This photochrome print of the Catherine II monument in St. Petersburg is part of “Views of Architecture and Other Sites Primarily in Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine” from the catalog of the Detroit Publishing Company (1905). Empress Catherine II, also known as Catherine the Great, ruled Russia from 1762 to 1796. She was much admired, particularly by the Russian nobility, who benefited from the reforms she instituted. The monument, erected in 1873, stands in a square just off of St. Petersburg’s main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt. It was designed by Mikhail Osipovich Mikeshin (1835–96) and Alexander Mikhailovich Opekushin (1838–1923). As described in Baedeker’s Russia with Teheran, Port Arthur, and Peking (1914), “a base of reddish granite supports a bell-shaped pedestal bearing a figure of the Empress, 13 ft. in height, clad in an ermine mantle, and holding the imperial scepter in her right hand and wreath in her left. Round the pedestal are nine colossal bronze figures of celebrated contemporaries of the Empress.” These “celebrated contemporaries” include General Alexander Suvorov, the politician Prince Potiomkin, Ekaterina Dashkova, the first woman to chair the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the celebrated poet Gavrila Derzhavin.