Dominic lieven russia against napoleon the t ace (v5 0)

For my courageous wife, Mikiko, and in memory of the regiments of the Imperial Russian Army whofought, suffered and triumphed in the great war of 1812–14... 2 Russia as a Great Power3 Th

Russia Against Napoleon

DOMINIC LIEVEN

Russia Against Napoleon

The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace

VIKING

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

1 Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815—Campaigns—Russia 2 Russia—History—Alexander I, 1801–

1825 3 Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828–1910 Voina i mir I Title

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For my courageous wife, Mikiko, and in memory of the regiments of the Imperial Russian Army who

fought, suffered and triumphed in the great war of 1812–14

2 Russia as a Great Power

3 The Russo-French Alliance

4 Preparing for War

5 The Retreat

6 Borodino and the Fall of Moscow

7 The Home Front in 1812

8 The Advance from Moscow

9 1813: The Spring Campaign

10 Rebuilding the Army

11 Europe’s Fate in the Balance

12 The Battle of Leipzig

13 The Invasion of France

14 The Fall of Napoleon

Additional Reading in English

Alexander I

Mikhail Barclay de Tolly

Mikhail Kutuzov

Levin von Bennigsen

Peter von Wittgenstein

Karl von Toll

Johann von Diebitsch

Aleksei Gorchakov

Dmitrii Lobanov-Rostovsky

Georg Kankrin

Andrei Kologrivov

Private: Preobrazhensky Guards Regiment

Private: Finland Guards Regiment

Private: Riazan Infantry Regiment

Lieutenant: field artillery of the line – heavy battery

Private: Ekaterinoslav Cuirassier Regiment

Lieutenant: Guards Dragoon Regiment

Private: Sumi Hussar Regiment

Private: Lithuania Lancer Regiment

Napoleon awards the Légion d’honneur to Private Lazarev at Tilsit

Borodino: the Raevsky Redoubt after the battle

Spring 1813: the Cossacks in Hamburg

Fère-Champenoise: the Cossack Life Guard Regiment attacks the French infantry

Picture credits:

George Dawe painting, Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images

Christoph von Lieven: British Library

Aleksei Arakcheev: British Library

Alexandre de Langeron and Fabian von der Osten-Sacken: British Library

Andrei Kologrivov: British Library

Albrecht Adam sketch: AKG Images

V Bezotosny

Don Cossack Life Guard Club/Courbevoie

1 The Campaign of 1812

2 The Campaign of Autumn 1813

3 Europe in May 1812

4 The Smolensk Region

5 The Borodino Battlefield

6 The Crossing of the Berezina

7 The Campaign of Spring 1813

8 The Battle of Bautzen

9 The Battle of the Katzbach

10 August 1813: The Dresden Campaign

11 The Battle of Kulm

12 The Leipzig Campaign

13 The Battle of Leipzig

14 North-Eastern France

15 The Paris Region

So many people and institutions helped me to research and write this book that in normalcircumstances it would be difficult to know where to start with my thanks But the help of oneinstitution, the Leverhulme Trust, was so fundamental that beyond question it must come first In 2006

I was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, which left me free to work on my book forthe next two years and also funded most of my research in the Russian archives I owe a huge amount

to the generous support of the Trust Professors Paul Bushkovitch, William Fuller and GeoffreyHosking supported my application for the fellowship, and to them too I owe many thanks

In the summer of 2006 I had a two-month fellowship from the British Academy which enabled

me to work in the Slavic Library in Helsinki During these two months I was able to read all theregimental histories of Russian units which participated in the Napoleonic Wars I also read or atleast copied all the journal articles published in Russia before 1917 which were relevant to my topic.For any historian of imperial Russia the Helsinki Library is a unique asset, made all the better by thefriendly and efficient help of its staff, led by Irina Lukka My deep thanks are owed not just to Irinabut also to Ulla Tillander, who helped so much to organize my expedition and make it pleasant.Richard Stites and the community of historians working in the Library were also very kind to me

One part of the Russian State Military Historical Archive’s (RGVIA) holdings on theNapoleonic Wars was microfilmed shortly before I began my research This is Fond 846, the so-called Voenno-uchenyi Arkhiv (VUA) As anyone looking at my references will see, it containspriceless information for my book The Librarian of the LSE Library (BLPES), Jean Sykes, and theLibrary’s main Russian specialist, Graham Camfield, acquired this immensely valuable collection,and left me for ever in their debt

Even so, the main archival sources for my book had to come from holdings in the Russian StateMilitary Historical Archive (RGVIA) in Moscow other than the VUA Above all these were thepapers of the wartime recruit levies (Fond 1), most of the materials relating to the feeding, equipmentand arming of the field armies (Fond 103), the documents of the Reserve Army (Fond 125), and theimmensely useful personnel records of Russian regiments (Fond 489) Thanks to Tatiana IurevnaBurmistrova and the staff of RGVIA, I was able to get through all the materials I needed during my sixresearch trips to Moscow

I would never have been able to do so, however, without the help of Vasili Kashirin Myresearch was complicated by family needs and by the fact that for part of this time the archive closedfor repairs, sometimes with minimal notice Without Vasili’s help in finding materials and ensuringthat I received them this book would be much weaker than it is More than any other individual, hemade an enormous contribution to my research A number of archivists also deserve my specialthanks, and not least Aleksandr Kapitonov Professor Apollon Davidson and his wife Liudmillakindly put me up in Moscow on a number of occasions and coped with my grumpiness whensomething went wrong with the archive

I owe a big debt to the friends who took me to battlefields Viktor Bezotosnyi showed me thefield at Maloiaroslavets, and was also a constant source of advice, information and friendship PaulSimmons and Vasili Kashirin spent a memorable day at Borodino with me Dominic Herbestreit and

Christin Pilz took me around the battlefields of Leipzig and also drove me to Kulm, now in the CzechRepublic Even more heroic was my sister, Professor Elena Lieven, who drove me deep into ruralPoland to the battlefield of the Katzbach Our expedition was helped hugely by Alexandra Porada,who helped us negotiate the area.

My agent, Natasha Fairweather, has been a key ally and so have my publishers, Simon Winderand Wendy Wolf, as well as Alice Dawson and Richard Duguid of Penguin Elizabeth Stratford was

an exceptionally efficient copy-editor I have wanted to write this book since childhood but theyencouraged me to do so I think that the initial spur to write the book in time for the bicentenary in

2012 came, however, from my colleague, Professor James Hughes

Among others at LSE who helped me enormously, Sue Starkey stands out She coped with myfrequent hysteria when confronted by computers, photocopiers and other technological challenges.Her colleagues in the Government Department’s General Office (Jill Stuart, Cerys Jones, MadeleineBothe, Hiszah Tariq) also helped me and calmed me down My colleague, Professor Janet Hartley,very kindly read the text for me and suggested changes So too did our students, Conor Riffle andMegan Tulac In my first twenty-four years at LSE I kept as far from the School’s management aspossible While working on this book, however, I was initially head of department and subsequently amember of LSE’s governing council That gave me some insight into the intelligent, efficient andgood-humoured manner in which the School was run by (Sir) Howard Davies, its director Tony(Lord) Grabiner, chairman of the Board of Governors, showed not just wisdom but greatunselfishness, devoting an immense amount of his time to unpaid service to the School to a degree thatfew members of the academic community realize

I must also thank Professor Patrick O’Brien for his advice on war, finance and economic issues,and Alexis de Tiesenhausen for his help and advice as regards illustrations

For the first eighteen months of my research I lived mostly off the excellent holdings of theBritish Library and owed much to the help of its staff After joining the London Library halfwaythrough my research, I discovered just how splendid a resource it is for scholars in general andhistorians of imperial Russia in particular

I published an article outlining the theme and purpose of this book in Kritika in spring 2006 and

would like to thank the editors of the journal and readers of the piece for their useful criticism andadvice

My family – Mikiko, Aleka, Max and Tolly – suffered during my research and writing of thebook but helped to keep me going

A Note on the Text

In the era covered by this book Russia ran on the Julian calendar, which in the nineteenth century wastwelve days behind the Gregorian calendar used in most of the rest of Europe The events covered bythis book occurred partly in Russia and partly abroad To avoid confusion, I have used the Gregorian– i.e European – calendar throughout the text Documents are cited in the notes in their original formand when they have dates from the Julian calendar the letters OS (i.e Old Style) appear after them inbrackets

I have used a modified version of the Library of Congress system for transliterating words fromRussian To avoid bewildering anglophone readers I have not included Russian hard and soft signs,

accents or stress signs in names of people and places in the text A point to note is that the Russian e

is usually pronounced ye Sometimes, however, the e is accented and stressed, appearing in Russian

as é In this case it is generally pronounced as yo, though after some consonants as just o Among

words frequently found in this book, for example, are Petr (i.e Peter) which is pronounced Pyotr,Potemkin which is pronounced Patyomkin and the Semenovsky Guards Regiment, which ispronounced Semyonovsky The surname of Aleksandr Chernyshev, who figures prominently in thisstory, sounds like Chernyshoff in English Very many Russian surnames end like an adjective in the

letters -ii but in deference to English custom I use the letter -y Thus the reader will come across, for

example, Petr Volkonsky, who served as Alexander’s chief of staff, not the grammatically morecorrect Volkonskii

When faced with surnames of non-Russian origin I have tried – not always successfully – torender them in their original Latin version My own name thereby emerges unscathed as Lieven ratherthan depressed and reduced as Liven As regards Christian names I also transliterate for Russians but

in general use Western versions for Germans, Frenchmen and other Europeans So Alexander’s chief

of staff is called Petr Volkonsky but General von der Pahlen is rendered as Peter, in deference to hisBaltic German origins No system is perfect in this respect, not least because members of the Russianelite of this era sometimes spelt their own names quite differently according to mood and to thelanguage in which they were writing

Where an Anglicized version of a town’s name is in common use, I have used it So Moscowrather than Moskva burns down in this book But other towns in the Russian Empire are usuallyrendered in the Russian version, unless the German or Polish version is more familiar to Englishreaders Towns in the Habsburg Empire and Germany are usually given their German version of aname This is to simplify the lives of baffled readers trying to follow the movements of armies in textsand maps, though when any doubts might exist alternative versions of place names are given inbrackets

The names of Russian regiments can also be a problem Above all this boils down to whether or

not to use the adjectival version (i.e ending in -skii) as in the Russian I prefer Moscow Regiment –

to take one example – rather than Moskovskii Regiment but I make some exceptions for the Guards.The senior Guards infantry regiments, for example, were named after obscure villages outsideMoscow It makes far more sense to render them in their habitual adjectival form: in other wordsPreobrazhensky Guards rather than Preobrazhenskoe Where confusion might occur the alternative

variants of the regiment’s name are placed in brackets: so, Lithuania (Litovsky) Guards I have alsoaccepted tradition in using the habitual French version – Chevaliers Gardes – rather than the RussianKavalergardsky for this regiment and by referring to the Cossack Life Guards.

Russia Against Napoleon

1 Introduction

Russia’s defeat of Napoleon is one of the most dramatic stories in European history It has manytwists and turns Not just in 1812 but also for much of 1813 the outcome remained very uncertain withmost of the odds seemingly in Napoleon’s favour His personal history in these years is a tale ofhubris and nemesis There is a rich supporting cast of fascinating personalities who enliven the storyand with whom it is often easy to empathize The story contains two of the greatest battles inEuropean history, Leipzig and Borodino, and many other episodes of great fascination for the militaryhistorian It also tells one much about European society, culture and politics in that era From the

Russian perspective the story has that crucial element, a happy ending Napoleon’s first Grande Armée was destroyed in Russia in 1812 His second was defeated on the battlefields of Germany in

1813 In the longest campaign in European history, the Russian army pursued the French all the wayfrom Moscow to Paris and led the victorious coalition into the enemy capital on 31 March 1814

For very many years I have wanted to tell this story At one level that is the simple purpose ofthis book But I am an old-fashioned historian who likes his stories to be true, or at least as close tothe truth as an honest, knowledgeable and meticulous study of the available evidence allows Manyyears ago I came to the conclusion that the story as told in Western Europe and North America wasvery far from the truth Hearing an untrue tale told over and over again annoyed me Another purpose

of this book is therefore to tell the story of how and why Russia defeated Napoleon in what seems to

me to be a more truthful way.1

It is not surprising that what happened in 1812–14 is usually distorted in British, French andAmerican books Popular works on the Napoleonic era necessarily follow a rather set pattern InBritain, for example, the bookshelves groan under the weight of works on Nelson and Trafalgar, orWellington and Waterloo These are the heroic narratives and the icons of British national identity.Napoleon and his army have also retained their fascination for the English-as well as French-speaking public In any case, most authors cannot be expected to read many languages or consultarchives in a range of countries They expect to draw their information from the research ofspecialists As regards Russia’s role in the defeat of Napoleon, this research and these specialists donot exist No Western professor has ever written a book on the Russian war effort against Napoleon.The surest way to make yourself unappointable in any British, let alone American, university is to saythat you wish to study the history of battles, diplomacy and kings.2

In many areas of military history the gap left by the universities is filled by army staff colleges.There are some excellent books by military specialists – often but not always serving officers – onthe Napoleonic era but almost none of this work covers Russia.3 One reason why military specialistshave avoided Russia is that the military archives have only become accessible to foreign researcherssince 1991 More important, however, has been the belief that the French and Prussian armies of theNapoleonic era are much more worth studying, because they appear more modern In the case ofNapoleon, one had the timeless lessons to be learned from military genius, but the French army wasalso seen as pioneering aspects of modern warfare such as the all-arms division and corps In the

Prussian case one had Clausewitz, generally seen as the greatest of all thinkers on modern war Inaddition, Prussia was believed to have created two other key elements of military modernity in thisera: the first modern general staff and a highly effective and motivated mass conscript army Bycontrast, there seemed little point in struggling to learn Russian and scrounge for information outsidethe archives in order to study an army that was still unequivocally Old Regime The result is that theRussian side of the story is ignored or misinterpreted, with historians largely seeing Russia throughthe prism of French- or German-language sources.

As regards the French sources,4 there are obvious dangers of interpreting any army or campaignlargely through enemy eyes Of course French officers usually wrote reports or memoirs to winpromotion, boost their egos, achieve glory or justify their actions No one who looks at the uniforms

of the era can expect to find much modesty or self-effacement from the men who wore them On thecontrary, aggressive and boastful self-promotion often flourished in the armies of both Napoleon andhis enemies If the French were more boastful than most of the others, they had some reason to be,since their army was in most respects the best in Europe until 1812 When facing the Russians, theirnormal sense of superiority was sometimes heightened by an almost colonial scorn for the irrationalbarbarians of Europe’s borderlands Napoleon himself set the tone by finding few words of praise forany Russian troops other than Cossacks This to some extent perhaps reflected a French variation onthe theme of exoticism and Orientalism Blaming defeat on the Cossacks or the weather was alsouseful Since the French army had no Cossacks and the weather was an ‘unfair’ act of God, no Frenchofficer need fear that by invoking these sources of disaster he was questioning his own superiorvirility or professional skill The way in which the English-language literature often uncriticallyrepeats French accounts is likely to drive to distraction anyone who has studied the Russian sources

or even just walked over the battlefields in question

The German-language sources are much more mixed In 1812–14 Germans fought both with andagainst Russia Germans who fought with Russia in 1812 were either ethnic German subjects of thetsar or officers who had left their own armies in order to fight against Napoleon There are actually anumber of German-language memoirs which tell one a great deal about the Russian army and theRussian war effort in 1812 For example, of all the Russian generals’ memoirs, probably the best arethose of Prince Eugen of Württemberg, which are written in German.5 Even so, they are very littleused by English-language authors The same is true of a number of other valuable memoirs written inGerman, for the most part by men who were Alexander’s subjects.6 By far the most frequently citedsource is Clausewitz, both because of his fame and because his history of the 1812 campaign istranslated into English.7

Clausewitz’s history is extremely interesting and useful but one does nevertheless need toremember the context in which it was written Under Frederick the Great the Prussian army had beenconsidered the best in Europe Foreign officers studied it as a model But in 1806 it was not justdefeated but humiliated, with rearguards and garrisons sometimes disintegrating and surrendering inthe face of much smaller enemy forces When Frederick William III sided with Napoleon in 1812 thehumiliation increased, especially among those hyper-patriotic officers who like Clausewitz resignedtheir commissions and entered the Russian service The xenophobic and faction-ridden Russian army

of 1812 was a deeply frustrating place to be for a foreign officer such as Clausewitz who spoke noRussian and had inevitable difficulties in understanding the army and society he had joined Whenreading Clausewitz I sometimes think of parallels with an intelligent staff officer in the Free Frenchforces in London in 1940–44 Such an officer might have written a fascinating corrective to standard

accounts of the British war effort but it would be surprising if we were to understand the conflictthrough his eyes alone.8

Studies of the 1812 campaign in English mostly concentrate on Napoleon’s mistakes, on theproblems created for the French by Russia’s geography and climate, and on the horror but also theheroism in evidence in Napoleon’s army during the retreat from Moscow The year 1813 traditionallybelongs to German authors celebrating the resurgence of Prussia and the triumph of Germanpatriotism Some of the Prussian general staff historians, and above all Rudolph von Friederich, areexcellent.9 But of course most of the memoirs and many of the histories put forward a Prussian view

of events, which subsequently influenced British and American authors So too do the views of theAustrian official history, not written until just before 1914, some volumes of which have a distinctlyanti-Russian tinge.10 If anything, the Russian angle on events gets even less attention or sympathywhen it comes to the 1814 campaign Military historians enthuse about Napoleon’s reinvigoratedgenius after his disappointing performance in 1813 Historians of diplomacy and internationalrelations on the other hand focus on Metternich and Castlereagh as the creators of a stable and orderlyEuropean system Sometimes this literature has a Cold War feel to it, celebrating the alliance ofBritish and German statesmanship to secure Europe against a threat of Russian hegemony.11

Of course national bias in the writing of history exists in all countries and especially when itcomes to writing about war War is generally the best source of heroic nationalist myths.12 TheNapoleonic Wars occurred at the dawn of modern European nationalism It was exactly at this timethat many of the ideas behind modern nationalism were first expressed Shortly afterwards theIndustrial Revolution would create cities, mass literacy and all the other aspects of modern societywhich helped nationalism to flourish Traditionally, for example, the British grabbed Waterloo forthemselves and it is only very recently that the decisive Prussian contribution to victory has beenrecognized in the English-language literature.13 In this context it is not at all surprising that thePrussians elbowed Russia aside when it came to interpretations of 1813 or that French historians ofthe period have gloried in the exploits of Napoleon and his army, without paying too much attention towhat enemy accounts and foreign historians had to say

One crucial area of Napoleonic warfare has attracted too little attention from historians of everynationality This is logistics, in other words the equipment and feeding of the armies Commissariatofficers had little status in any of the rival armies and societies Their efforts have won little attentionfrom historians This is unfortunate because their role was often crucial Napoleon destroyed his army

in 1812 in large part because of logistical failures By contrast, one of the key triumphs of the Russianwar effort was its success in feeding and supplying more than half a million troops outside Russia’sborders in 1813–14 How this was done in a European continent which in those days only had twocities with populations of more than 500,000 is a key part of the present book The contrast with theSeven Years War (1756–63), when logistics helped to cripple the Russian military effort, is verymuch to the point.14

In many ways the greatest hero of the Russian war effort in 1812–14 was not a human being butthe horse To some extent this was true of all European land warfare at that time The horse fulfilledthe present-day functions of the tank, the lorry, the aeroplane and motorized artillery It was in otherwords the weapon of shock, pursuit, reconnaissance, transport and mobile firepower The horse was

a crucial – perhaps even the single most decisive – factor in Russia’s defeat of Napoleon Theenormous superiority of the Russian light cavalry played a key role in denying food or rest toNapoleon’s army in the retreat from Moscow and thereby destroying it In 1812 Napoleon lost not just

almost all the men but virtually all the horses with which he had invaded Russia In 1813 he couldand did replace the men but finding new horses proved a far more difficult and in the end disastrousproblem Above all it was lack of cavalry which stopped Napoleon winning decisively in the spring

1813 campaign and persuaded him to agree to the fatal two-month summer armistice, whichcontributed so much to his ultimate defeat The final allied offensive in 1814 which led to the fall ofParis and Napoleon’s overthrow was sparked off by the Russian light cavalry’s interception of secretFrench dispatches revealing all of the emperor’s plans and his capital’s vulnerability This was afitting end to two years of warfare in which the Russian light cavalry had been superior from the startand totally dominant after September 1812 But this dominance was not an act of God or nature Thehistorian needs to study the Russian horse industry and how it was mobilized by the government in1812–14 Also crucial is a grasp of how the Russians managed, preserved and reinforced theircavalry regiments during these campaigns Again, this is a key part of the present book.15

Naturally, humans in general and nationalist historians in particular were interested in soldiers’heroics on the battlefield, not in how their stomachs were filled or their horses kept healthy This wasjust as true in Russia as elsewhere Like the other great powers, Russia mined the Napoleonic era fornational myths The official tsarist myth of 1812 was that the Russian people had united around thethrone and under the leadership of the nobility to destroy the invader of the country’s sacred soil.There was if anything rather more truth to this Russian myth than to its Prusso-German equivalent,which stated that the Prussian nation had sprung to arms in 1813 to liberate Germany after FrederickWilliam III’s appeal ‘To My People’

One entirely true reason why Russia defeated Napoleon was that many able young officers werepromoted on merit to key positions during the war Among the Russian leaders, AleksandrChernyshev and Johann von Diebitsch became lieutenant-generals aged 28, and Mikhail Vorontsovaged 30 They were just the tip of the iceberg Count Karl von Nesselrode was only 28 when he tookcontrol of Russian espionage in Paris in 1808 He served subsequently as Alexander’s chiefdiplomatic adviser in 1813–14 Even the older generation of military leaders was often not that old:Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky, who served as Alexander’s chief of staff, was only 38 when the warended These men were to dominate Russia’s army and government for many subsequent decades Theofficial histories of the war by Dmitrii Buturlin and Aleksandr Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky were verycareful not to offend these grandees There are British parallels The Duke of Wellington lived foralmost four decades after Waterloo and was in a position to make his own view on the battle almostcanonical in Britain.16

There were, however, important differences between Wellington and the Russian leaders.Although the duke had many political enemies in the 1820s and 1830s, by the time he died he was anational icon The same was far from true of the Russian generals who lived as long as him Just afterAlexander I’s death in 1825 a group of officers, the so-called Decembrists, attempted to overthrowthe absolute monarchy and install a constitutional regime or even a republic Among them wereofficers such as Mikhail Orlov and Prince Serge Volkonsky who had distinguished themselves in thewars The coup was crushed Key heroes of the wars such as Aleksandr Chernyshev, AlexanderBenckendorff and Petr Volkonsky played a part in its suppression and went on to serve as ministersunder Nicholas I well into the mid-nineteenth century

The Decembrist revolt and its suppression was the beginning of the exceptionally bitter splitbetween right and left in Russia which ended in the revolution of 1917 The violent hatred betweenthe two camps helped to poison and distort memories of 1812–14 In the Winter Palace in Petersburgthere is a fine gallery with portraits of almost all the generals from 1812–14 As a graduate student in

the Soviet Union in the 1970s I once got into a fierce argument with a young woman who was furious

at the fact that among the portraits is that of Alexander Benckendorff, who subsequently served asNicholas I’s chief of the security police My attempts to argue that Benckendorff was a war hero gotnowhere When I called him a partisan leader, which is exactly what he was for much of 1812–14,she stormed off in disgust The young student was not at all pro-Communist but she was a product ofthe Moscow radical-liberal intelligentsia For her, heroes of 1812 in general and partisans inparticular were ‘friends of the people’ and therefore by definition honorary members of her radicalpolitical camp and tradition

When it took over the 1812 myth and made it an integral part of Soviet patriotism, theCommunist regime to a great extent set such ideas in stone The historical reality of Russia’s wareffort had to be startlingly distorted to suit official ideology in the Stalinist era Alexander I had to bemarginalized and vilified, and the war’s international context distorted; Kutuzov was elevated to thelevel of Napoleon or higher, while his aristocratic origins and court connections (together with those

of Prince Petr Bagration) had to be overlooked; the significance of mass resistance to Napoleon had

to be exaggerated and occasional resistance to landlords and government officials somehowinterpreted as constructive elements in the people’s war against both domestic tyranny and the French.Official norms of this sort crippled Russian scholarship on the Napoleonic era for a time and haveleft a mark on how many ordinary Russians of the older generation think about 1812–14.Contemporary Russian historians have mercifully long since escaped the Stalinist myths about theNapoleonic era, however.17

Nevertheless, for all its crude distortions, the Soviet-era official interpretation of theNapoleonic Wars still in many ways remained true to the spirit of Leo Tolstoy, who was by far themost important nineteenth-century mythmaker as regards his impact on Russian (and foreign)understanding of Russia’s role in the Napoleonic era Tolstoy depicts elemental Russian patriotism asuniting in defence of national soil He paints Kutuzov as the embodiment of Russian patriotism andwisdom, contrasting him with the idiocy of so-called professional military experts, whom he sees asGermans and pedants His conception of history in any case leaves little room for skilful leadership

or even for the attempt to direct events in rational fashion Instead, he celebrates the moral strength,courage and patriotism of ordinary Russians Perhaps most important in the context of the present

book, Tolstoy ends his novel War and Peace in December 1812 with the war only half over and the

greatest challenges still to come The long, bitter but ultimately triumphant road that led from Vilna inDecember 1812 to Paris in March 1814 plays no part in his work, just as it was entirely marginalized

in the Soviet patriotic canon and in contemporary Russian folk memory For every one publication inRussian on 1813–14 there are probably more than one hundred on 1812 The most recent attempt towrite a grand history of 1812–14 which is both popular and scholarly devotes 490 pages to 1812 and

50 to the longer and more complicated campaigns of the two following years.18

The popular or ‘Tolstoyan’ Russian interpretation of the war fits rather well with foreignaccounts that play down the role of Russia’s army and government in the victory over Napoleon.Napoleon himself was much inclined to blame geography, the climate and chance; this absolved himfrom responsibility for the catastrophe Historians usually add Napoleon’s miscalculations andblunders to the equation but many of them are happy to go along with Tolstoy’s implied conclusionthat the Russian leadership had little control over events and that Russian ‘strategy’ was acombination of improvisation and accident Inevitably too, Russian lack of interest in 1813–14 leftthe field free for historians of other nations who were happy to tell the story of these years withRussia’s role marginalized