The Burning of Moscow

by Alexander Mikaberidze

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Pen & Sword Military

  an imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire

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  Copyright © Alexander Mikaberidze 2014

  HARDBACK ISBN: 978-1-78159-352-3

  PDF ISBN: 978-1-47383-625-9

  EPUB ISBN: 978-1-47383-449-1

  PRC ISBN: 978-1-47383-537-5

  The right of Alexander Mikaberidze to be identified as the Author of this

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs

  and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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  Contents

  Maps

  Preface

  Chapter 1 The Road to Moscow

  Chapter 2 The City

  Chapter 3 The Governor

  Chapter 4 The Conqueror

  Chapter 5 ‘And Moscow, Mighty City, Blaze!’

  Chapter 6 The Great Conflagration

  Chapter 7 In the Ruins of the Great City

  Chapter 8 ‘By Accident or Malice?’ Who Burned Moscow?

  Chapter 9 In Search of Peace

  Chapter 10 The Die is Cast

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my brother Levan, whose encouragement, support and conscientious engagement have been a constant and indispensable source of strength and inspiration. I could not ask for a better, more loving brother.

  Maps

  1. The streets of Moscow on the eve of the great fire

  2. The Kremlin in 1812

  3. Moscow after the great fire

  4. The deployment of Allied troops in Moscow

  5. Moscow and Environs, 1812

  Map 1: Moscow on the eve of the Great Fire.

  Key:

  1. Dragomilovskaya Street

  2. Arbatskaya Street

  3. Nikitskaya Street

  4. Vzdvizhenka Street

  5. Znamenka Street

  6. Prechistenka Street

  7. Kremlin

  8. Red Square

  9. Nikolskaya Street

  10. Ilyinka

  11. Varvarka

  12. Solyanka

  13. Foundlings Home

  14. Nikolaemskaya Street

  15. Taganskaya

  16. Semyonovskaya Street

  17. Moskvoretskii Bridge

  18. Zamoskvorechye

  19. Ostozhenka Street

  20. Tverskoi Boulevard

  21. Presnenskii Ponds

  22. Meschanskaya Street

  23. Pokrovka

  24. Novospasskii Monastery

  25. Powder Magazines

  26. Simonov Monastery

  27. Danilov Monastery

  28. Donskoi Monastery

  29. Novodevichii Convent

  30. Prison

  Map 2

  In Kremlin:

  1. Borovitskaya Tower

  2. Vodovzvodnaya (Water-lifting) Tower

  3. Blagoveschenskaya (Annunciation) Tower

  4. Taynitskaya (Secret) Tower

  5. First Unnamed (Bezymyannaya) Tower

  6. Second Unnamed (Bezymyannaya) Tower

  7. Petrovskaya Tower

  8. Beklemishevskaya (Moskvoretskaya) Tower

  9. Konstantino-Eleninskaya Tower

  10. Nabatnaya Tower

  11. Spasskaya (Saviour) Tower

  12. Senatskaya Tower

  13. Nikolskaya Tower

  14. Corner Arsenalnaya (Arsenal) Tower

  15. Middle Arsenalnaya (Arsenal) Tower

  16. Troitskaya (Trinity)

  17. Kutafya Barbican Tower

  18. Komendatskaya (Commandant’s) Tower

  19. Oruzheinaya (Armoury) Tower

  In Kitai-gorod:

  1. Varvarskie Gates

  2. Ilyinskie Gates

  3. Nikolskie Gates

  4–5. Governor’s Mansion and other buildings of municipal administration

  6. St Basil’s Cathedral

  Map 3: Moscow after the Great Fire.

  Map 4 Initial deployment of Allied troops in Moscow, 15–29 September 1812.

  Map 5: Moscow and its environs, 1812.

  Preface

  ‘It is impossible to express the astonishment and dismay that the news of the burning of Moscow has produced in Paris. People have long forgotten about the effects of war that push people to the extremes. Despite the time elapsed since the bulletin brought this news to Paris, the impression that it has made still endures. This is one of those events whose consequences are incalculable and the more we reflect upon it, the more insights we gain.’1

  In 1802, just slightly over one year after ascending to the throne of the Russian empire, Emperor Alexander I was informed of rather disturbing news. A certain monk Abel, who was said to have possessed a rare gift of foreseeing the future, had written a book of revelations. It would have been easy to dismiss his writing as the product of rampant imagination, were it not for the monk’s correct prior predictions, including of the deaths of Empress Catherine II and Emperor Paul I. In March 1796 Catherine II, upon learning of Abel’s prophecy of her death, had him confined to the Schlüsselburg Fortress but just eight months later she suddenly passed away – ‘on the very day and hour predicted by Abel’, as General Alexei Yermolov noted. Catherine’s son Paul had him released and brought to the imperial palace. They had a long private talk, at the end of which the emperor ordered Abel to be accommodated at a privileged monastery and that all his needs be met.

  A year later Abel made another ‘worrisome’ prediction, and history repeated itself. Arrested in May 1800 for ‘various writing containing prophecies and other literary nonsense’, the monk was released after Emperor Paul was assassinated by conspirators on the very night Abel had foretold. Paul’s successor, Emperor Alexander, initially followed his father’s example in treating the monk well until he was informed that the monk had produced yet another book of prophecies. This time the monk’s predictions were even more ominous, as he spoke of a future invasion of Russia by enemy hordes and the fall of the glorious city of Moscow. Alarmed by this prediction, Alexander commanded that the prophet be thrown into prison ‘and remain there until his prophecy comes true’. Ten years passed before Abel’s prediction was fulfilled – Napoleon’s Grande Armée crossed the Russian borders and Moscow fell and burned in September 1812. Just a month later Emperor
Alexander released Abel from prison and ordered the monk to be well looked after for the rest of his life. Judging from the surviving documents, Abel lived a fairly quiet and untroubled life until his death in 1841.2

  Historians have long agreed that the fiery destruction of Moscow was one of decisive factors in Napoleon’s fiasco in 1812. Russia loomed large in Napoleon’s mind. With war against Britain already entering its tenth year in 1812, the emperor was eager to find a way to subdue his stalwart enemy. The Continental Blockade, Napoleon’s effort to defeat Britain by denying her access to European markets, required the involvement of all European states, most importantly Russia. In the summer of 1807 Emperor Alexander I, his army defeated by Napoleon, accepted the Treaty of Tilsit and joined the Continental Blockade. However, Russian involvement proved to be lukewarm at best. The embargo on British trade led to a sharp decrease in Russian foreign trade, which in turned produced profound financial strains. These economic tribulations forced the Russian government gradually to relax the enforcement of the blockade, an action that incurred Napoleon’s wrath. Franco-Russian relations remained tense in other areas as well, most notably over the future of Poland and the conflicting interests in Germany and the Balkan peninsula.

  By 1812 it was clear that the two empires were on a collision course and both were actively preparing for war. As part of his campaign against Russia, Napoleon even revived his ‘oriental’ dreams. ‘Imagine Moscow taken,’ he had confided to his trusted aide-decamp on the eve of the war, ‘Russia overthrown, [and] the Tsar reconciled or murdered by a palace plot … and tell me that it is impossible for a large army of Frenchmen and auxiliaries starting from Tiflis [in Georgia] to reach the Ganges, where the mere touch of a French sword would be sufficient to bring down the framework of [Britain’s] mercantile grandeur throughout India.’3 Although Napoleon never actually planned to get as far as Moscow, the prospects of overpowering Russia and then bringing the war against Britain to a conclusion clearly preoccupied him.4

  The war, however, turned rather differently. After two months of futile pursuit of the Russian army, Napoleon found himself at the gates of Moscow, where he believed his opponent would finally sue for peace. Instead, the city went up in flames, taking with it any hopes for a triumph. ‘By directing his efforts against Moscow,’ wrote the famed Russian historian and war participant Dmitri Buturlin, ‘Napoleon thought that he was striking at the heart of Russia. So how great his dismay must have been when he saw that the Russians looked on their ancient capital as no more than a vast accumulation of stones, with which Russia’s destiny was not bound up in any way.’5 A ruined Moscow had inflamed Russian passions, lowered the Grande Armée’s morale and discipline and made retreat inevitable by destroying any prospects of peace. When in November 1816 Barry O’Meara asked the emperor to what he principally attributed his failure in the Russian expedition, Napoleon quickly named two factors – the premature cold and the burning of Moscow. ‘Had it not been for the burning of Moscow,’ he reminisced, ‘I should have succeeded. I would have wintered there. There were in that city about forty thousand people who were practically slaves. For you must know that the Russian nobility keep their vassals in a sort of slavery. I would have proclaimed liberty to all the slaves in Russia, and abolished serfdom and nobility. This would have procured me the support of an immense and a powerful party. I would either have made peace at Moscow, or else I would have marched the next year to St Petersburg … Had it not been for that fire, I should have succeeded in everything …’6 Of course, this statement, made by a man exiled to a remote island and bent on consolidating his legacy, must be treated with caution, but it does reveal Napoleon’s belief that the Moscow fire was the turning point in his war against Russia.

  Debate over who was responsible for the great conflagration in Moscow began even while smoke was still billowing over the ruins of the city. Young artillery officer Nikolai Mitarevskii recalled that in the evening of 14 September, as he and his comrades rested in the vicinity of Moscow, they saw dark dense clouds forming in the distance and realized that the city was burning. ‘We began debating, with some arguing that the French were burning Moscow, others believing it was Count Fedor Rostopchin, the governor of Moscow, and some pointing a finger to the people themselves.’7 Meanwhile, many Allied soldiers and officers were simply astounded by the city’s destruction and struggled to understand ‘what possible advantage could this monstrous sacrifice be to Russia’.8 Seeking answers, some pointed fingers at their greatest enemy, Britain, ‘perfidious Albion’, which had been at war with France for the past two decades. Soldier Marchal wrote that the fire was, in fact, caused by the ‘English agents who had been detained wearing Russian clothing and holding torches’. Similarly, Guillaume Peyrusse, paymaster to Napoleon’s household, cited prevailing rumours that ‘it’s all been a plan proposed by the English to attract us to Moscow and in the midst of the fire and the disorder of a town delivered over to pillage fall on the emperor’s headquarters and the garrison’.9 But the majority of Allied troops thought otherwise and their letters and diaries are replete with references to Russian responsibility for what they considered a ‘barbaric’ act.10 Just hours after arriving at Moscow, Castellane recorded in his diary that ‘many Russians had been arrested with matches in hand’.11 Five days later Lieutenant Pierre-Laurent Paradis of the 25th Line wrote that ‘the emperor of Russia forced the people to evacuate the city and then set it on fire’. Similar rumour is repeated in the letter of Pierre Besnard of the 12th Line, who wrote of the ‘Emperor of Russia releasing convicts and inciting the fire’.12 On 24 September Jean-Pierre-Michel Barriés of the 1st Division of the 1st Corps could not contain his anger at the actions of the Russian ‘barbarians’. He explained that the Russians ‘were hotly pursued by our legions’ and, upon coming under strong fire near Moscow, they asked for a truce to save the city which ‘they agreed to leave to us intact’. But alas, ‘in an act of unsurpassed treachery that cannot be even compared to the actions of the worst frauds of ancient Greece’, the Russians then released ‘all the deranged and scoundrels from prisons’ to destroy the city.13 General Baron Louis-Joseph Grandeau d’Abeacourt, commanding the 1st Brigade of the 2nd Division (1st Corps) at least drew some consolation from the fact that even though ‘the city was burned by the Russians themselves, we plundered it in the most beautiful fashion’.14

  The bulletins Napoleon issued in Moscow, as well as his subsequent writings in exile on St Helena, played an important role in shaping the public memory of the Moscow fire. They directly accused the governor, Fedor Rostopchin, of conceiving this enterprise, collecting immense quantities of combustible materials and incendiary rockets, releasing hundreds of criminals to serve as incendiaries and removing firefighting equipment. Such claims were repeated in numerous French memoirs and studies, starting with the earliest memoirs and campaign studies, most notably by Georges Chambray.15 The appearance of Rostopchin’s brochure La vérité sur l’incendie de Moscou, in which the governor sought to clear his name, led to the publication of Chambray’s rebuttal and Abbé Adrian Surrugues’ Lettres sur l’incendie de Moscou, while a year later Dmitri Buturlin completed his two-volume classic Histoire militaire de la campagne de Russie en 1812. These works were instrumental in shaping the French historiography and, as one Russian historian justly observed, ‘Surrugues’ letters, Napoleon’s statements, the works of Chambray created a rather well formed version of the Moscow fire that determined the course of the French historiography for the next hundred and fifty years and significantly influenced the writing of memoirs (and even publication of diaries!) of virtually every [French] participant in the Russian Campaign.’16

  French perceptions of the Great Fire had, in turn, shaped the English-language historiography of the subject. Relying mainly on French sources, British and American scholars tend to concentrate on the military aspects of the campaign as a whole and, although one can find discussions of the Moscow fire in many books (for example those by Archibald F. Becke, Hila
ire Belloc, Reginald Burton, Cate Curtis, Ronald Delderfield, Theodore Dodge, Edward Foord, H.B. George, George Nafziger, Nigel Nicolson, Alan Palmer, Richard Riehn, Achilles Rose, Digby Smith and Adam Zamoyski), the broad nature of these books meant that Napoleon’s one-month stay in the Russian capital is usually described in general terms, with an emphasis on the ‘French’ experiences. In the last fifty years only two separate studies dealt with the burning of Moscow: Daria Olivier’s The Burning of Moscow 1812 (originally published as L’incendie de Moscou) and Paul Britten Austin’s Napoleon in Moscow. Both books offer an engaging and accessible narrative to the reader but suffer from certain blemishes. Austin’s book deals exclusively with the Grande Armée and has nothing to say about the experiences of the Muscovites. Olivier had consulted some Russian documents to examine the well-worn question of the origins of the Great Fire. She found her culprit in Moscow’s governor, Count Fyodor Rostopchin, whom she held solely responsible for the fire. To support her argument, the author claimed that Rostopchin, given the opportunity by Emperor Alexander’s failure to articulate specific orders for Moscow’s defence, planned the city’s destruction and carried it out through the use of incendiary bombs and willing fire-starters in the criminals he had released from Moscow’s prisons. Yet some of her claims are far from conclusive and must be re-evaluated on the basis of a wider array of sources.

  The Russian side of the story offers a rather different version of the event, and both public perceptions and historical assessments of what had transpired in Moscow in 1812 have varied over the past two hundred years. The news of the burning of Moscow ‘struck us all like a thunderbolt,’ remembered Russian noblewoman Caroline Pavlova. ‘Everyone was in some sort of bewilderment and everything that had transpired seemed like a fairy tale to us; the reality seemingly turned into a daydream and the boundaries of what was feasible disappeared.’17 The Russian public’s immediate reaction to this shocking news was to point the finger at the enemy that was barbarian enough to devastate a focal point of Russian history and society, and Rostopchin’s private letter reflects these attitudes when it states that, ‘frustrated in his great dreams by the actions of our Sovereigns and the Russian people, [Napoleon] burned the city so he could have an excuse to plunder it’.18 Throughout 1813 and 1814, recalled Dmitri Sverbeev, ‘no one amongst us even considered [the possibility] that Moscow could have been deliberately destroyed by the Russians’.19 Writing to his friend in March 1813, Aleksei Merzlyakov was infuriated that ‘there are still half-wits who try to explain French actions and even justify them. There are even people who place responsibility for the fires on the Russians even though Napoleon publicly brags about them in Paris!’20