Catherine the Great began life as Sophie Auguste Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst, a minor German princess sent to Russia at fourteen to marry the future Grand Duke Peter. This History Hit documentary traces how that arranged marriage soured into years of humiliation and isolation at the Russian court, and how Catherine used the time to build alliances among nobles, guards officers, and foreign diplomats who saw Peter III as unfit to rule. The film follows the 1762 coup itself, when Catherine rode out in a guardsman's uniform to claim the loyalty of the Imperial Guard and force her husband's abdication within days, and examines the death in custody that followed and cleared her path to sole power. It also covers her decades on the throne: territorial expansion, Enlightenment correspondence with Voltaire, and the rumors that trailed her private life. Historians speak throughout, weighing how a foreign-born teenage bride became, in the film's account, the most powerful woman in Russian history.