Russia Against Napoleon (34 page)

In the immediate aftermath of the fighting, abandoning Moscow seems to have been far from Kutuzov’s mind. On the contrary, he told his subordinates that he intended to attack the next day. Only the news that Napoleon had not committed his Guards and that Russian losses were enormous persuaded him to change his mind. In all, the most recent Russian estimates suggest that they lost between 45,000 and 50,000 men at Shevardino and Borodino, as against perhaps 35,000 French casualties. In particular, Bagration’s Second Army had been nearly destroyed. Even some weeks later, after stragglers had returned to the ranks, Second Army was reckoned to have lost more than 16,000 men on 7 September, and this was on top of the 5,000 lost at Shevardino two days before. As serious, casualties among the army’s senior officers had been crippling.
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Kutuzov therefore ordered a retreat. For almost the only time during the campaign the Russian rearguard performed poorly. This was blamed on its commander, Matvei Platov, and was seen by regular officers as confirmation of their long-held view that Cossack generals were not competent to command infantry and artillery. The basic problem was that Platov’s rearguard did not impose delays on the French or keep them at a sufficiently respectful distance from the main body of the retreating Russian army, as Konovnitsyn had always done with great skill. As a result, the already exhausted troops did not get the rest they needed. The army’s precipitate departure from Mozhaisk meant that thousands of wounded were left behind, in sharp contrast to what had happened previously during the retreat. When Kutuzov reinforced the rearguard and replaced Platov by Mikhail Miloradovich matters improved greatly but the episode fed growing tensions between the regular and Cossack leaders.
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The basic point, however, was that the Russians were running out of space. Six days after the battle of Borodino, Kutuzov’s army was on the outskirts of Moscow. The great question now was whether or not to fight for the city. Kutuzov would find it harder than Barclay to abandon Moscow. Both generals were patriots who had risked their lives on many battlefields, but the Russia for which they fought was not quite the same. Barclay had great loyalty and admiration for the Russian soldier but he was a Protestant Balt brought up in Petersburg. For him, Russia meant above all else the emperor, the army and the state. For reasons both of sentiment and interest these were very much part of Kutuzov’s Russia too, but not all of it. For any member of the old Russian aristocracy who had not lost his roots there was also another Russia, an Orthodox land which had existed before the Romanovs and before the empire and whose capital was Moscow.

Kutuzov’s last words to Alexander on leaving Petersburg to assume the supreme command were that he would rather perish than abandon Moscow. Shortly after arriving at headquarters he wrote to Rostopchin, Moscow’s governor-general, that ‘the question remains undecided as to which is more important – to lose the army or to lose Moscow. In my opinion the loss of Moscow entails the loss of Russia itself.’ When the council of war met at Fili on 13 September, however, Kutuzov understood that actually this was no longer the question. If he stood and fought, there was every probability that both the army and the capital would be lost. No doubt the commander-in-chief had already made his decision to abandon the city before the council met at four o’clock that afternoon. But such a momentous step could not be taken without consulting his senior generals. Moreover, Kutuzov was anxious to share some of the responsibility for a decision which was bound to cause huge anger and condemnation.
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The main protagonists at the council of war were Bennigsen and Barclay. The former had chosen the ground on which the army was preparing to fight outside Moscow. In time-honoured fashion pride alone would have forbidden him to admit that he had made a mistake. From his subsequent correspondence with Alexander it was also clear that he was anxious to thrust responsibility for the city’s loss onto Kutuzov and Barclay. At the council of war Barclay set out the reasons why the Russian army would certainly be defeated if it stood on the defensive in this position. Not only would they be greatly outnumbered but their position was divided up by ravines, which would make it very difficult to coordinate resistance. A lost battle would entail a rushed retreat through Moscow, which could easily result in the army’s disintegration. The only possibility was to attack Napoleon’s army but the huge loss of officers at Borodino made a battle of manoeuvre immensely risky. Toll and Ermolov shared Barclay’s view, though Ermolov lacked the moral courage to speak up and take responsibility in front of his seniors. On the contrary, Barclay showed not just moral courage but also some generosity of spirit by speaking up decisively and thereby sharing the burden of responsibility of a man who had superseded him in command.
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There remained the difficult task of getting an exhausted and somewhat demoralized army with all its baggage and some of its wounded through the streets of a great city. With the enemy on their heels this could be an extremely dangerous enterprise. Matters were not helped by the fact that the news that Moscow was to be abandoned had broken on the civilian population very late. As the army passed through Moscow on 14 September a mass civilian exodus was still under way. One staff officer described the scene as ‘not the passage of an army but the relocation of whole tribes from one corner of the earth to another’. Barclay did his usual indefatigable best to impose some order on this chaos. Officers were posted at key intersections to direct the troops. Cavalry rode down the sides of the columns to stop desertion and plundering. Barclay himself oversaw arrangements.
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The true hero of the occasion, however, was Miloradovich, who was now commanding the Russian rearguard. His opposite number in the French advance guard was usually Joachim Murat, and the two men had much in common. Both generals were showmen who loved splendid clothes and the grand gesture. It would be an understatement to say that neither man was an intellectual but Miloradovich was not only honourable and generous but on occasion surprisingly modest and shrewd. He certainly summed up the essence of the present danger and with some
bravura
sent his aide-de-camp to Murat to suggest a one-day truce so that the Russians could depart, leaving the city intact. In the event that this request was refused, Miloradovich threatened to fight in the streets and turn Moscow into a ruin. Even more than most of the French generals, Murat was longing for comfortable quarters, peace and a return home. Perhaps lulled by Napoleon’s own illusions, he saw the fall of Moscow as a prelude to peace. All this disposed him not just to accept Miloradovich’s offer of a truce but also subsequently to extend it for a further twelve hours. As a result of Miloradovich’s cheeky initiative, the Russian army emerged from Moscow almost unscathed.
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In principle Kutuzov might have retreated out of Moscow in a number of directions. Had he turned north-west, for instance, he could have blocked the road to Tver and Petersburg, whose population was bound to be in an uproar at the news of Moscow’s fall. In fact he retreated south-eastwards down the road to Riazan. This was in many ways the safest exit from Moscow in the face of an enemy who was entering the city from the west. On 17 September, however, after crossing the river Moskva at Borovsk, Kutuzov turned sharply westwards. Marching rapidly he crossed the roads to Kashira and Tula before turning southwards down the Old Kaluga Road which led out from Moscow to the south-west.

Meanwhile on 15 September Napoleon entered Moscow and set up his headquarters in the Kremlin. That very day fires started in many parts of the city. Moscow burned for six days. Three-quarters of its buildings were destroyed. In all, during the summer and autumn of 1812, 270 million rubles’ worth of private property was destroyed in the city and province of Moscow, an astronomical sum for that era. The overwhelming majority of the civilian population had already fled but those who remained were driven from their homes, made destitute and sometimes killed. Of the more than 30,000 wounded soldiers who had been in Moscow, all but 6,000 were evacuated in time, thanks above all to the efforts of James Wylie, the efficient head of the army’s medical services. But very many of those who were left behind died in the flames. When the Russians recaptured Moscow they found and burned 12,000 corpses.
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Even before the fire began the Russians had also been forced to abandon vast stocks of military materials in the city, including more than 70,000 muskets, though admittedly half of these were in need of repair. Moscow had been the rear base for Kutuzov’s army and by the time the news came that the city was to be abandoned it was very difficult to evacuate all military stores. Finding sufficient carts at this last moment was impossible, so most weapons, equipment and other military goods were evacuated on twenty-three barges. The first three escaped but the fourth, overloaded by the artillery department, got stuck in the river Moskva and blocked the passage of the remaining nineteen. These barges carried almost 5 million rubles’ worth of weapons, clothing and equipment, all of which had to be burned in order to keep it out of Napoleon’s hands.
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Who or what caused the fire has always been a source of dispute. The one certain point is that neither Alexander nor Napoleon ordered the city to be burned. Rostopchin said before the city’s fall that the French would only conquer its ashes. He evacuated the 2,000 men of Moscow’s fire brigade and all its equipment. Cossack detachments from Kutuzov’s army burned one at least of the city’s quarters, following a scorched-earth policy of destroying all houses which the Russians had pursued ever since Napoleon passed Smolensk and invaded the Russian heartland. Kutuzov also ordered that the many remaining military stores should be set alight. Although French carelessness and plundering may have contributed to the city’s destruction, it was undoubtedly the Russians who were most responsible for what happened. What mattered at the time, however, was the perception that Napoleon was to blame and that the city’s destruction was a huge sacrifice to Russian patriotism and Europe’s liberation.
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Maybe the fire helped to distract French attention from Kutuzov’s flank march from the Riazan to the Kaluga road. In normal circumstances this would have been a risky undertaking since it took the Russian columns right across the front of Napoleon’s army in Moscow. In fact, however, a combination of French exhaustion and the Cossack rearguard’s skill meant that it was some time before Napoleon even realized that his enemy was no longer en route to Riazan.

Once installed in his camp near Tarutino on the Old Kaluga Road, Kutuzov was in a strong position. He could cover the arms works and stores at Briansk and above all the crucial arms factories and workshops at Tula. At the news of Moscow’s fall many artisans in the Tula arms works fled back to their native villages. Major-General Voronov, the commandant of the Tula arms works, reported that if he was forced to evacuate Tula it would be six months before production could resume, which would have been a disaster for the Russian war effort. The field-marshal was able to reassure him that Tula was now covered by the Russian army and in no immediate danger.
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At Tarutino Kutuzov was excellently positioned to send out raiding parties to harass the long French lines of communication stretching westwards from Moscow all the way back to Smolensk. He was also best placed for communication with Tormasov and Chichagov. Since his food supplies and reinforcements were mostly coming up through Kaluga from the fertile and populous southern provinces, his new deployment gave him every opportunity to feed his men and horses and rebuild their strength. To understand how this was done, however, means we must turn aside from military operations for a moment and look instead at the mobilization of Russia’s home front.

Napoleon’s plan had been to wage a limited ‘cabinet’ war against Alexander I. The French emperor might contemplate wiping Prussia off the map but he believed that it was neither in his power nor in his interests to destroy the Russian Empire. Instead he hoped to weaken Russia, force her back into the Continental System, and make her accept French domination of Europe. Far from desiring to drive Alexander off his throne or throw Russian society into revolution and chaos, Napoleon looked to the tsar to agree peace conditions and then enforce them on Russian society. Partly for this reason, he stressed his personal respect for Alexander during the 1812 campaign and made clear his view that the true initiator of the war was Britain and her stooges in the Petersburg elite.

Alexander and his advisers well understood Napoleon’s aims and tactics. In this as in every other way, they sought to impose on him the kind of war he least wanted to fight. In political terms this meant a Spanish-style national war to the death, in which the emperor would refuse all negotiations and would seek to mobilize Russian society behind the war effort by appeals to patriotic, religious and xenophobic sentiment. In his memorandum of April 1812 Petr Chuikevich stressed that Russia’s key strengths must include ‘the resoluteness of its monarch and the loyalty to him of his people, who must be armed and inspired, as in Spain, with the help of the clergy’. In addition, in a national war fought on the nation’s soil Russian society would willingly provide the resources and make the sacrifices which victory over Napoleon’s immense empire would require.
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The best source on Alexander’s own views about the war’s domestic political context is the record of a long conversation he had in Helsingfors (Helsinki) in August 1812 while on the way to his meeting with Bernadotte. The emperor noted that for the past century all Russia’s wars had been fought abroad and had seemed to most Russians to be far removed from their own immediate interests and concerns. The landowners had resented the conscription of their peasants and all setbacks resulted in relentless criticism of the government and its military commanders.

In present circumstances it was necessary to persuade the people that the government did not seek war and that it was arming only in order to defend the state. It was vital strongly to interest the people in the war, by waging it for the first time in over a hundred years on the territory of their motherland (
rodina
). This was the only way to make this a truly people’s war and to unite society around the government, of its own freewill and conviction, and in the cause of its own defence.

Alexander added that the united resolution shown by Russian society since Napoleon’s invasion showed that his calculation had proved correct. He added that, as for himself, he would never make peace so long as a single enemy soldier remained on Russian soil, even if that meant standing firm on the line of the river Volga after being defeated in battle and losing Petersburg and Moscow. The Finnish official to whom Alexander was speaking recorded in his memoirs that the intelligence, clarity and resolution with which the emperor spoke was impressive and inspiring.
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From the moment Napoleon crossed the frontier Alexander proclaimed the national character of the war. After the line of defence on the river Dvina was breached and the French approached Smolensk and the borders of Great Russia, this call was redoubled. In early August Barclay de Tolly wrote to the governor of Smolensk, Baron Casimir von Asch, that he knew that the loyal population of the province would rise up to defend ‘the Holy Faith and the frontiers of the Fatherland’, and that in the end Russia would triumph over the ‘perfidious’ French as it had in the past over the Tatars.

In the name of the Fatherland call upon the population of all areas close to the enemy to take up arms and attack isolated enemy units, wherever they are seen. In addition I have myself issued a special appeal to all Russians in areas occupied by the French to make sure that not a single enemy soldier can hide himself from our vengeance for the insults committed against our religion and our Fatherland, and when their army has been defeated by our troops then the fleeing enemy must everywhere meet ruin and death at the hands of the population.
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When Alexander left the army on 19 July and set off to Moscow to mobilize the home front for war, his immediate priority was to create a militia as a second line of defence against the invaders. Aleksandr Shishkov drafted the imperial manifesto appealing for the support of all estates of the realm for the new militia. The manifesto harked back to the so-called Time of Troubles exactly two hundred years before, when Russian society had risen up against an attempt to put a Polish prince on the throne and had ended a period of Russian powerlessness and humiliation by electing the first Romanov tsar and rebuilding a strong state.

The enemy has crossed our frontiers and is continuing to carry his arms into Russia, seeking to shake the foundations of this great power by his might and his seductions…With slyness in his heart and flattery on his tongue he brings us ever-lasting chains and fetters…We now appeal to all our loyal subjects, to all estates and conditions both spiritual and temporal, to rise up with us in a united and universal stand against the enemy’s schemes and endeavours.

After appealing to the nobility – ‘at all times the saviours of the Fatherland’ – and the clergy, the manifesto turned to the Russian people. ‘Brave descendants of courageous Slavs! You always smashed the teeth of the lions and tigers who sought to attack you. Let everyone unite: with the Cross in your hearts and weapons in your hands no human force will defeat you.’
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In the Soviet era it was an article of faith for Russian historians that the ‘patriotic masses’ were the key to resistance against Napoleon’s invasion. By far the greatest contribution of the ‘masses’ – which in this era really meant the peasantry – to the Russian war effort was their service in the armed forces and the militia. From 1812 to 1814 roughly one million men were drafted, more than two-thirds of them into the regular army. No peasant volunteered for the army. In the first place, it would have taken a saintly degree of patriotism to volunteer for twenty-five years’ service with minimal prospects of promotion to senior NCO, let alone into the officer corps. In any case peasants were not allowed to volunteer. Their bodies belonged to the state and to the landlords, not to themselves.

Nor were peasants allowed to volunteer for the militia. The latter was formed only from privately owned serfs, not from the state peasantry. It was entirely up to the landlord which peasants were assigned to serve. In principle, service in the militia was a less awful prospect than service in the regular army because the emperor had promised that militiamen would be released at the end of the war. The promise had to be renewed on many occasions and the militiamen were allowed to keep their beards and to dress in everyday peasant clothes, in order to underline the point that they were not soldiers. Nevertheless, no one could easily forget that at the end of the 1806–7 war the great majority of militiamen had in fact been transferred to the regular army.

In March 1813 John Quincy Adams was told by his landlord that none of the Petersburg militia would ever return home. Many had already perished. ‘The rest have been, or will be, incorporated in the regiments [i.e. of the regular army]. Not one of them will ever come back.’ In fact this was too pessimistic. Alexander kept his promise and the militia was disbanded and the men sent home at the end of the war. Losses had been immense, however, above all due to disease, exhaustion and the sheer shock of wartime military service for many peasants. Of the more than 13,000 men mobilized into the Tver militia in 1812, for example, only 4,200 returned home in 1814 and this was by no means exceptional.
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In Soviet times great stress was also laid on so-called ‘partisan warfare’ in 1812. The partisans of the Napoleonic era were portrayed as the ancestors of the partisan movement behind German lines in 1941–5 and as key heroes of a ‘people’s war’. The incautious Western reader thereby gets the impression that something akin to the French
maquis
played a major role in harrying Napoleon’s communications in 1812. In fact this is to misunderstand the meaning of the word ‘partisan’ in the Napoleonic era. The Russian partisan units which struck deep into the French rear in 1812 were commanded by officers of the regular army. The core of these units were usually squadrons of regular light cavalry detached from the main Russian armies. Around them were grouped Cossack regiments. Sometimes armed civilians joined these detachments but the most important role of the civilian population was to provide local guides and intelligence on French movements and whereabouts. Partisan raids began even before Napoleon advanced beyond Smolensk and they were to continue in 1813–14. In strategic terms the most important partisan raids actually occurred in early 1813. Led most famously by Aleksandr Chernyshev, these penetrated deep into Prussia and played a major role in bringing Prussia into the Russian camp.
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A much more genuine ‘people’s war’ was waged by the peasantry of provinces close to Napoleon’s line of advance in 1812. When the French army occupied Moscow it was forced to send out ever larger foraging parties to secure food and, above all, fodder for the horses. The resistance these parties encountered in the villages was a major nuisance to Napoleon and rammed home the point that if he tried to sit in Moscow through the winter his army would be without horses and thereby immobilized when the 1813 campaign began. Much of this peasant resistance was not completely spontaneous. The local noble militia commanders and officials organized cordons of ‘home guards’ to beat off French foraging parties and marauders. But in many cases the peasants organized resistance by themselves.

There are numerous reports of peasant ambushes of foraging parties, some of which developed into running battles that lasted a number of days. In early November 1812 Kutuzov reported to Alexander that in the great majority of cases the peasants of Moscow and Kaluga provinces had rejected all overtures from the French, had hidden their families and children in the forests, and had then defended their villages against foraging parties. ‘Quite often even the women’ had helped to trap and destroy the enemy. There is no reason to doubt accounts that the Russian peasants were infuriated by the way in which the French turned churches into stables, storehouses and dormitories. Even more obvious is the elemental small-scale patriotism involved in defending one’s home and family against alien plunderers.
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As regards spontaneous action by the peasantry, however, the most important issue was not what the masses did but what they did not do. The government’s appeals to the population, with their references to enemy slyness and seduction, reflect the elite’s worries about potential peasant insurrection. In fact this did not occur. In part this was because Napoleon did not try to launch a peasant war against serfdom. Until the French army reached Smolensk this would have been unthinkable because in Lithuania and most of Belorussia the landlords were Polish and therefore Napoleon’s potential allies. Beyond Smolensk, the French might have tried to incite insurrection but they only stayed in Great Russia for two months and in any case Napoleon’s strategy was to defeat the Russian army and then agree peace terms with Alexander. By the time he realized that the Russian emperor would not negotiate it was far too late to adopt an alternative strategy. In any case, though an appeal to the peasantry to throw off serfdom might well have increased the chaos in the Moscow area, the behaviour of Napoleon’s army made it unthinkable that Russian peasants would trust him or look to him for leadership. In the Russian heartland there were no alternative indigenous potential leaders or shapers of social revolution.

On the other hand, even without Napoleon’s incitement there was a good deal of anarchy in the Moscow region in the autumn of 1812. There were three times more peasant disturbances than in an average pre-war year and most of these disturbances occurred in the areas close to military operations, where the state’s authority had been weakened. The effects of shaken authority were apparent to all. One week after the fall of Moscow Prince Dmitrii Volkonsky recorded in his diary that a drunken NCO had insulted him in an inn, which was not at all a normal experience for a Russian lieutenant-general. He added, ‘The people are ready for disturbances, assuming that everyone in authority has fled in the face of the enemy.’ In some cases these ‘disturbances’ were serious, though always very localized, and they required the detachment of small regular units from the field army.
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The worst peasant disturbances occurred in and around Vitebsk province, which was the area of operations of Peter Wittgenstein’s First Corps. A number of landowners were murdered or assaulted in the summer and autumn of 1812, sometimes by crowds of 300 peasants or more. On one notorious occasion a troop of forty dragoons was routed by the rioters, two dragoons were killed, twelve taken prisoner and their officer badly beaten up. The civil authorities could not cope with this level of trouble and appealed to Wittgenstein for help. In the short run he refused, saying that he had too few cavalry and only one regiment of Cossacks. These had to concentrate on the autumn counter-offensive to drive the French out of Polotsk. Wittgenstein added that the disturbances had been caused by the French incursion into the region and would quickly cease once the enemy was ejected, which in fact occurred soon after.
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In time, however, Wittgenstein was able, for example, to deploy a squadron of Bashkirs on one particularly troublesome estate. This underlines a general point. In some areas close to the war authority briefly tottered, though it never collapsed in any large area unoccupied by the French. But the Russian Empire was enormous and the government could draw on resources from regions untouched by crisis. On 21 November, for example, Alexander wrote to the war minister, Prince Aleksei Gorchakov, that there were no fewer than twenty-nine irregular cavalry regiments, twenty of them Bashkir, en route from the Urals and western Siberia. These might often be of limited use against the French but they were more than adequate to overawe the peasants of Vitebsk.
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