The memoirs of Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, were a state secret from soon after Catherine’s death in 1796 until the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. Reading this surprisingly fast-paced volume (Modern Library, 352 pages,$26.95) – the kind of thing Bridget Jones might have produced if she were an absolute monarch – it’s easy to see why. Sustaining the apparent dignity of an absolute monarch is hard enough when that monarch isn’t gleefully giving away family and state secrets – including, it is very strongly suggested, that the later Romanovs were not, in fact, Romanovs.

The memoir is a recollection by an aging empress of her first years in Russia as the Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseevna (1745-62), and of the court intrigue and politics of the time. This new English translation by Mark Cruse and Hilde Hoogenboom is the first complete one made directly from the final document Catherine the Great wrote in the two years before her death in 1796.

Written in her own hand, in French, the memoir is a unique first-person account of an 18th-century Russian court by someone who understood intimately its internal factions and clan politics. It is also an engaging story, told by a brilliant woman.

Catherine has long been the object of salacious, and mostly false, gossip, but history also remembers her as unusually intelligent and capable, a rare bright spot in Russia’s long history of misrule. She instituted basic health and education reforms, created many enduring institutions, promoted the arts, and further opened Russia to the West.

During the reign of her predecessor, Empress Elizabeth I, Catherine’s future depended on producing a male heir and ensuring she had close allies and supporters in the royal court. The latter came naturally to a very political woman who described herself as having a man’s mind and an easy charm: “My disposition was naturally so accommodating that no one was ever with me a quarter of an hour without falling comfortably into conversation, chatting with me as if they had known me for a long time.”

Producing the heir was much more difficult. The problem was her husband, Grand Duke Peter. Catherine – or as she was then known, Princess Sophie Auguste Frederike von Anhalt-Zerbst – was 16 when she married her 17-year-old second cousin. She soon discovered her husband was more interested in his dolls, dogs, and military parades than in her or the affairs of the country he was to inherit. He would soon graduate to alcohol and mistresses, but there’s no indication in the memoir that he ever slept with his wife.

Meanwhile, the young grand duchess was appalled by the backwardness of her new homeland. Even worse than the drafty and rat-infested lodgings in St. Petersburg was that there were hardly any books in the Russian Imperial court, and even fewer people who had read them.

So Catherine, bored out of her mind, decided to learn Russian and educate herself. She read novels during her first year in Russia, before discovering Voltaire (with whom she started corresponding as soon as she became empress), and she turned her mind to the more substantial historical and political writings of her time.

Catherine’s memoirs bring out most poignantly the loneliness of the young princess. Elizabeth ruled the Russian court and kept careful watch on her relationships. Her mother soon fell in with the wrong faction and was sent back to Germany. Her son was whisked off by Elizabeth immediately after his birth; she did not see him for 40 days.

Catherine did, however, attract a set of lovers, discussed with a bluntness that surprises the modern reader. Her pregnancies came as a shock to her husband: In 1758, as she was about to give birth to her daughter Anna, word came back to her that Peter had said: “God knows where my wife gets her pregnancies. I really do not know if this child is mine and if I ought to recognize it.”

He seems to have been right in his suspicion, and this is what made Catherine’s memoirs so dangerous to the Russian throne. Count Poniatowski, the future king of Poland, was the likely father of Anna, while a Russian nobleman, Sergei Saltykov, was probably the father of her son Paul, born in 1754 and heir to the throne.

The threat posed by Peter likely not recognizing her son as the heir compromised her standing, and was very real as early as 1758, when she wrote “it was a question of perishing with him, or by him, or else of saving myself, my children, and perhaps the state from the disaster that all this Prince’s moral and physical faculties promised.” This seems to be the impetus that led Catherine, in the years following, to make sure the public saw her, not her husband, as the savior of the country. She charged herself with saving Russia from the incompetent rule of her husband (who died mysteriously soon after she claimed power in 1762).

Unfortunately, Catherine’s memoirs end before her rise, leaving the reader hungry for a sequel that will never be.

Ms. Zagare last wrote in these pages on crime in contemporary Russia.