Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace

by Dominic Lieven

  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.

  7

  The Home Front in 1812

  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.1

  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.2

  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.3

  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.’4

  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 s
hock 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.5

  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.6

  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.7

  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.8

  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.9

  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.10

  For the government, the loyalty of the peasantry was closely connected to the issue of order in the towns, and especially in Moscow. Only one-third of the city’s population were full-time, deeply rooted urban residents. Nobles and their horde of household serfs migrated to their estates in the late spring and returned as winter approached. In addition, many peasant workmen and artisans worked for part of their lives in the city but retained their links to their villages. The household serfs, concentrated in large numbers and with their ears open to their masters’ gossip, were of particular concern to the authorities. Calm and order in Moscow was the responsibility of Fedor Rostopchin. In the empire as a whole it was the responsibility of the minister of police, Aleksandr Balashev. Rostopchin employed all his wiles to divert and pacify Moscow’s masses, but his letters to Balashev suggest confidence in public order and the masses’ loyalty in the late spring and early summer of 1812. Only at the last, after the authorities had evacuated the city and during the French occupation, did anarchy take hold in Moscow. Servants looted their masters’ homes, respectable women turned to prostitution in order to survive and the general mayhem was increased because gaols emptied and prisoners roamed the streets in search of easy pickings. As in the countryside, however, this was anarchy pure and simple, without any of the leadership or ideology to fuel social revolution.11

  The government had no reason to fear for the loyalty of the urban elites. Russian merchants were usually deeply conservative and Orthodox in their mentalities, and contributed generously to the war effort. Moscow showed the lead here. When Alexander visited the city in late July to appeal for support for
the militia, the city’s merchants instantly pledged 2.5 million rubles, over and above their other existing contributions to the war effort. Even less need the government fear the Church, which was its main ideological ally in mobilizing mass resistance to the invader. In the war of 1806–7 the Orthodox Church had issued an anathema against Napoleon which caused some embarrassment after Tilsit. Now, however, the clergy could denounce the Antichrist with full gusto. On 27 July the Synod issued a blistering manifesto, warning that the same evil tribe which had brought down God’s wrath on the human race by overthrowing their legitimate king and Church were now directly threatening Russia. It was therefore the duty of every priest to inspire unity, obedience and courage among the population in defence of the Orthodox religion, monarch and Fatherland.12

  Given the nature of Russian society and government in this era, it was inevitably the support of the nobility which was most crucial to the war effort. Nobles controlled most of the resources which the state needed for its war and often could not afford to pay for: surpluses of food and fodder, horses, manpower. Nobles would have to provide the great majority of the officers for the militia and the enormously expanded army. Even in peacetime the crown depended on the nobility to help it govern Russia. Below the level of the provincial capital, elected noble marshals, police captains and court officials were the administration’s bedrock. In wartime their jobs became even more essential and far more burdensome. One of their key traditional tasks was managing the system of conscription. In 1812–14 they had to handle ten times more conscripts than would normally have been the case. Nobles also needed to volunteer for new jobs. Transport columns of food, fodder and equipment had to be escorted from deep in the Russian interior to the armies. So too did thousands of horses. The hugely overworked officers of the internal security troops needed noble volunteers to assume some of the burden of escorting parties of new recruits to the army and prisoners of war away from it.