by Alan Palmer
Even before the coming of the thaw the Russian capital had the air of a city preparing for war. ‘Seven or eight regiments have already marched from St Petersburg within the last three weeks for the frontiers, and others are following twice or three times each week’, wrote John Quincy Adams in his journal on 19 March.66 In Paris Kurakin continued to put forward proposals for a settlement, and the Tsar held out some hopes of a compromise in his talks with Lauriston. But privately Alexander knew he was facing the reality of war: ‘I have done everything to prevent this struggle but thus it ends’, he observed to Adams when they happened to meet walking along the quay by the Neva ten days before Speransky’s dismissal.67 Every possible solution for easing tension between the Russians and French broke down on two basic questions: the refusal of the French to permit Russia total freedom of trade by land and by sea; and the French insistence on retaining armies of occupation on Prussian territory, even as far east as the line of the Niemen. No one doubted in St Petersburg that Napoleon was preparing for a campaign on an unprecedented scale: there were reports of troops on the move northwards from Spain and Italy, of great collections of food and fodder at centres in Danzig and Königsberg, of thousands of horses moving eastwards from Holstein. At times it seemed as if Napoleon regarded the Russian operation as a preliminary to something far grander (such as a march on India), in which Alexander’s hostility was a mere matter of form, easily brushed aside by the first troops to cross the frontier: ‘You may assure the Tsar’, Napoleon told Chernyshev in the last days of February, ‘that should Fate ordain we must fight each other, I shall make war on him in a chivalrous spirit, without hate and without rancour. And if circumstances permit, I will even send an invitation for him to dine with me among the advance posts.’68
Alexander, however, was no longer inclined to treat the tragedy of war as though it were some personal duel. He had accepted the principle which Barclay had pressed on him for several weeks: he would encourage unrest within Napoleon’s Empire, and prepare a rising in the Adriatic to divert troops from the North. In the second week of April he wrote to Baron vom Stein, the Prussian reformer whom Napoleon had driven into exile in Bohemia, suggesting he might like to come to Russia and work for the liberation of the German lands from across the frontiers.69¶ And Alexander also drafted a directive recommending Admiral Chichagov to study the possibilities of carrying war to the French (and, if necessary, Austrian) outposts in Dalmatia and Croatia.70 If there was to be another contest with the French, Alexander saw it in terms of Europe as a whole and not merely a dispute over Russia’s own frontiers. Yet, in his final audience with Lauriston on 20 April, Alexander limited himself to specific demands for relaxing tension on his borders. He would accept an indemnity for Peter of Oldenburg, he would even modify the Russian tariff to the benefit of French trade; but he insisted on the total evacuation by the French of Swedish Pomerania and of all Prussia; and he warned Lauriston that if the French continued to concentrate armies east of the Oder and reinforced their bases on the Vistula, he would regard these dispositions as tantamount to an act of war against his Empire.71 These proposals, virtually repeated by Kurakin to the French Foreign Minister a week later in Paris, were moderate; and, in private conversation, Lauriston declared that he had not yet given up hope that war might be avoided.72 But Alexander was unwilling to wait any longer in his capital while the troops were massing. On the day after his audience with the Tsar, Lauriston was informed by Rumiantsev that Alexander had left for Vilna in order to prevent his army commanders from making any provocative moves in response to the massing of the French in eastern Prussia. Lauriston was to tell Napoleon that Alexander did not want a war, would seek to avoid it and that ‘in Vilna, no less than in St Petersburg, he would remain a friend and loyal ally’ to the French.73
The fiction that Alexander was leaving St Petersburg to carry out ‘an ordinary review of his troops and the inspection of some of his provinces’ was maintained in official communications from the Russian Foreign Ministry for several days.74 But the people of St Petersburg had never doubted that the Tsar was once again off to the wars, following the regiments which had marched westwards so steadily over the preceding weeks. And on the afternoon of Alexander’s departure (Tuesday, 21 April) his subjects pledged to him their loyalty and their sympathy, as they had done in such different circumstances after Austerlitz. The Empress Elizabeth, sensing what lay ahead for the country of her adoption, was uplifted with patriotic pride. Next morning she described the scene in a letter to her mother in Baden:
The Emperor left yesterday at two o’clock, to the accompaniment of cheers and blessings from an immense crowd of people who were tightly packed from the Kazan Church [sic] to the gate of the city. As these folk had not been hustled into position by the police and as the cheering was not led by planted agents, he was – quite rightly – moved deeply by such signs of affection from our splendid people! … ‘For God and their Sovereign’ – that was the cry! They make no distinction between them in their hearts and scarcely at all in their worship. Woe to him who profanes one or the other. These old-world attitudes are certainly not found more intensively anywhere than at the extremes of Europe. Forgive me, dear Mamma, for regaling you with commonplaces familiar to everyone who has a true knowledge of Russia, but one is carried away when speaking of something you love; and you know my passionate devotion to this country.75
* The Empress Elizabeth’s suite was headed by Prince Alexander Mikhailovitch Golitsyn (the bereaved husband of one of her oldest friends) and by Prince Alexander Naryshkin, a somewhat high-spirited member of the family into which the Tsar’s mistress had married. Like her husband, Elizabeth retained the same physician for many years, Dr Stoffregen, who – in the fashion of medical advisers to the English royal family at this time – strongly believed in the curative powers of sea-water bathing.
† In 1810 the Duchy of Oldenburg covered an area of some 2000 square miles on the left bank of the Weser, where it enters the North Sea. The ruling dynasty was a branch of the Holstein-Gottorp family who had, of course, made a successful takeover bid for the Russian Romanovs in 1762. Even before the marriage of Catherine Pavlovna to an Oldenburg prince, Alexander regarded the Duchy as a distant fief of the Russian Crown and had, he thought, safeguarded the rights of its sovereign under the Treaty of Tilsit. Napoleon’s subsequent offer to compensate Duke Peter of Oldenburg by according him the principality of Erfurt (which was hardly a sixth the size of Oldenburg) seemed to Alexander almost a derisory gesture.
‡ In March 1809 the Swedish aristocracy overthrew King Gustavus IV (who was held to be an imbecile) and placed his uncle, Charles XIII, on the throne. The Peace of Friedrichsham in September 1809 formally ceded Finland to Russia, but left relations between the two countries tense. When the heir to Charles XIII died suddenly at the end of May 1810, the Swedish parliament elected Marshal Bernadotte Prince-Royal of the Kingdom. With Napoleon’s hesitant consent Bernadotte accepted the title, much to the dismay of the Tsar who feared a Swedish war of revenge for the loss of Finland. Once in Stockholm, however, Bernadotte took charge of Swedish military and foreign policy and was determined to show his independence of Napoleon. When, in January 1812, Davout was ordered to occupy Swedish Pomerania so as to strengthen the French hold on the Baltic, Bernadotte at once put out feelers for a Russian alliance.
§ Alexander was also irritated to discover the extent of Speransky’s correspondence with members of the Russian diplomatic service in foreign capitals, although he had earlier encouraged the State Secretary to have his own sources of information on economic problems. The link with Talleyrand declined in importance, partly because of the return of Nesselrode to St Petersburg but also because Talleyrand was excluded from the centre of affairs in Paris at the start of the year 1812 since Napoleon was alarmed by his ‘verbal indiscretions’.
¶ Stein joined Alexander at Vilna on 12 June, less than a fortnight before Napoleon launched his invasion across the Niemen, but there is no evidence
he had any significant influence on the Tsar’s policy at this time. Subsequently Stein settled in St Petersburg.
13
Captain in the Field
The Pleasures of Vilna
Alexander arrived in the city of Vilna early on the following Sunday afternoon, 26 April. The old capital of the Lithuanian Kingdom was, in these days, the third most populous town in his Empire,* but few of its inhabitants were Russian in race or by religion.1 Its churches were mostly Roman Catholic or Lutheran although for more than four generations the principal cultural influence in the city had been Jewish. Beyond the ramparts all the fields along the river Vileka were tilled by Polish or Lithuanian peasants and most of them were owned by families who regarded themselves as Poles, even though their racial origin and surnames were frequently Germanic. It would have been hardly surprising if the Tsar had received a cool welcome, for both Poles and Jews stood to gain much from incorporation in a Napoleonic dependency. Yet Alexander himself still hoped he could win support from the non-Russian peoples along his frontier, and before setting out from St Petersburg he seriously considered authorizing the proclamation of a Grand-Duchy of Lithuania which he would endow with representative institutions of its own. He rejected the idea in the end because he had no desire to alienate Polish sentiment by an appeal to specifically Lithuanian historical traditions and not to any common heritage.2 So long as there was an external crisis, he preferred to seek loyal support in a city close to the frontier by holding out the prospect of favours rather than by making gestures of reform benefiting one national group at the expense of others. He had only once in his reign briefly visited the Vilna region and he chose now to delay political decisions until he knew better the mood of this western fringe of his empire. This was not, perhaps, the most courageous of policies but against the darkening background of probable war it made good sense.
In one respect the Tsar need not have worried. His affability speedily conquered Vilna. Alexander was greeted with peals from the baroque belfries, with flags draped from windows and spring garlands festooned across the cobbled streets of the inner town. He responded to this unexpectedly warm reception with a refreshingly youthful geniality. There was, at first, some constraint on both sides, mainly because by the Russian Orthodox calendar it was still Lent while the Roman Catholics had celebrated Easter four weeks before the Tsar’s arrival; but, once this awkward social distinction was overcome by the natural passage of time, the city took on the appearance of a capital in miniature – and enjoyed itself, as never before.3 Many of the Tsar’s ministers travelled out from St Petersburg, and so too did some of the diplomatic corps. ‘His Majesty’s choristers from the chapel of the Imperial palace’ came to sing the Liturgy each Sunday. The Court, and the socially ambitious, treated the Tsar’s period of residence in Lithuania much as they would have done had he decided on a protracted stay in Moscow or any other great city in the Empire. Ladies from St Petersburg society made the journey westwards to dance and gossip and flirt their way through the warm evenings and shortening nights of summer. Young officers frittered away hundreds of roubles in gambling, and the money-lenders of Vilna (like the innkeepers) found the Tsar’s presence in the neighbourhood gratifyingly profitable. There were numerous balls, fêtes and formal receptions, while a surfeit of lighter entertainment strained the inventive ingenuity of the local nobility and ran many of them heavily into debt.
It was the daughters of the Polish-Lithuanian aristocracy who most welcomed all this excitement. Sixteen years later one of them, Countess Tiesenhausen, recalled the extraordinary summer in her memoirs: ‘A storm was about to break over our heads’, she wrote, ‘and yet, feeling perfectly secure, none of us thought of anything but pleasure, and of the happiness in having the Emperor among us.’4 The Countess, who had never seen Alexander before and who shared her father’s suspicion of his political programme, was easily captivated by his personality. Her acute powers of observation missed little: the way in which he inclined his head to the right to catch a conversation, because of deafness in his left ear; the yellow morocco palliasse which his valet filled each night with fresh straw for his master’s comfort; the small lorgnettes which the Tsar tucked into the sleeve of his uniform jacket, and often lost. She noted, too, his table-talk that summer: how he enjoyed travelling through the Lithuanian countryside; what beauty he found in the unexpected bends of the river Niemen; what problems he foresaw in farming the harvest that season; and how one evening, when someone anxiously touched on the proximity of Vilna to the frontier, he dismissed the whole subject with grand simplicity by declaring, ‘I hope that all will be arranged’. At times, as others too noticed, Alexander seemed to treat the foreign menace as if it were a contemptible irrelevancy.5
The young Countess also tried to explain the fascination which Alexander kindled among those who were meeting him for the first time. She felt he was a man with so many shades of tone to his character that no artist could ever capture the subtleties of his nature for a portrait; and she therefore attempted to convey in prose some of the magic of his personality.
To Countess Tiesenhausen, and many other ladies of fashion as well, there was a friendly confidence in Alexander’s manner which painted the future with bright colours of hope. Although the frontier along the Niemen was less than fifty miles from Vilna, nobody bothered much over what was happening elsewhere than in the city. ‘We did not even know the French were crossing Germany, for no item of news was allowed to circulate in Lithuania’, the Countess later wrote, almost apologetically.7 No doubt much of what she says is exaggerated, for in reminiscence she was seeking to catch the fragrance of Alexander’s charm and contrast it with the sorrow and suffering of the winter that was to come; but there is ample evidence from other sources to show the feverish self-confidence with which Vilna awaited the coming of war and the honours which its people heaped upon their sovereign.
The Eve of Invasion, 1812
It is, however, difficult to believe Alexander had much faith in the ability of his armies to contain the invaders, whatever remarks he may have made to his social neophytes in Vilna. He still appears to have favoured Pfuehl’s planned withdrawal to Drissa, which implied the abandonment of all Lithuania and Byelo-Russia as well. But the Tsar was not totally convinced Pfuehl was right; and he was prepared to listen to Barclay de Tolly and to such veteran commanders as Bennigsen and Bagration. According to Lebzeltern (who had followed Alexander to Vilna, despite the strained relations between Austria and Russia), the Tsar ‘did not place his entire confidence’ in any one adviser, military or diplomatic. Alexander had developed a habit of letting ‘many individuals know partially of matters uppermost in his thoughts while he was talking to them’ but ‘the result of these bursts of confidence is that nobody knows about general matters in their entirety’.8 Lebzeltern’s judgement is shrewd and more penetrating than the comments of any Russian observer, for few of the Tsar’s own senior officers realized how muddled was the military thought at Imperial headquarters. Alexander was, at one and the same time, toying with at least four operational projects: he was willing to encourage Bagration, the commander of the Russian Second Army, to contemplate an advance up the Bug and the Vistula on Warsaw; he was prepared to approve two alternative contingency plans drawn up by Barclay de Tolly, one for a battle on the frontiers and the other for disengagement in depth; and he still gave the impression to foreign officers serving with him that he rated highly the value of Pfuehl’s fortified camp at Drissa.9 Alexander’s mind was as confused over military affairs on the eve of invasion in 1812 as in the weeks preceding Austerlitz.
There was hardly any greater clarity of purpose in his foreign policy. Here, too, he relied increasingly on the advice of his latest discovery, the young Count Karl Nesselrode, who had already distinguished himself in Paris. Even before setting out from the capital Alexander informed Nesselrode of the responsibilities awaiting him should war come: ‘I plan to place myself at the head of the armies’, Alexander told him, ‘I will
need to have with me a young man capable of following me everywhere on horseback, to be in charge of my diplomatic correspondence … I have cast my eyes upon you and hope you will fulfil such a confidential post with loyalty and discretion.’10 Technically Nesselrode was merely a high-ranking departmental secretary attached to the Foreign Ministry, but his importance increased when Chancellor Rumiantsev collapsed with an apoplectic stroke while travelling from St Petersburg to Vilna in May. Although Rumiantsev suffered only partial paralysis and remained nominally in charge of foreign affairs, Alexander used the Chancellor’s ill-health as an excuse for ignoring him.11 It was more convenient to consult Nesselrode, who had never been a Francophile but who understood the French political scene as well as anybody in the Russian diplomatic service. Moreover, Nesselrode had one particular advantage in Alexander’s eyes: he was the first of the specialists in foreign affairs to be both younger and less experienced than the Tsar himself. Training and character alike thus made him naturally offer advice to Alexander rather than seek to dominate him. In a letter which he sent to his wife a month after arriving at Imperial headquarters, Nesselrode showed clearly enough the way in which Alexander intended foreign affairs to be conducted while he was in the field: ‘I am summoned to him when I am needed’, Nesselrode wrote, ‘but otherwise I do not push myself forward so as to multiply these occasions. I am completely passive.’12 With a departmental secretary who was prepared to interpret policy rather than initiate it, Alexander became in effect his own Foreign Minister. As with military affairs, there was uncertainty and vacillation in much he undertook.