by Alan Palmer
And so, in a sense, it was. For on the day following the diplomatic reception at the Tuileries, Napoleon ordered Maret to bring him all the papers on Franco-Russian relations over the previous four years.41 Together the two men pored over the files of the Polish problem and the blockade, the blueprints for partitioning Turkey, and the claims of compensation for Oldenburg. It was a depressing task. That evening Napoleon held a Council of State. There could be no Russian campaign now in 1811, for it was already too late in the year; but the winter months must be used for preparation and for making certain of Austrian and Prussian co-operation. Although as yet Napoleon would take no final decision over whether or not to march to the East, work was beginning already on planning the greatest military enterprise of his career, an invasion of the endless Russian plains.
Portents and Military Plans
In St Petersburg the autumn of 1811, like the summer which had preceded it, was pleasantly warm and free from dangerous alarms. Society was more interested in celebrating victories against the Turks than in rumours of tension with the French, although fairly accurate reports of Napoleon’s tirade were circulating before the middle of September. The principal occasion that month in the Russian capital was the solemn consecration of the massive new basilica on the Nevsky Prospect, dedicated to Our Lady of Kazan.42 For over ten years craftsmen and labourers had been toiling on the neo-classical cathedral, with its arc of 136 Corinthian columns, monoliths of Finnish granite bringing to Alexander’s capital the dignified grandeur of St Peter’s in Rome; and the Tsar and all the members of the Imperial family were present at the consecration on 27 September, the tenth anniversary of Alexander’s coronation. The service, which was preceded by a brief parade of troops, lasted for three and a half hours; and Alexander, together with the two Empresses and the Grand Duke Constantine, followed the Metropolitan Ambrose in procession as the sacred ikon of the Virgin was borne out of the richly decorated central portal and around the great square, with its crescented colonnade. There was an ‘immense crowd’ of worshippers and onlookers. Not for many years had the people of St Petersburg witnessed so solemn a ceremony symbolizing the inter-dependence of Church and State, for this essential bond of Tsardom was customarily emphasized in Moscow rather than in the newer capital. To some it seemed, both at the time and later, that the act of consecration served Alexander as a moment of re-dedication and renewal, linking the pledges he had given at his crowning in Moscow with the mounting challenge from across the frontier. For the rest of the century, the Kazan Cathedral remained associated in people’s minds with the high drama of its early years, so that it became in time a shrine for the heroes of the Napoleonic wars.
The final quarter of this year, 1811, was indeed heavy with portent. Everywhere in Europe, from Moscow to Glasgow and south as far as Lisbon, simple souls watched a comet blaze in the heavens and turned, in fear, to their devotions. Some, especially in St Petersburg, believed they saw two comets at the same time. Alexander, ‘though no astronomer’ (as he admitted), was fascinated; and in the second week of December he discussed the phenomenon both with Lauriston and with John Quincy Adams.43 The Tsar was inclined to mock the superstitious who seemed so willingly to read disaster in the night skies, suggesting light-heartedly in conversation that if there were really two comets (as he himself believed) then ‘their mischief will operate mutually against each other’ and so offset any evil they might foreshadow. But his subjects were not so ready to dismiss these manifestations with a private joke; and the enormous comet, with its ‘white radiance and long uplifted tail’ passed into folk legend – and ultimately into the prose of Leo Tolstoy.44
Alexander had no need of such metaphysical omens to convince him his Empire was approaching a climacteric in its history. He was impressed by sober warnings from Nesselrode in October and, even more, by noting movements of French troops as reported each fortnight in the ‘Summary of the Situation’, a highly confidential document which a clerk in the Department of War Administration in Paris regularly sold to Chernyshev until his discovery and arrest in February 1812.45 Moreover in November Kurakin, once such a patron of the French alliance, confirmed the war preparations which Nesselrode and Chernyshev had already reported: ‘The time has passed’, Kurakin wrote, ‘when we could delude ourselves with vain hopes. The time is fast approaching when, with courage and resolution, we must preserve our national heritage and the present limits of our frontiers.’46 Alexander took all these gloomy messages to heart. He informed Catherine in November that he remained ‘on constant guard’ in St Petersburg, unable to escape for even a few days to Tver. And in the following month, on his birthday, he wrote to his sister: ‘All this devilish political business is going from bad to worse, and that infernal creature who is the curse of all the human race becomes every day more and more abominable.’47 This was the language of the Anathema once more, rather than the apologetic self-justification he had sent Catherine from Tilsit and Erfurt.
Words, however, were not enough to prepare Russia for war. Throughout the winter of 1811–12 Alexander and Rumiantsev sought to improve the Empire’s international position, combating the isolation which Napoleon had predicted to Kurakin would await the Tsar’s armies if the fate of Poland led to new campaigns. Naturally, in the first instance, Alexander continued to appeal to the Prussians and Austrians, but with only limited success: for, while a comprehensive Russo-Prussian military convention was actually drafted in St Petersburg in the third week of October, Napoleon made it clear a month later he would abolish the Kingdom of Prussia entirely unless Frederick William co-operated with Davout;48 and, though the Austrians gave verbal assurances that the Tsar need not fear more than token participation on Napoleon’s side in any campaign, Metternich could not risk losing the privileged position he had obtained among France’s clients by overt collaboration with the Russians. Prussia concluded a humiliating alliance with France on 24 February 1812 (which induced almost a quarter of the officer corps to resign their commissions) and Austria signed a far less rigid commitment with the French less than three weeks later.49 Alexander was left to win diplomatic triumphs elsewhere. In order to free his southern armies from pressure, the Tsar authorized General Kutuzov, who had succeeded Kamensky as commander on the Danubian Front in the spring of 1811, to begin peace talks with Turkish representatives at Giurgiu.50 He also found an opportunity to strengthen the northern flank of his armies by improving relations with Sweden where the Gascon-born Bernadotte wished to demonstrate his change of loyalties by opposing the spread of French influence along the southern shores of the Baltic.‡ Talks between a Swedish emissary and the Russians began in the third week of February and ended with the conclusion of a limited form of alliance, signed in St Petersburg at the beginning of April.51 It was, however, far harder for the Russians to pin down the Turks to any written undertaking, and military operations were resumed on the Danubian Front at the start of January 1812 in the vain hope of inflicting a decisive defeat on the Turks before the summer months.
In addition to all this diplomatic activity, Alexander was busy in the final weeks of 1811 with military plans for the future campaign. By now St Petersburg was rapidly becoming a refuge for statesmen and soldiers exiled from their homeland by hostility to Napoleon. Among the earliest military commanders to seek sanctuary in St Petersburg was General von Pfuehl, one of the original three joint chiefs-of-staff in the Prussian army and a specialist in the military history of ancient Greece and the Roman Republic. Pfuehl enjoyed a considerable reputation in St Petersburg society, not least because of his ability to describe the campaigns of Lysander, Hannibal and Philip of Macedon as though he had himself fought in them. When John Quincy Adams attended his first ‘great diplomatic dinner’ a month after his arrival in Russia in 1809, his neighbour drew his attention to General von Pfuehl, speaking of him with awe as ‘one of the ablest men in the world’.52 Naturally Alexander, always inclined to favour any armchair strategist with a strong German accent, was impressed by Pfuehl. When
the General suggested that the Russians should prepare an entrenched fortress between Riga and Smolensk in order to delay any invader, the Tsar gave orders for thousands of labourers to be sent to the town of Drissa on the river Dvina, where they were to construct a formidable defensive encampment which would require investment by the French before they could advance on the major cities of Russia. The plan did not appeal to Russia’s military leaders (nor to Pfuehl’s gifted compatriot and fellow exile, Colonel von Clausewitz) but it made sense to Alexander – just as Weyrother’s ideas had done on the eve of Austerlitz.53
By now, however, Alexander was sufficiently experienced not to rely exclusively on Pfuehl or any other single adviser. There was, as yet, no concept of a General Staff in Russia but, since all plans required approval from the Ministry of War, the minister himself inevitably had greater influence than any commander in the field. Hence, almost by chance, Alexander found he was giving more and more weight to the opinions of General Barclay de Tolly, a fifty-year-old Baltic baron of Scottish descent who had acquired a sound knowledge of warfare on the shores of the Black Sea and in Finland.54 Barclay’s appointment as Minister of War in the first weeks of 1810 owed something to his administrative abilities and even more to the fact that Arakcheev had thrown his fit of pique at the wrong moment. He was not, in any sense, an original thinker nor did he ever reflect the glamour of a military hero; but he was in many ways an ideal man to prepare armies for a massive campaign. Whatever his deficiencies, he possessed a sense of order and an understanding of Russia’s strategic needs, broad in geographical compass. A memorandum on the need for an all-European concept of policy which he submitted to Alexander on 3 February 1812 is repetitive and clumsily expressed, but its basic points are sound enough: peace with Turkey was desirable to relieve pressure in the South, irrespective of what terms the Sultan granted; an anti-French diversion in the Mediterranean would remove Napoleon’s troops from the vital war zone in Prussia; and a solution of the Polish problem would ease the path of the Russians in their early battles.55 Here, indeed, was a more enterprising war plan than Pfuehl had to offer.
Barclay was a sound product of the military academies, with none of the personality of Suvorov, Kutuzov or the current idol of the soldiery, Prince Bagration; but this absence of flair well suited Alexander. In many respects Barclay’s qualities complemented his own. If war came, Alexander was prepared to leave to Barclay de Tolly all the tedious problems of keeping an army in the field while he, once more a soldier Tsar in the saddle, would inspire his troops with the will to win their battles. For strangely enough, despite the traumatic recollection of Austerlitz, Alexander was still able to convince himself he was born to lead his armies to victory – provided, of course, that Barclay could supply the men, the horses and the guns of which such armies are composed, and provided too that his officers would follow him against Napoleon.
The Fall of Speransky and Alexander’s Departure for the Army
Early in the New Year Alexander left St Petersburg for a tour of inspection of border fortresses.56 Since the frost that winter was particularly severe and all Russia’s western provinces lay deep in snow, the effectiveness of the Tsar’s visit was minimal. There were ironical comments in the Petersburg salons. Speransky, who possessed an astringent tongue, could not resist making a pun on the name of that most famous champion of barrier fortresses, Marshal Vauban, and referred to the Tsar as ‘notre Veau Blanc’.57 When the joke was repeated to Alexander by mischief-makers at Court, it failed somehow to appeal to his sense of humour; and a certain coolness which had begun to mark the Tsar’s relations with his State Secretary over the preceding six months was intensified. Speransky was a little surprised to discover in February that Alexander was too busy to accord him an audience or to go through with him the papers which needed signing; but the State Secretary assumed that he was preoccupied with military affairs and, though he grumbled to his colleagues at the delay, he was not alarmed. Eventually, on the morning of Sunday, 29 March, a messenger from the Winter Palace informed Speransky that the Tsar would receive him that evening.58
When Speransky reached the anteroom of the Tsar’s study shortly after half-past eight, he found it crowded with important dignitaries awaiting an audience with the sovereign. But Speransky was summoned into Alexander’s presence ahead of everybody else. For more than two hours the others waited, puzzled by the length of what was normally a formal occasion. At last about eleven at night Speransky emerged, visibly upset, and began to put his papers into his briefcase, without a word to those around him. Suddenly the Tsar’s door opened again and Alexander came out, tears coursing down his cheeks. He embraced Speransky, declaring melodramatically, ‘Once more, Mikhail Mikhailovich, farewell’; and then he retired just as abruptly to his room. Speransky hurried home, found the Minister of Police awaiting for him with an official carriage, and departed that same night for exile at Nizhni Novgorod, the great trading centre on the Volga. At the palace Alexander instructed an attendant to inform those waiting for an audience that, to his regret, he would not be able to see any more visitors that night.59
The fall of Speransky created a sensation in Russia and abroad, as one suspects the Tsar intended when he staged it in so dramatic and mysterious a way. No one knows precisely what was said between the two men during those two hours on the Sunday evening: Speransky left no record of the conversation; and, although Alexander subsequently indicated to Novosiltsov he had urged the State Secretary to escape from St Petersburg as excited patriots were accusing him of treachery, this is clearly not the whole story. For several weeks Alexander had allowed Balashov, the Minister of Police, to trail Speransky (and had also instructed a special agent of his own to trail both Balashov and Speransky). Yet, apart from his unfortunate tendency to make injudicious verbal asides, there was little enough evidence on which to damn Speransky.§ Nor does it seem as if Alexander wished to discover anything against him, for there is no doubt he was genuinely distressed at having to dismiss a man on whom he had relied so heavily for the past four years. On that Monday morning Prince Golitsyn – one of the dignitaries denied an audience the previous evening – visited Alexander and, as an old friend, asked him why he was looking so wretched. ‘No doubt you too would lament and cry with pain if someone amputated your hand’, replied Alexander bitterly. ‘Last night they took Speransky from me, and he was my right hand.’60 On Tuesday Nesselrode, too, was received by Alexander. He found him deeply moved by what had happened and mourning the departure of someone ‘whose character he liked and whose talents he respected’. ‘Only the present exceptional circumstances could induce me to make such a sacrifice to public opinion’, Alexander declared. Nesselrode, who regarded himself as one of Speransky’s friends, commented sadly in his journal, ‘It is clear he is the victim of an intrigue’.61 And so, indeed, he was.
The agitation against Speransky, already active among conservative backwoodsmen in 1810, had grown in intensity as the foreign crisis mounted and the burden of taxation increased to keep pace with the expanding army. To his old enemies he had recently added many of the foreigners who were seeking to enter the service of Alexander, for it was difficult for them to infiltrate a system of government controlled by someone as rigid over appointments and preferment as the State Secretary. Yet his most formidable adversary remained, as ever, the Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna, who could never forgive him for insisting that her husband’s reports as Governor-General should pass through the normal departments of the administration rather than receive direct and preferential treatment from his brother-in-law on the throne. It was Catherine who forwarded to Alexander a powerfully written memorandum by the distinguished historian Karamzin, which was a plea for strong autocratic government rather than the hesitant deliberation in committee which, it was assumed, the State Secretary’s methods encouraged; and it appears to have been Catherine who, generalizing from the mood of her salon at Tver, insisted to Alexander that the sacrifice of Speransky was essential if the Tsar
wished to rally his nobility and gentry in a patriotic front of resistance to the French.62 It is significant that, on the very Sunday Speransky was dismissed, the most articulate and ambitious of the Muscovite landowners, Rostopchin, was forwarding to Alexander a petition from the patrician families of the old capital begging the Tsar to protect ‘his loyal subjects’ from the hardships of the State Secretary’s policy. The intrigue which ousted Speransky certainly had its agents in St Petersburg, but the pressure to get rid of him came above all from Moscow and Tver.63
Speransky was succeeded as State Secretary by Admiral Shishkov, against whom little was known, even at Tver. And, as though to reward Catherine and her vigilantes, Alexander agreed to appoint her nominee, Rostopchin, as Governor-General of Moscow when the post fell vacant in the spring of 1812. It must be admitted that the Tsar was reluctant to give such responsibilities to Rostopchin, for he had distrusted the man ever since the days when he had fawned on Paul at Gatchina, some twenty years ago. At first Alexander did his best to persuade Catherine to change her mind. ‘He’s no soldier’, Alexander complained, ‘and the Governor of Moscow must bear epaulettes on his shoulders’. But his sister was not to be thwarted. ‘That’, she replied grandly, ‘is a matter for the tailor’; and Alexander capitulated.64 When, however, the Grand Duchess went further still and began to press for her exiled father-in-law, Duke Peter of Oldenburg, to be entrusted with high command in the Russian army, Alexander dug in his toes. It was one thing to find room for distinguished foreign soldiers from abroad, but rather a different matter to persuade naturally xenophobic troops to accept an ageing German Prince, who happened to be a first cousin of Catherine the Great.65 Russia would venture much for Oldenburg, but not the fate of an army. Alexander’s brotherly affection stopped short of endorsing the ridiculous; and, as she came to know her father-in-law better, Catherine readily perceived Alexander was right.