The Burning of Moscow

by Alexander Mikaberidze

  Faith sustained many Muscovites through this calamity and allowed some to accept their fate calmly. Anna Grigorievna Kruglova, the wife of a wealthy merchant, lived near the Sukarevskaya Tower (in Zemlyanoi Gorod). Determined to leave Moscow with her friends, she called upon one of her acquaintances, an old woman married to another merchant, to urge her to flee with them. Kruglova later recalled:

  I found her near the icons, lighting her lamp. She was dressed as if for a holiday, all in white, with a white kerchief about her head. ‘What is the matter?’ I asked. ‘Do you not know that your house is already on fire? Let us pack up your clothes as quickly as possible, and with God’s help we may escape; we came to take you with us.’ But she only replied, ‘Thank you, my dear, for remembering me. For my part, I have spent all my life in this house, and I will not leave it alive. As the house caught on fire, I put on my wedding chemise and my burial garment. I shall begin to pray. And it is thus that death will find me.’ We tried to reason with her; why should she become a martyr when the good God pointed out a way of escape? ‘I shall not burn,’ she rejoined, ‘I shall be suffocated before the flames can reach me. So go, there is still time. The smoke is already filling the room, and I have my prayers to make. Let us say good-bye, and then go. God bless you.’

  Weeping, Kruglova embraced her old friend and left. ‘The room was already full of smoke.’35

  Moscow was home to two dozen monasteries and over three hundred cathedrals and churches; despite the fiery devastation and pillaging, at least fourteen churches continued to perform services and provide spiritual guidance to their communities throughout the occupation.36 However, the richly adorned monasteries and churches also naturally attracted numerous marauders. Metropolitan Platon and Archbishop Augustin tried their best to evacuate church property in good time, and Governor Rostopchin assisted them by granting some 300 transports to remove the most important church treasures. However, the sheer number of churches and convents made this task impossible to complete. Most importantly, the evacuation could not be launched too soon since the removal of icons and other holy symbols would have had a profound effect on the population and might have caused disturbances. Therefore most of the church property was evacuated in the last two days before the surrender of the city, but the process could not be completed in the time available. By 14 September there were still considerable quantities of valuables remaining in most churches and in all five women’s monasteries and one male. ‘I received permission to depart from the city,’ wrote the priest of the Church of the Icon of the Holy Mother of Georgia, ‘but our army confiscated our rented transports for the wounded soldiers and we could not find any other transports, and were thus compelled to stay in Moscow to protect our church property.’37 Similar challenges prevented many other Russian churchmen from leaving the city or evacuating their precious possessions. To protect church property, the priests and almoners resorted to a variety of methods of concealment, including hiding property behind fake walls and burying it in the ground. But concealment often proved ineffective – the Allied soldiers broke down walls and tore apart hearths and ovens in the search for treasure. They dug into any ground that bore signs of disturbed topsoil, and even ransacked cemeteries, violating the resting-places of the dead and opening recent graves. Even goods that had been placed in ‘store-rooms and basements and cleverly walled up with bricks so that it was quite impossible to perceive that there was a hole were nevertheless discovered by the French. Not even property buried in the ground escaped discovery: under vegetable gardens and courtyards they prodded the ground and pulled out chests.’38 The small valuables of the Convent of St Alexis were hidden in a store-room; they were plundered, despite the best efforts of the priests. Some Allied soldiers here dressed themselves in the long habits of the nuns, and a few took up their quarters in the cell of the Lady Superior. They stayed at the convent for two whole days, often inviting the young nuns to join them.

  ‘After the fire, the enemy broke into the church and, having smashed the doors, began to ransack with great fury us and all the other people who had sought shelter from the fires. This pillaging continued unremittingly for the next three weeks,’ lamented one Muscovite priest.39 Soldiers resorted to threats and violence to force priests and nuns to reveal the secret places where their treasures were hidden. At the Zaikopasskii Monastery they rounded up all the monks and, having ‘robbed them of all their clothing’, they made the naked monks carry their loot to their camp; along the way they threw several monks into the Moscow river. At the Pokrovskii Monastery the few remaining monks were all ‘tormented to force them to reveal their treasures’. At the Bogoyavlenskii Monastery they dragged the hieromonk40 Aaron ‘by hair and beard and pressed their bayonets against his chest’, demanding to know where the monastery treasures had been hidden.41 After ransacking the monastery but finding no precious items, the soldiers forced the hieromonk to carry a few textiles and bottles of wine back to their camp, where he was freed. On his way back, Aaron was stopped by another group of soldiers, who made him carry their plunder. He managed to return the following day, only to suffer another round of abuse from a new wave of soldiers, who beat him senseless with their sabres in an effort to extract information about the whereabouts of the treasures. ‘My shoulders and back remained blackened for an entire month,’ complained the hieromonk in a letter to the bishop.42 Less fortunate was the priest at the Soroka-svyatskii Church, located near the Novospasskii Monastery, who was tortured to death, his mutilated body left out in the open for days. Near the Church of St George on Vspolye a Muscovite merchant was tortured by soldiers who refused to believe that he was not a priest, and were slowly making cuts with a sword in the poor man’s back demanding to know where he had hidden the church treasures.43

  Some monasteries fared better than others. At the Devichii Monastery the news of the enemy’s arrival in Moscow initially spread fear and confusion. ‘We saw our priest, pale as a sheet of linen, running from the gates and shouting, “They are coming! The French are coming!”,’ remembered Sister Antonina. The almoner ordered the monastery gates closed, hoping to save his convent from any pillaging. The first Allied troops appeared at the Devichii Monastery on Wednesday, 16 September. Early in the morning the nuns heard A ‘ruckus and commotion’ outside the monastery walls. ‘We looked outside and were awestruck by what we saw: there were numerous enemy soldiers in front of the monastery gates and they had two cannon in front of them.’ Preparing for the worst, the nuns dropped to their knees in tears and began praying. With some troops already scaling the wall, the almoner chose to open the gates to avoid unnecessary destruction.44 The younger nuns were all crammed into one room, and through the little windows they watched as the Allied troops entered the monastery. Spotting an officer at the head of the troops, the almoner asked him in Latin if he could help them in any way. The officer was Capitaines adjoint Zadera of Davout’s 1st Corps,45 who inquired about the monastery, which he said had drawn attention in the headquarters of Marshal Davout as it ‘resembled a fortress’.46 The almoner assured him it was just a monastery, and took Zadera and some other officers on a tour. When they disappeared behind the corner of the church, ‘the young ones among us’, relates one nun, ‘were dying of curiosity to find out what they were doing, so we decided to go outside and have a look. We gently opened the door to steal out one by one. An old nun – a kind-hearted but constantly grumbling woman – saw us and ran up to us. “Where are you going?” she exclaimed. “Go back at once. You wish to look at the soldiers, shameless women that you are. See how you blush. If you were modest girls you would be pale with fear.” The young nuns defended themselves: “How can we avoid having red cheeks? We are squashed like herrings in a barrel. One can scarcely breathe. If we died, we could not turn pale in here.”’ But the old nun went on scolding and shut the young nuns in the cell again.47

  After inspecting the monastery,48 Zadera informed the almoner that he intended to deploy a regiment here. As the Allied troops left, the nu
ns began preparing for the worst. ‘We were all frightened, since we knew that this might be the last chance for us to partake in the sacraments. We listened to a mass inside the church and after the service our priest told us, “There is no time for me to receive confessions from each of you. So confess your sins to the Almighty God yourselves. He will accept your penitence while I will pray for your souls … Only the wailing nuns could be heard in the church.”49 However, Zadera proved to be a decent man. As he inspected the church and saw its rich adornment and treasures, he told the priests to hide any precious items, adding ‘the French troops [are] thieves’.50 Zadera then took an inventory of the entire monastery. All the cells were examined and catalogued, and the nuns were asked to move into five rooms while the rest of the monastery was requisitioned. At the Rozhdestvenskii Convent, which was also treated more leniently than other monasteries, the older nuns tried to protect their younger companions from the soldiery by rubbing soot over their pretty faces. In passing through the courtyard they encountered a number of soldiers, who gathered round them. The old women spat on the ground, pretending, by their gestures, that the novices were black and ugly. But one of the soldiers picked up a bucket of water and gestured to the nuns to wash their faces. When the nuns tried to escape, the soldiers caught them and commenced scrubbing their faces. All the nuns, young and old, then began to shriek, but the soldiers laughed heartily, saying ‘Jolies filles!’51

  But it was the desecration of places of worship and religious artefacts by the Allied soldiers that particularly infuriated the Muscovites. In the burning city the stone-built churches and monasteries were often the only safe shelters and so, as Labaume explained, ‘all the churches except four or five were turned into stables. They had big iron doors and locks and the French felt safer there at nights.’ But for the Muscovites, the sight of enemy soldiers defiling their holy places was insufferable. ‘After pillaging the churches they stabled horses, slaughtered cattle and lodged wounded soldiers there,’ wrote one Russian eyewitness. ‘And having stripped the sacred icons from their frames they bayoneted them and poured filth on them. They also committed other abominations which the tongue cannot mention.’52 At the Novodevichii Monastery the troops ‘despoiled everything, even stones, because they were of weak constitution. [To relieve themselves] they would stand on a stone but cover two or three other stones with their filth, which could be found everywhere.’53 Another Muscovite was enraged to see an icon used for target practice by the Allied soldiers near the Red Gates.54 In their search for treasures the soldiers desecrated numerous tombs and scattered countless holy relics, including the ashes of Russian martyrs and saints.55 The young Becker was astonished to see a French soldier splitting icons with an axe near the church on the Petrovka and using the wood to cook his meal.56 ‘They slept in the sanctuary and ate off the altar,’ bemoaned one Russian nun. ‘In the church, there was a large icon representing the appearances of the Mother of God painted on wood and without fittings… . The French took it from the wall and used it as a table.’57 The Peter and Paul Church in Lefortovo was turned into a sty, while the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin and Trinity Church at the Syromyatniki served as stables. The Church of the Saviour in the Woods and the Church of St Nicholas (also inside the Kremlin) were used as storehouses for hay, oats and other materials. At the Kozmo-demyansk Church in the Zamoskvorechye soldiers built a bonfire in the middle of the temple, with the flames fuelled by wooden icons. In the kliros, where choirs once praised the Lord, the eyewitness now saw bundles of oats and rye and piles of vegetables, while horses were stationed at the altar.58 Worse, slaughter-houses were set up inside in many churches and convents. At the Petrovskii Monastery Russian passers-by were astounded to see the monastery’s entrance almost entirely covered in blood, while nearby animal intestines and other by-products lay in heaps producing an unbearable stench. ‘Looking inside the church,’ wrote the eyewitness, ‘I saw that the [Allied soldiers] had set up a meat shop there, with meat lying on wide shelves along the walls while some animal parts hung from chandeliers and iconostasis.’59 The Danilovskii Monastery fared a little better since the troops deployed there did not defile the church, although the area around it still presented an unseemly sight. ‘A slaughter-house was established here and cattle of various kinds were gathered, so that cows, sheep, pigs and other animals were slaughtered and their intestines thrown around the monastery. The soldiers acted very untidily and walking around the monastery became a rather revolting experience.’60 Once can only imagine the stench of blood, excrement and rotting flesh that filled the air in the city. After the French retreat, the Russian authorities collected almost 25,000 dead bodies and animal carcasses that had been left rotting in the streets in the unusually warm autumn weather. The putrid smell was so bad that even ‘15 verstas [10 miles] from Moscow it was still hard to breathe’.61 Disposing of this mass of decomposing flesh proved to be a huge operation and ‘for several weeks [after the French retreat], the police were burning corpses by the banks of the river and sweeping the ashes into the water’.62 These fires, however, produced ‘a horribly suffocating, stinking smoke that spread throughout the whole city’, choking its residents.63

  Many Russian eyewitnesses remark on the perceived lack of faith among the Allied soldiers. The desecration of the Russian Orthodox churches and cathedrals clearly showed the indifference felt by the soldiers towards Russian religious beliefs. But they also seemed unconcerned about religion in general. Although Moscow boasted a sizeable Catholic Church – St Louis des Français – very few Allied soldiers visited it. Its parish priest, Abbé Surrugues, marvelled that only a handful of officers, mostly from aristocratic backgrounds, came to mass and confession. He went around the hospitals to talk to the wounded but found them completely uninterested in spiritual issues. ‘Some 12,000 men died during their stay here,’ Surrugues wrote, ‘but I performed a religious burial service for only two of them, an officer and a servant of General Grouchy. All the others were simply buried by their comrades in nearby gardens. They do not seem to believe in an afterlife … Faith is nothing but an empty word to them.’64 On 2 October Russian reports from Moscow claimed that in wet weather ‘Frenchmen’ could frequently be seen wearing ‘priestly vestments to protect their uniforms. The depth of impertinence and the range of defilement that they commit inside the church is so godless that one does not even dare to put it on paper.’65

  In popular memory the Allied soldiers are often simply identified as ‘the French’, who are then associated with all the abuses and excesses committed in the city. Thus no distinction is made between the French and the Württembergers, Saxons, Bavarians, Poles, Italians and others who served in the Grande Armée. To the casual observer, they were all ‘French’. But more discerning eyewitnesses did distinguish between the French and the Allied troops, speaking highly of the former and disparagingly of the latter. Many contemporaries ‘ascribed most of their torments and rage to the Bavarians and Poles’,66 and many Muscovites remembered the French protecting them from the marauders. For example, Anna Kruglova’s family was being robbed by some Allied troops when a ‘dashing’ French general (she claimed his name was Caulaincourt) appeared with a few troops and drove the robbers away, leading the family to safety and giving a pretzel to a crying baby. Decades after the event Kruglova still admired this Frenchman: ‘What a kind soul he was! If he is no longer alive, may his soul rest in the heavens!’67 Ysarn witnessed how a French general (he thought it was Sebastiani) protected a Muscovite ‘bourgeois’ from the ‘Württemberg devils’ who were about to rob him.68 Indeed, the memoirs of the Muscovites who endured the occupation tend to describe the French soldiers as more polite, and even obliging, than some of their Allies. Thus, after enduring the first wave of plundering, Andrei Alekseyev noted that the men who robbed him ‘were not true Frenchmen, who are actually very compassionate. We usually recognized them by their speech and manners and were not afraid of them because we knew they had the decency to act properly. But may
the Lord protect us from their Allies! We called them a “merciless host” because neither begging nor tears affected them; it was even said among the masses that they could not be killed by a bullet. Indeed, they abused people both through word and deed … The French, on the other hand, did not abuse without a reason.’69 Kicheyev recalled a ‘French hussar officer, wearing a red dolman’, who came by his house and ‘politely greeted’ the family. After joining them for lunch, he took aside Kicheyev’s uncle and ‘revealed beneath his uniform a shirt that was as blackened as tinder’, humbly asking if he could spare a clean one. After receiving it, ‘he left us, asking us to excuse his intrusion and saying that only extreme hardship had compelled him to disturb us’.70 A certain mounted grenadier of the Imperial Guard left an interesting note in the great visitor’s book of Moscow’s city council. Written in broken French, the message reads: ‘There is not one Frenchman who is not desperately saddened by the misfortune which has befallen your lovely Moscow. I can assure you that as far as I am concerned, I weep for it and regret it, for it was worthy of being preserved.’71

  The young Becker’s first encounter with the French was also relatively trouble-free: three tall dragoons ‘with black moustaches and sideburns’ entered his house carrying four chickens, a small bag of provisions and a decanter of red wine. They asked the women to prepare the food, which they shared with the half-starved family before leaving.72 Seeking fresh information on what was happening in the city, Madame Fusil was pleasantly surprised when ‘a very polite young officer approached me and warned that it was dangerous for me to walk alone. Then he offered to accompany me … So we went on together … At the corner of the street, a few wailing women begged him for protection from soldiers who were looting their homes. He obliged and scattered the intruders …’ After safely delivering Fusil to her house, the young officer stayed for dinner and ‘spoke to us with great delight, telling us about the latest fashion and theatre’.73 An elderly Georgian princess living on the Presnenskaya street survived the Allied occupation of Moscow largely through the generosity of the French troops billeted in her house, who shared their food with her.74 Madame Domergues recalled that, after the entry of the Grande Armée, she waited for some time before daring to draw aside the curtains and open the shutters. Just as she looked out of the window, however, she was frightened by a thunderous knocking on the door. She hurried to close the shutters and curtains while the knocking continued, accompanied by ‘vigorous exclamations’. At last she opened the doors, and encountered some French troops led by a sous-officer of the Imperial Guard. ‘Par-bleu, madame,’ he exclaimed upon seeing her. ‘After marching for eight hundred lieues, all by forced marches, to have the pleasure of seeing you, it would have been very nice of you to have hurried up to open the doors for us.’75