". . Peter the Great's overturning of the laws of succession and his proclamation that every sovereign should have the right to designate the heir led to an anomaly in Russian history: Since the distant days of the Kievan state, no woman had reigned in Russia; after his death in 1725, four empresses reigned almost continuously for the next seventy-one years. They were Peter's wife (Catherine I), his niece (Anne), his daughter (Elizabeth) and his grandson's wife (Catherine the Great). The reigns of three pitiable males (Peter the Great's grandsons Peter II and Peter III and his brother's great-grandson Ivan IV) were interspersed among these women, but their three reigns encompassed only forty months."From Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie.
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