num_pages: 400
description: Countess Ekaterina (Catherine) Rzewuski was born in St. Petersburg in 1858 into a family of great wealth and vast estates. She met the love of her life, a prominent member of the tsar's secret police, when she was fourteen and visiting aunts in Paris. But at fifteen she was married off to a Prussian prince. Then the fun stopped - for a time - as the new Catherine Radziwill moved in with her dour in-laws in Berlin and started the breeding required of her as Prince Wilhelm Radziwill's wife.At the Prussian Court she met Bismarck and befriended Princess Vicky, daughter of Queen Victoria and mother of the future Kaiser Wilhelm II. When her first love turned up in her life again she began her dangerous career as a Russian spy.The many twists and turns of Catherine's life took her to South Africa at the time of the Boer War - and a disastrous relationship with empire builder Cecil Rhodes; to St. Petersburg for coronations, funerals and the Russian Revolution; and to New York at the end of the First World War. Hers was an incredible life, lived by a remarkable, beguiling woman who constantly fought for her own independence and survival.
language: English
title: The Princess from St. Petersburg: The Life of Princess Catherine Radzwill
titlecomplete: The Princess from St. Petersburg: The Life of Princess Catherine Radzwill
ratings_count: 1
publisher: Book Guild Ltd