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Russia Against Napoleon

Page 72

by Lieven, Dominic


  Detachment of Major-General Harpe

  Navagin, Tula, Sevsk infantry regiments

  2nd, 13th, 14th Jaeger regiments

  3 Combined Grenadier battalions

  Cavalry detachment of Major-General Count Joseph O’Rourke

  Nezhin Mounted Jaeger, Pavlograd Hussar, Polish Lancer and Volhynia Lancer regiments

  6 Don Cossack, 1 Siberian Cossack and 1 Bashkir regiment

  Cavalry detachment of Major-General A. I. Chernyshev

  Finland Dragoon Regiment; Riga Dragoon Regiment; Izium Hussar Regiment

  5 Don Cossack regiments; 4 guns of 8th Horse Artillery Battery

  Army Corps artillery

  31st Heavy, 42nd and 46th Light Artillery batteries; 8 guns of 8th Horse Artillery Battery

  Army of Poland:

  Commander: General Levin von Bennigsen: 43 battalions of army and 27 battalions of militia infantry: 40 squadrons of army regular cavalry, 10 regiments of irregular cavalry, 7 squadrons of militia cavalry: 198 guns = 59,033 men

  Advance Guard: Lieutenant-General E. I. Markov

  16th Infantry Division: Major-General M. L. Bulatov

  Neishlot Infantry Regiment; 27th and 43rd Jaeger regiments

  13th Infantry Division: 2nd Brigade: Major General Ivanov

  Saratov Infantry Regiment: Penza Infantry Regiment

  Cavalry: Major-General S. V. Diatkov and Major-General N. V. Dekhterev

  Orenburg and Vladimir Lancer regiments; 1st Combined Hussar Regiment; 1st Combined Lancer Regiment

  4 Don Cossack regiments, 1 Ural Cossack regiment, 4 Bashkir regiments

  1 regiment Siberian Cossack militia and 1 regiment Penza militia cavalry

  Artillery: 16th Heavy, 56th Light and 30th and 10th Horse Artillery batteries

  Right Flank Army Corps: General D. S. Dokhturov

  12th Infantry Division: Major-General Prince N. N. Khovansky

  Brigade: Smolensk Infantry Regiment; Narva Infantry Regiment

  Brigade: Aleksopol Infantry Regiment; Novoingermanland Infantry Regiment

  Brigade: 6th and 41st Jaeger regiments

  26th Infantry Division: Major-General I. F. Paskevich

  Brigade: Ladoga Infantry Regiment; Poltava Infantry Regiment

  Brigade: Nizhnii Novgorod Infantry Regiment; Orel Infantry Regiment

  Brigade: 5th and 42nd Jaeger regiments

  13th Infantry Division: Brigade of Major-General Axel Lindfors

  Velikie Luki Infantry Regiment: Galits Infantry Regiment

  Cavalry detachment: Lieutenant-General E. I. Chaplitz

  Combined Dragoon Regiment: 1st and 2nd Combined Mounted Jaeger regiments; 2nd Combined Lancer Regiment; Taganrog, Siberia and Zhitomir Lancer regiments

  Artillery: 26th and 45th Heavy, 1st and 47th Light, 2nd Horse Artillery batteries

  1 company miners

  Army Corps reserve artillery: 22nd Heavy, 18th, 48th, 53rd Light, and 9th Horse Artillery batteries

  Left Flank Army Corps: Lieutenant-General Count P. A. Tolstoy

  Militia Corps of Major-General N. S. Muromtsev

  4 regiments of Nizhnii Novgorod militia infantry; 1 regiment of Nizhnii Novgorod and 1 regiment of Kostroma militia cavalry; 1 Ural Cossack regiment

  52nd Heavy and 22nd Horse Artillery batteries

  Militia Corps of Major-General Titov

  3 regiments of Penza militia infantry; 1 regiment of Riazan militia infantry and 1 regiment of Riazan militia jaegers; 1 regiment of Riazan militia cavalry; 2 squadrons of Kazan militia cavalry

  64th Light Artillery Battery

  Notes

  Abbreviations

  AGM

  Arkhiv grafov Mordvinovykh

  BL

  British Library

  Correspondance de l’Empereur Alexandre

  Correspondance de l’Empereur Alexandre Ier avec sa sœur la Grande Duchesse Cathérine 1805–1818, ed. Grand Duke Nicholas, SPB, 1910

  Entsiklopediia

  V. Bezotosnyi et al. (eds.), Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda: Entsiklopediia, Moscow, 2004

  Eugen, Memoiren

  Memoiren des Herzogs Eugen von Württemberg, 3 vols., Frankfurt an der Oder, 1862

  IV

  Istoricheskii vestnik

  Kutuzov

  L. G. Beskrovnyi (ed.), M. I. Kutuzov: Sbornik dokumentov, Moscow, 1954, vols. 4i, 4ii, 5

  MVUA

  Materialy voenno-uchenago arkhiva (1812, 1813)

  PSZ

  Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii

  RA

  Russkii arkhiv

  RD

  Relations diplomatiques

  RGVIA

  Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv

  RS

  Russkaia Starina

  SIM

  Sbornik istoricheskikh materialov izvlechennykh iz arkhiva S.E.I.V. kantseliarii

  SIRIO

  Sbornik imperatorskago russkago istoricheskago obshchestva

  SPB

  St Petersburg

  SVM

  Stoletie voennago ministerstva

  TGIM

  Trudy gosudarstvennogo istoricheskogo muzeia

  VIS

  Voenno-istoricheskii sbornik

  VPR

  Vneshniaia politika Rossii

  VS

  Voennyi sbornik

  Chapter 1: Introduction

  1 Much of this introduction is drawn from my article, ‘Russia and the Defeat of Napoleon’, Kritika, 7/2, 2006, pp. 283–308. That article includes comprehensive footnotes, and interested readers should consult it as regards references to most of the secondary literature. This introductory chapter also skims across many topics covered in more detail later in the book, at which point I will make the necessary citations to literature in the notes.

  2 For the key works in English on and around this subject, see Additional Reading.

  3 The one exception is Christopher Duffy: see his Austerlitz, London, 1999, and Borodino and the War of 1812, London, 1999: both of these are reprints by Cassell of books published some years previously. Both books are brief and were written when Russian archives were shut to foreigners. Duffy’s main works on Russia cover an earlier period.

  4 Of course by this I mean the primary sources: there is much splendid French secondary literature on the Napoleonic era. See my article in Kritika, n. 14.

  5 Memoiren des Herzogs Eugen von Württemberg, 3 vols., Frankfurt an der Oder, 1862.

  6 For example, the memoirs of Friedrich von Schubert, the chief of staff of Baron Korff’s cavalry corps: Unter dem Doppeladler, Stuttgart, 1962.

  7 Carl von Clausewitz, The Campaign of 1812 in Russia, London, 1992.

  8 Clausewitz’s judgements on the later stages of the campaign are more mellow: conceivably it helped that by then he was serving under Peter Wittgenstein, at whose headquarters all the key officers were German.

  9 The first three volumes of Rudolph von Friederich (Die Befreiungskriege 1813–1815) cover the spring and autumn campaigns of 1813 and the campaign of 1814: Der Frühjahrsfeldzug 1813, Berlin, 1911; Der Herbstfeldzug 1813, Berlin, 1912; Der Feldzug 1814, Berlin, 1913.

  10 See the five volumes of Geschichte der Kämpfe Österreichs: Kriege unter der Regierung des Kaisers Franz. Befreiungskrieg 1813 und 1814, Vienna, 1913.

  11 This is most true as regards Henry Kissinger, A World Restored, London, 1957.

  12 See e.g. Anthony D. Smith, ‘War and Ethnicity: The Role of Warfare in the Formation, Self-Images, and Cohesion of Ethnic Communities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 4/4, 1981, pp. 375–97.

  13 Above all thanks to Peter Hofschroer’s two volumes: 1815: The Waterloo Campaign, London, 1998 and 1999.

  14 The tart comment by F. Zatler in 1860 that logistics is the big weakness of military history still largely remains true: Zapiski o prodovol’stvii voisk v voennoe vremia, SPB, 1860, p. 95. The best published source on Russian logistics in 1812–14 remains the report submitted to Alexander I by Georg Kankrin and Mikhail Ba
rclay de Tolly: Upravlenie General-Intendanta Kankrina: General’nyi sokrashchennyi otchet po armiiam…za pokhody protiv Frantsuzov, 1812, 1813 i 1814 godov, Warsaw, 1815. There is a useful candidate’s dissertation by Serge Gavrilov, Organizatsiia i snabzheniia russkoi armii nakanune i v khode otechestvennoi voiny 1812 g. i zagranichnykh pokhodov 1813–1815 gg.: Istoricheskie aspekty, SPB, 2003. On Napoleonic logistics, see Martin van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton, Cambridge, 1977, ch. 2.

  15 There is an interesting recent work on the horse in war by Louis DiMarco, War Horse: A History of the Military Horse and Rider, Yardley, 2008.

  16 On Wellington and the history of Waterloo, see Malcolm Balen, A Model Victory: Waterloo and the Battle for History, London, 1999, and Peter Hofschroer, Wellington’s Smallest Victory: The Duke, the Model-Maker and the Secret of Waterloo, London, 2004. Buturlin’s work was originally published in French in 1824: Histoire militaire de la campagne de Russie en 1812. Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky’s first published campaign history was on the 1814 campaign: Opisanie pokhoda vo Frantsii v 1814 godu, 2 vols., SPB, 1836. His history of 1812 was published in Petersburg in 1839 in four volumes: Opisanie otechestvennoi voiny 1812 goda. The next year his two-volume history of the 1813 campaign was published: Opisanie voiny 1813 g.

  17 On Russian historiography of the Napoleonic Wars, see I. A. Shtein, Voina 1812 goda v otechestvennoi istoriografii, Moscow, 2002, and the article by V. P. Totfalushin in Entsiklopediia, pp. 309–13.

  18 B. F. Frolov, ‘Da byli liudi v nashe vremia’: Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda i zagranichnye pokhody russkoi armii, Moscow, 2005.

  19 See the discussion and bibliography in D. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals, London, 2001.

  20 There are some parallels in Chinese and Turkish historiography concerning the Manchu and Ottoman empires.

  21 Anyone touching this theme owes much to John Keegan, The Face of Battle, London, 1978, pp. 117–206. There were great similarities and relatively few differences between the values of the British officers he discusses and their Russian counterparts.

  22 Pamfil Nazarov and Ivan Men’shii.

  23 J. P. Riley, Napoleon and the World War of 1813, London, 2000, is an interesting and original study of world war in 1813 by a senior British officer. It is true that the Anglo-American war of 1812–14 was directly linked to the Napoleonic Wars though not part of them: see Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America, Cambridge, Mass., 2007.

  Chapter 2: Russia as a Great Power

  1 See the chapters by Paul Bushkovitch and Hugh Ragsdale in D. Lieven (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, Cambridge, 2006, vol. 2, pp. 489–529, for surveys of Russian foreign policy in the eighteenth century.

  2 On Catherine and her reign, the bible is Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, London, 1981. On the ‘Greek project’, see Simon Sebag Montefiore’s splendid Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin, London, 2000, pp. 219–21, 241–3.

  3 The fullest recent survey of eighteenth-century Ottoman developments is Suraiya Faroqhi (ed.), Turkey, vol. 3: The Later Ottoman Empire 1603–1839, Cambridge, 2003. On the Ottoman army, see Virginia Aksan, Ottoman Wars 1700–1870: An Empire Besieged, Harlow, 2007. I attempted Russo-Ottoman comparisons in D. Lieven, Empire: TheRussian Empire and its Rivals, London, 2001, ch. 4, pp. 128 ff.

  4 There is a vast literature on the European Old Regime. For the long view of state formation in Europe, see Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States: A.D. 990–1992, Oxford, 1990. Equally thought-provoking are Perry Anderson, Lineages of the AbsolutistState, London, 1974, and Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change, Princeton, 1992.

  5 The best recent survey of the Russian peasantry is by David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 1600–1930, London, 1999. On comparative European landholding by elites, see D. Lieven, Aristocracy in Europe 1815–1914, Basingstoke, 1992, chs. 1 and 2, pp. 1–73.

  6 The exact figure is 7.3 per cent, and is derived from the nearly 500 generals included in Entsiklopediia. On education and Enlightenment in the Baltic provinces, see G. von Pistohlkors, Deutsche Geschichte in Osten Europas: Baltische Länder, Berlin, 1994, pp. 266–94.

  7 The best source is the official history of Russian military engineering: I. G. Fabritsius, Glavnoe inzhenernoe upravlenie, SVM, 7, SPB, 1902. On doctors see: A. A. Baranov, ‘Meditsinskoe obespechenie armii v 1812 godu’, in Epokha 1812 goda: Issledovaniia, istochniki, istoriografiia, TGIM, vol. 1, Moscow, 2002, pp. 105–24.

  8 D. G. Tselerungo, Ofitsery russkoi armii, uchastniki Borodinskogo srazheniia, Moscow, 2002, p. 81. The best source on the origins of the general staff is N. Glinoetskii, ‘Russkii general’nyi shtab v tsarstvovanie Imperatora Aleksandra I’, VS, 17/10, 1874, pp. 187–250. See also: P. A. Geisman, Vozniknovenie i razvitie v Rossii general’nago shtaba, SVM, 4/1/2/1, especially pp. 169 ff: ‘Svita Ego Imperatorskago Velichestva po kvartirmeisterskoi chasti’.

  9 This is to borrow the term used by John Brewer in the context of eighteenth-century Britain.

  10 The Russian statistics are inexact because the government only counted the number of subjects who owed compulsory military service. This did not include women, nobles, priests, merchants or all non-Russian minorities. For the basic statistics on European populations, see R. Bonney (ed.), Economic Systems and Finance, Oxford, 1995, pp. 315–19 and 360–76. For a more detailed breakdown of the European population in 1812, see the statistics compiled by Major Josef Paldus which are contained in the appendix to Geschichte der Kämpfe Österreichs: Kriege unter der Regierung des Kaisers Franz. Befreiungskrieg 1813 und 1814, vol. 1: O. Criste, Österreichs Beitritt zur Koalition, Vienna, 1913. All these statistics have to be watched carefully. For example Paldus’s figure for the Russian population is much too low, though it may well be that he is using estimates for ethnic Russians rather than for all subjects of the emperor. Bonney cites P. G. M. Dickson for the Habsburg figure (Finance and Government under Maria Theresa 1740– 1780, 2 vols., Oxford, 1987, vol. 1, p. 36), but Dickson does not include the population of the Habsburg Netherlands or Italy.

  11 On Russian pay and rations, see F. P. Shelekhov, Glavnoe intendantskoe upravlenie: istoricheskii ocherk, SVM, 5, SPB, 1903, pp. 87, 92. On Wellington’s troops, see Matthew Morgan, Wellington’s Victories, London, 2004, pp. 33, 74.

  12 E. K. Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian Soldier, Princeton, 1990, ch. 4, pp. 74–95.

  13 On Russian conscription, see Janet Hartley, Russia, 1762–1825: Military Power, London, 2008, ch. 2, pp. 25–47. On French conscription, see Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civil Order, 1789–1820s, London, 1994, ch. 13, pp. 380–426, and David Hopkin, Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture, Woodbridge, 2003, pp. 125–214. On the nation in arms, see MacGregor Knox, ‘Mass Politics and Nationalism as Military Revolution: The French Revolution and After’, in MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray (eds.), The Dynamics of Military Revolution. 1300–2050, Cambridge, 2001, ch. 4, pp. 57–73.

  14 ‘Zapiski I. V. Lopukhina’, RA, 3, 1914, pp. 318–56, at p. 345. On the militia and the debate that surrounded its mobilization, see V. V. Shchepetil’nikov, Komplektovanie voisk v tsarstvovanie imperatora Aleksandra I, SVM, 4/1/1/2, SPB, 1904, pp. 18–40, 69–72.

  15 I. Merder, Istoricheskii ocherk russkogo konevodstva i konnozavodstva, SPB, 1868: the quote is on pp. 84–5. V. V. Ermolov and M. M. Ryndin, Upravlenie general-inspektora kavalerii o remontirovanii kavalerii. Istoricheskii ocherk, SVM, 3/3.1, SPB, 1906. This is a key work.

  16 Marquess of Londonderry, Narrative of the War in Germany and France in 1813 and 1814, London, 1830, p. 31. Sir Robert Wilson, Campaigns in Poland. 1806 and 1807, London, 1810, p. 14.

  17 Apart from Merder, see Shelekhov, Glavnoe intendantskoe upravlenie, for the purchase and upkeep of horses: e.g. purchase prices are on p. 104. A useful modern history of the Russian cavalry is A. Begunova, Sabli ostry, koni bystry, Moscow, 1992. On the incident with the Austrians, see T. von Bern
hardi, Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem Leben des kaiserlichen russischen Generals der Infanterie Carl Friedrich Grafen von Toll, 5 vols., Leipzig, 1858, vol. 4, book 7, pp. 183–4.

  18 There are two extremely useful unpublished Russian candidates’ dissertations (i.e. roughly equivalent to a contemporary British Ph.D.) on the military economy: S. V. Gavrilov, Organizatsiia i snabzheniia russkoi armii nakanune i v khode otechestvennoi voiny 1812g i zagranichnykh pokhodov 1813–1815gg: Istoricheskie aspekty, candidate’s dissertation, SPB, 2003, and V. N. Speranskii, Voenno-ekonomicheskaia podgotovka Rossii k bor’be s Napoleonom v 1812–1814 godakh, Gorky, 1967. The basic statistics on raw materials are in Gavrilov, pp. 39–42. Speransky is a mine of useful information: his only weakness appears to be that he neglects the crucial production of field artillery at the Petersburg arsenal. See the following note for references to this production. Viktor Bezotosnyi kindly confirmed that the arsenal did indeed produce most Russian field artillery.

 

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