Editing Catherine the Great (section)

====The evaluation of foreign policy====
Nicholas I, her grandson, evaluated the foreign policy of Catherine the Great as a dishonest one.<ref>[Kazimir Valishevsky. Catherine the Great. Book. 2, part 2, Chapter 3, V]</ref> Catherine failed to reach any of the initial goals she had put forward. Her foreign policy lacked a long-term strategy and from the very start was characterised by a series of mistakes. She lost the large territories of the Russian protectorate of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania and left its territories to Prussia and Austria. The Commonwealth had become the Russian protectorate since the reign of Peter I, but he did not intervene into the problem of political freedoms of dissidents advocating for their religious freedoms only. Catherine did turn Russia into a global great power, not only a European one, but with quite a different reputation from what she initially had planned as an honest policy. The global trade of Russian natural resources and Russian grain provoked famines, starvation and fear of famines in Russia. Her dynasty lost power because of this and of a war with Austria and Germany, impossible without her foreign policy.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Kamenskii |first1=Alexander |title=Catherine the Great's Foreign Policy Reconsidered |journal=The Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography |date=23 September 2019 |volume=12 |issue=1 |pages=169–187 |doi=10.1163/22102388-01201006}}</ref>