A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  Crises and tensions multiplied. The French protested the Russian perfunctory, and in fact feigned, participation in Napoleon's war against Austria in 1809, and Alexander I's failure, from 1810 on, to observe the continental blockade. The Russians expressed bitterness over the development of an active French policy in the Near East and over Napoleon's efforts to curb rather than support the Russian position and aims in the Balkans and the Near East: the French opposed Russian control of the Danubian principalities, objected to Russian bases in the eastern Mediterranean, and would not let the Russians have a free hand in regard to Constantinople and the Straits. Napoleon's political rearrangement of central and eastern Europe also provoked Russian hostility. Notably his deposing the Duke of Oldenburg and annexing the duchy to France, a part of the rearrangement in Germany, offended the Russian sovereign who was a close relative of the duke. Still more ominously for Russia, in 1809 after the French victory over Austria and the Treaty of Schonbrunn, West Galicia was added to the Duchy of Warsaw, a state created by Napoleon from Prussian Poland. This change appeared to threaten in turn the hold of Russia on the vast lands that it had acquired in the partitions of Poland. Even Napoleon's marriage to Marie Louise of Austria added to the tension between Russia and France, because it marked the French emperor's

  final abandonment of plans to wed a Russian princess, Alexander's sister Anne. Behind specific tensions, complaints, and crises there loomed the fundamental antagonism of two great powers astride a continent and two hostile rulers. In June 1812, having made the necessary diplomatic and military preparations, Napoleon invaded Russia.

  France had obtained the support of a number of European states, allies and satellites, including Austria and Prussia: the twelve invading tongues in the popular Russian tradition. Russia had just succeeded in making peace with Turkey, and it had acquired active allies in Sweden and Great Britain. Some 420,000 troops crossed the Russian border with Napoleon to face only about 120,000 Russian soldiers divided into two separate armies, one commanded by Prince Michael Barclay de Tolly and the other by Prince Peter Bagration. Including later reinforcements, an approximate total of 600,000 troops invaded Russia. In addition to its tremendous numbers, Napoleon's army had the reputation of invincibility and what was considered to be an incomparably able leadership. Yet all the advantages were not on one side. Napoleon's Grande Armee contained a surprisingly small proportion of veterans. Also, Frenchmen constituted less than half of it, while of the allied troops only the Poles, who fought for a great independent Poland, acquitted themselves with distinction. With the return of the Russian forces from the Turkish front, the arrival of other Russian reinforcements, and the extension of French lines of communication which had to be protected, the invaders gradually lost their numerical superiority. Moreover, on the whole the country rallied solidly behind Alexander I, and the Russian soldiers fought with remarkable tenacity. Indeed, Napoleon's expectations that their early defeats would force the Russians to sue for peace proved groundless. An early and exceptionally cold winter contributed its share to the Russian cause. But, above all, problems of logistics involved in the French campaign turned out to be much more difficult to resolve than Napoleon and his assistants had foreseen.

  Napoleon advanced into the heart of Russia along the Vilna-Vitebsk-Smolensk line, just as Charles XII had done a century earlier. The Russians could not stop the invaders and lost several engagements to them, including the bloody battle of Smolensk. However, Russian troops inflicted considerable losses on the enemy, repeatedly escaped encirclement, and continued to oppose French progress. Near Smolensk the two separate Russian armies managed to effect a junction and thus present a united front to the invaders. Under the pressure of public opinion incensed by the continuous French advance, Alexander I put Prince Michael Kutuzov in supreme command of the Russian forces. A disciple of Suvorov, and a veteran of many campaigns, the sixty-seven-year-old Kutuzov did agree in fact with Barclay de Tolly's policy of retreat. Still, he felt it incumbent upon him and his army to fight before surrendering Moscow, and so gave

  Napoleon a major battle on the seventh of September near the village of Borodino, seventy-five miles from the great Russian city. The battle of Borodino had few equals in history for the severity of the fighting. Although it lasted but a single day, the Russians suffered 42,000 casualties out of 112,000 combatants, the French and their allies 58,000 out of 130,000. The casualties included scores of generals and thousands of officers, with Prince Bagration and other prominent commanders among the dead or fatally wounded. By nightfall the Russians in the center and on the left flank had been forced to retreat slightly, while they held fast on the right. Kutuzov, however, decided to disengage and to withdraw southeast of Moscow. On the fourteenth of September Napoleon entered the Kremlin.

  His expectations of final victory and peace were cruelly deceived. In a rare demonstration of tenacity, Alexander I refused even to consider peace as long as a single French soldier remained on Russian soil, and the country backed its monarch. Far from providing sumptuous accommodations for the French emperor and his army, Moscow, still constructed largely of wood, burned down during the first days of the French occupation. It is possible that Count Theodore Rostopchin, the Russian governor and military commander of the city, deliberately started the conflagration - as most French and some Russian specialists assert - but this remains a disputed issue. Unable to obtain peace from Alexander and largely isolated in the Russian wasteland, Napoleon had to retreat before the onset of winter. The return march of the Grande Armee, which started on October 19, gradually became a rout. To begin with, the action of the Russian army at Maloiaroslavets prevented the French from taking a new road through fertile areas untouched by war and forced them to leave the way they had come. As Napoleon's soldiers marched slowly westward winter descended upon them and they were constantly pressed by the pursuing Russian forces - although Kutuzov chose to avoid a major engagement - and harassed by cossacks and other irregulars, including peasant guerrillas. The French and their allies perished in droves, and their discipline began to break down. Late in November, as the remnants of the Grande Armee crossed the Berezina River, they were lucky to escape capture through the mistake of a Russian commander. From 30,000 to 50,000 men, out of the total force of perhaps 600,000, finally struggled out of Russia. By the end of the year no foreign soldiers, except prisoners, remained in the country.

  The epic of 1812 became a favorite subject for many Russian historians, writers, and publicists, and for some scholars in other lands. Leo Tolstoy's peerless War and Peace stands out as the most remarkable, albeit fictionalized, description of the events and human experiences of that cataclysmic year. Other treatments of the subject range from an excellent

  seven-volume history to some of the best-known poems in Russian literature. While we cannot discuss the poets here, certain conclusions of the historians deserve notice. For example, it has been established that the Russian high command had no overall "Scythian policy" of retreat with the intention of enticing Napoleon's army deep into a devastated country. The French advance resulted rather from Russian inability to stop the invader and from Napoleon's determination to seize Moscow, which he considered essential for victory. The catastrophic French defeat can be ascribed to a number of factors: the fighting spirit of the Russian army, Kutuzov's wise decisions, Napoleon's crucial mistakes, Alexander's determination to continue the war, the winter, and others. But the breakdown of the transportation and supply of the Grand Armee should rank high among the reasons for its collapse. More soldiers of Napoleon died from hunger and epidemics than from cold, for the supply services, handicapped by enormous distances, insecure lines of communication, and bad planning, failed on the whole to sustain the military effort. Finally, it is worth noting that the war of 1812 deserves its reputation in Russian history as a popular, patriotic war. Except for certain small court circles, no defeatism appeared in the midst of the Russian government, educated public, or people. Moreover, the Russian pe
asants not only fought heroically in the ranks of the regular army but also banded into guerrilla detachments to attack the enemy on their own, an activity unparalleled at the time except in Spain. In fact, as the revising of Tarle's study of the war of 1812 and other works indicate, Soviet historians, while they had once neglected it, later even tended to overstate the role of the Russian people in the defeat of the French invaders.

  Russian Foreign Policy, 1812-25

  Alexander I continued the war beyond the boundaries of Russia. Prussia and several months later Austria switched sides to join Russia, Sweden, and Great Britain. The combined forces of Austria, Prussia, and Russia finally scored a decisive victory over Napoleon in the tremendous Battle of Leipzig, known as the "Battle of the Nations," fought from the sixteenth through the nineteenth of October, 1813. Late that year they began to cross the Rhine and invade France. After more desperate fighting and in spite of another display of the French emperor's military genius, the allies entered Paris triumphantly on March 31, 1814. Alexander I referred to that day as the happiest of his life. Napoleon had to abdicate unconditionally and retire to the island of Elba. He returned on March 1, 1815, rapidly won back the French throne, and threatened the allies until his final defeat at Waterloo on the eighteenth of June. The events of the "Hundred Days" moved too quickly for the Russian army to participate in this last

  war against Napoleon, although, of course, Alexander I was eager to help his allies.

  The French emperor's abortive comeback thus failed to undo the new settlement for Europe drawn by the victors at the Congress of Vienna. The Congress, which lasted from September 1814, until the Act was signed on June 8, 1815, constituted one of the most impressive and important diplomatic gatherings in history. Alexander I himself represented Russia and played a leading role at the Congress together with Metternich of Austria, Castlereagh of Great Britain, Hardenberg of Prussia, and, eventually, Talleyrand of France. It must be assumed that the reader has a general knowledge of the redrawing of the political map of Europe and of the colonial settlement that took place in Vienna; however, certain issues in which Russia had a crucial part must be mentioned here. Alexander I wanted to establish a large kingdom of Poland in personal union with Russia, that is, with himself as king; and, by offering to support the Prussian claim to all of Saxony, he obtained Prussian backing for his scheme. Great Britain and Austria, however, strongly opposed the desires of Russia and Prussia. Talleyrand used this opportunity to bring France prominently back into the diplomatic picture, on the side of Great Britain and Austria. The conflict, in the opinion of some specialists, almost provoked a war. Its resolution - which angered the Russian public who expected "gratitude" for "liberating Europe from Napoleon" - constituted a compromise: Alexander I obtained his Kingdom of Poland, but reduced in size, while Prussia acquired about three-fifths of Saxony. More precisely, the Kingdom of Poland contained most of the former Grand Duchy of Warsaw, with Warsaw itself as its capital, but Prussia regained northwestern Poland, and Austria retained most of its earlier share of the country; Cracow became a free city-state under the joint protection of Russia, Austria, and Prussia. New Poland received a liberal constitution from Alexander I. He thus combined the offices of autocratic Russian emperor, constitutional Finnish grand duke, and constitutional Polish king. It might be added that he also favored constitutionalism in France, where the Bourbons returned to the throne as constitutional, not absolute, monarchs.

  Alexander I's elated, mystical, and even messianic mood at the time of the Congress of Vienna - a complex sentiment which the Russian sovereign apparently shared in some measure with many other Europeans in the months and years following the shattering fall of Napoleon, and which found a number of spokesmen, such as Baroness Julie de Krudener, in the tsar's entourage - expressed itself best in a remarkable and peculiar document known as the Holy Alliance. Signed on September 26, 1815, by Russia, Austria, and Prussia, and subsequently by the great majority of European powers, the alliance simply appealed to Christian rulers to live

  as brothers and preserve peace in Europe. While the Holy Alliance had deep roots in at least two major Western traditions, Christianity and international law, it had singularly little relevance to the international problems of the moment and provided no machinery for the application or enforcement of Christian brotherhood. Indeed, Castlereagh could well describe it as a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense, while the pope remarked drily that from time immemorial the papacy had been in possession of Christian truth and needed no new interpretation of it.

  But, if the Holy Alliance had no practical consequences, the Quadruple Alliance, and the later Quintuple Alliance with which it came to be confused, did. The Quadruple Alliance represented a continuation of the wartime association of the allies and dated from November 20, 1815. At that time Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia agreed to maintain the settlement with France - that is, the Second Treaty of Paris, which had followed the "Hundred Days" and has superseded the First Treaty of Paris - and in particular to prevent the return of Napoleon or his dynasty to the French throne. The alliance was to last for twenty years. Moreover, its sixth article provided for periodic consultations among the signatory powers and resulted in the so-called "government by conference," also known as the Congress System or Confederation of Europe. Conferences took place at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, Troppau and Laibach in 1820-21, and Verona in 1822. At Aix-la-Chapelle, with the payment of the indemnity and the withdrawal of allied occupation troops, France shed its status as a defeated nation and joined the other four great European powers in the Quintuple Alliance. The congresses of Troppau and Laibach considered revolutions in Spain and Italy. Finally, the meeting in Verona dealt again with Spain and also with the Greek struggle against the Turks, to which we shall return in the chapter on the reign of Nicholas I.

  After an impressive start, highlighted by the harmony and success of the Aix-la-Chapelle meeting, the Congress System failed to work. A fundamental split developed between Great Britain, which, as the British state paper of May 5, 1820, made plain, opposed intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states, and Austria, Prussia, and Russia, who, as the Protocol of Troppau spelled out, were determined to suppress revolution, no matter where it raised its head. France occupied something of an intermediate position, although it did invade Spain to crush the liberal regime there. Metternich tended to dominate the joint policies of the eastern European monarchies, especially in the crucial years of 1820-22 when Alexander I, frightened by a mutiny in the elite Semenovskii guard regiment and other events, followed the Austrian chancellor in his eagerness to combat revolution everywhere. The Semenovskii uprising, it might be added, really resulted from the conflict between the regiment and its commanding officer, not from any liberal conspiracy.

  The reactionary powers succeeded in defeating liberal revolutions on the continent of Europe, except in Greece, where Christians fought their Moslem masters and the complexity of the issues involved upset the usual diplomatic attitudes and alignments. To be sure, these victories of reaction proved to be short-lived, as the subsequent history of Europe in the nineteenth century was to demonstrate. Also, the British navy prevented their possible extension across the seas, thus barring reactionary Spain and its allies from any attempt to subdue the former Spanish colonies in the new world that had won their independence. The Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed on December 2, 1823, and aimed at preventing European intervention on "the American continents," represented the response of the United States to the potential threat to the countries of the Western hemisphere posed by the reactionary members of the Confederation of Europe, and also, incidentally, a response to the Russian expansion in North America.

  The Congress System has been roundly condemned by many historians as a tool of reaction, both noxious and essentially ineffective in maintaining order and stability in Europe. Yet at least one more positive aspect of that unusual political phenomenon and of Alexander I's role in it deserves notice. The architect
s of the Congress System, including the Russian emperor, created what was at its best more than a diplomatic alliance. In the enthusiastic words of a British scholar writing about the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle:

  It is clear that at this period the Alliance was looked upon even by British statesmen as something more than a mere union of the Great Powers for preserving peace on the basis of the treaties; and in effect, during its short session the Conference acted, not only as a European representative body, but as a sort of European Supreme Court, which heard appeals and received petitions of all kinds from sovereigns and their subjects alike.

  To be sure, this European harmony did not last, and "the Confederation of Europe" seems too ambitious a designation for the alliance following the Congress of Vienna. Yet, if a true Confederation of Europe ever emerges, the Congress System will have to be accepted as its early, in a sense prophetic, predecessor. And it was Alexander I who, more than any other European leader, emphasized the broad construction of the Quadruple and the Quintuple alliances and tried to develop co-operation and unity in Europe. Although Austrian troops intervened in the Italian states and French troops in Spain, the Russian ruler was also eager to contribute his men to enforce the decisions of the powers. In fact, he proposed forming a permanent international army to guarantee the European settlement and