HOW delightful to discover that Robert K. Massie, 82 years old, hasn't lost his mojo. At a heft befitting its subject, his long-awaited "Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman" is a consistently nimble and buoyant performance, defying what might in a lesser writer's hands prove a deadly undertow of exhaustively researched historical facts. Of course, Massie, who has spent almost half a century studying czarist Russia, has always been a biographer with the instincts of a novelist. He understands plot - fate - as a function of character, and the narrative perspective he establishes and maintains, a vision tightly aligned with that of his subject, convinces a reader he's not so much looking at Catherine the Great as he is out of her eyes.

It's an elegantly simple and effective strategy, one familiar to Massie's admirers, who will find his latest work as juicy and suspenseful as the book that thrust him into celebrity when it was published in 1967, smack in the middle of the Cold War.

Lucky circumstances

The genius of "Nicholas and Alexandra" was that it recreated the tragedy of the last Romanov rulers from the inside out, intimately enough to challenge even a Bolshevik to insist on the decadence and inhumanity of monarchs whose first of many misfortunes was an accident of timing, as czarism was defunct if not yet dead when Nicholas inherited the crown.

By contrast, Catherine the Great would be able to credit the "many lucky circumstances" that facilitated her seizing control of a system of imperial absolutism at the height of its influence, if bearing the blueprint of its own destruction. She began her life on April 21, 1729, as Sophia Augusta Fredericka, a minor German princess whose 16-year-old mother, Johanna, immediately handed her over to a wet nurse. Johanna's maternal feeling was held in reserve for the yet-to-be conceived son she hoped would secure her claim to his father's princedom. But when the sickly son, born 18 months after Sophia, died at 12, Johanna had no choice but to redirect her energies onto her one remaining ticket to the exalted social position she coveted.

Never underestimate the power of a cold, calculating and unaffectionate mother to inspire ambition in her child. Determined not just to escape but to transcend her unhappy beginnings, Sophia became Johanna's collaborator. Having discovered that people preferred "to talk about themselves rather than anything else," she learned to conceal pride with humility and became a very good listener, both skills that would serve her well as Empress and Autocrat of All the Russias. She wanted power, and she wanted what she "couldn't live for a day without" - love - and she'd get them both, in spades, but not from the husband who awaited her.

He looked good on paper, "the only surviving male descendant of Peter the Great," enough that Russia's reigning and childless empress Elizabeth chose her nephew Peter as her successor and had him plucked from his native Holstein and delivered to St. Petersburg. But when she saw the "odd little figure" Peter presented at 14, weak in both body and mind, she began hunting for a bride to facilitate her leapfrogging over his incompetence by presenting her a grandson as heir. Each year may have produced "a new crop of eligible adolescent European princesses," but only one had Johanna for a mother. With the persistence of a terrier, Johanna unearthed and exploited any and all connections to the top, and once she'd contrived a means of introducing her 14-year-old daughter, the empress noted Sophia's "freshness, intelligence and discreet, submissive manner."

Indeed, Sophia had many virtues, both cultured and innate, to recommend her as an ideal candidate for marriage to the unprepossessing Peter, but it was her immediate and canny pursuit of everything Russian -- church, language and customs - that predicted the transformation of a girl who might otherwise have been a historical footnote into "the pre-eminent royal personage in the world."

Love for Russia

A zealous student who begged her tutor for more hours to fill with lessons, Sophia slipped out of bed to drill herself on Russian vocabulary while pacing the cold stone floors. Rather than kill her, however, the pneumonia she developed secured her place in the empress' affections and kindled the first of her many public relations triumphs. "In the space of a few weeks," reports that Sophia's love for Russia was so great that she'd risked her life to learn her adoptive nation's language more quickly seduced a public eternally suspicious of German influences and machinations.

Upon her marriage, Catherine - the name the empress gave Sophia on the occasion of her mandatory conversion to Orthodoxy - found herself shackled to a 17-year-old whom one European king would remember as "a mere poltroon ... comic in all things ... not stupid, but mad." He was precocious in alcoholism if nothing else, and his drinking was encouraged by servants whom he dressed in military uniforms for "indoor parades" when he wasn't playing with the toy soldiers that filled his room and which he took to bed with him. Had they been Russian uniforms or Russian toy soldiers - had Peter the sense and ambition of his wife, who worked assiduously to obliterate every damning trace of her German origins - his future might not have been quite so bleak. But his six-month reign, which began in 1761, was characterized by his attempting to remake the Orthodox Church into Protestantism even as he set out to "reorganize the Russian Army on the Prussian model." To be an ineffectual czar is unfortunate, to attack both of Russia's two most sacred institutions and announce loyalty to an enemy nation by wearing a Prussian uniform to state functions was tantamount to inviting the coup d'etat that removed him from the throne in 1762.

Catherine, too, made calculated and convincing appearances in uniform, but that of a Russian soldier. Dressed as a colonel of an elite Russian regiment and mounted on a white stallion, Catherine, an expert horsewoman, led 14,000 infantry soldiers to arrest and unseat her feckless husband, who, Nerolike, ignored reports of conspiracy to go on playing his violin.