European and the world proportions. Besides, in order to achieve this, in her last years, she also launched the Persian campaign as a part of her new, the so-called ''Oriental Project'', which, however, was terminated by her son and heir Paul I. Although he endorsed some reforms regarding the army and the Russian Orthodox Church, he, in his actions, mainly did not follow his mother's footsteps, so that his tyrannical reign was violently terminated in 1801, while his son and Catherine's grandson Alexander I mainly followed his grandmother's footsteps, especially when fighting Napoleon, so that his reign lasted for full 24 years, i.e. from 1801 to 1825, when, after his death from the natural causes, he was succeeded by his brother Nikolai, better known as emperor Nicholas I.