Russia Against Napoleon

by Dominic Lieven

  Lobanov’s battle with Prince Dolgorukov was by no means the only fight which enlivened the formation of the twelve regiments. One of Lobanov’s two assistants, Major-General Rusanov, was so infuriated by his boss’s behaviour that he denounced him directly to the emperor, much to Arakcheev’s rage. There were also conflicts between the military officers overseeing the regiments’ formation and the provincial marshals, since the officers were interested only in getting the units ready at top speed whereas the marshals were also concerned at the price of the uniforms and equipment, for which they were going to have to pay. For all the arguments and difficulties, however, the new regiments proved a success. Six of them, together with three of Kleinmichel’s regiments, reinforced Kutuzov’s army while the latter was in camp at Tarutino. The field-marshal reported to Alexander that despite the ‘very short’ time available to train them ‘they were extremely well formed and most of the men also shoot well’.31

  Whatever the quality of Lobanov and Kleinmichel’s troops, 40,000 reinforcements were far too few to turn the war in Russia’s favour. Even as the two generals were struggling to form their eighteen regiments, Alexander ordered a massive new recruit levy – the 83rd – designed to net well over 150,000 conscripts. It would take months to assemble and train these men, however. To provide a second line of defence in the interim Alexander appealed to his nobles to mobilize and officer a temporary wartime militia from their serfs. In fact, with French troops already threatening their province the nobility of Smolensk was beginning to organize a ‘home guard’ even before the emperor’s appeal. But the drive to mobilize the militia was really launched when Alexander travelled to Moscow in late July. There he met a strong patriotic response to his appeal from the Moscow nobility. On 30 July a manifesto was issued, calling for a militia to be mobilized in sixteen provinces.32

  In all, some 230,000 men served in the militia. Almost all of them were private serfs, just as their officers were in the great majority of cases nobles from the militia’s own province. No state or crown peasants joined the militia. This made good sense. It was vital not to drain the pool of recruits for the regular army since the army would always be the core of Russian military power and the key to victory. In addition, finding enough officers for the militia was bound to be difficult. Nobles might well feel some obligation to serve in militia forces volunteered and formed by their own province’s noble assemblies, though many did in fact do everything possible to avoid this obligation. Finding suitable men to officer a militia drawn from state and crown peasants would be impossible.33

  The militiaman was to keep his civilian clothes. He needed a cloak (kaftan) which had to be voluminous enough for him to wear a fur jacket underneath it. His two pairs of boots also had to be wide enough to accommodate feet wrapped in socks and leggings against the winter cold. He would also need two Russian shirts with slanted collars, some handkerchiefs and puttees, and a cap which could be tied under his beard and keep his head warm in winter.34

  Both the peasant militiamen and the state liked this arrangement. For the militiaman it implied recognition that he was not a soldier and would return home at the end of the war. Meanwhile the state was freed from the obligation to provide militiamen with uniforms, which in present circumstances it was totally incapable of doing. As the minister of the interior reported in mid-July, there was already a 340,000-metre deficit on existing military orders for uniform cloth. It was totally inconceivable to meet the projected additional wartime requirement for 2.4 million metres. Not merely, wrote the minister, were there too few factories but Russia even lacked the sheep to provide this amount of wool. In fact, apart from the Guards, Dmitrii Lobanov-Rostovsky’s men were the last Russian recruits in 1812–14 to be supplied with the dark-green uniforms traditional in the Russian infantry. All subsequent conscripts had to struggle along in shoddy, grey ‘recruit dress’, made from inferior ‘peasant cloth’ and ill-suited to the rigours of a campaign.35

  The new militia was divided into three districts. The eight provinces of the first district were in principle committed to the defence of Moscow. The two provinces (St Petersburg and Novgorod) which made up the second district were given the task of defending the emperor’s capital. Both these districts were to be mobilized immediately. The third district of six provinces was not to be mobilized until after the harvest, and even then in stages. The third district’s commander was Lieutenant-General Count Petr Tolstoy, previously the ambassador in Paris. Tolstoy was far happier fighting Napoleon than paying court to him. As he explained, if only someone would give him enough artillery to cover his attacks, he would launch his columns of militia armed with pikes against the enemy in a Russian version of France’s own levée en masse of 1793.36 Much the most effective militia in 1812 were the regiments formed by St Petersburg and Novgorod. With Wittgenstein keeping the French at bay, they had a short time to train before being committed to action. The capital’s garrison provided officers and NCOs with long experience of training recruits. With the St Petersburg Arsenal at their service, all these militiamen received muskets. After five days and nights of training, Alexander I reviewed the Petersburg militia in the presence of the British ambassador, Lord Cathcart. Watching the new recruits perform their basic drill with remarkable skill, the ambassador commented to Alexander that ‘these men have sprouted out of the earth’. In the autumn 1812 campaign the Petersburg and Novgorod militias were to fight alongside Wittgenstein’s regulars in a number of battles, performing better than anyone had a right to expect.37

  The operations of the second militia district in 1812 were exceptional. Unlike their Prussian equivalent – the Landwehr – in 1813–15, the Russian militia was never integrated into brigades and divisions with units of the regular army. In the great majority of cases it remained an auxiliary corps rather than a part of the field army. In the early autumn of 1812 most militiamen were employed to man cordons and block roads in order to stop enemy foraging parties and marauders breaking out of the area around Moscow. When Napoleon retreated some militia units were used to police reconquered territory and help with the restoration of order, administration and communications. Others escorted prisoners of war. In 1813 most of the militia was used to blockade Danzig, Dresden and a number of other fortresses in the allied rear with large enemy garrisons of regular troops. None of this work was particularly heroic or romantic, though it took a heavy toll in lives. Nevertheless, the militia’s role was very important because it freed tens of thousands of Russian regular soldiers for service in the field.38

  A crucial problem for the militia in 1812 was lack of firearms. By the end of July Russia was facing an acute shortage of muskets. By now almost 350,000 of the 371,000 muskets held in store in the eighteen months before the war had been distributed. Current production of muskets depended almost entirely on state and private manufacturers in Tula. Between May and December 1812 Tula produced 127,000 muskets, at an average of just under 16,000 a month. After the fall of Moscow, however, many artisans fled from Tula back to their villages, which seriously affected production for many weeks and infuriated Alexander. Subsequently much effort had to be directed into manufacturing pistols for the cavalry reserves and for a time the main source of Russian muskets was the 101,000 imported from Britain and the many thousands captured from the French. Correctly, Kutuzov put top priority on arming the new recruits destined for the field army. The militia came at the back of the queue for firearms. The leftovers it received were usually of wretched quality and most militiamen in December 1812 were still armed with pikes.39

  All of this was a big disappointment to Kutuzov. On appointment as commander-in-chief, one of his first concerns was to learn what reserve forces stood behind the armies in the field. The truth was discouraging. The last remnant of what had initially been seen as a second line of defence were Miloradovich’s battalions, most of which joined Kutuzov before Borodino. All that now remained were Lobanov and Kleinmichel’s regiments, and the militia. Even if Lobanov could arrive in t
ime to defend Moscow, Alexander forbade Kutuzov to use his regiments. In the emperor’s opinion the men were insufficiently trained and, more importantly, it was crucial to retain a cadre around which the horde of new recruits could be formed into an effective army. Part of the Moscow and Smolensk militias did arrive in time to defend the city. After Borodino Kutuzov incorporated some of them into his regiments in order to make up for his enormous losses. With so many untrained and sometimes even unarmed men in the ranks, however, it is not at all surprising that he and Barclay rejected the idea of risking a battle on the outskirts of Moscow.40

  As a result, the city was lost. Thanks to Miloradovich and Barclay, the army did not disintegrate as it retreated through Moscow but in the following days it came closer to doing so than on any previous occasion. For the first time Kutuzov was not greeted with cheers as he rode past his marching regiments. To exhaustion and enormous losses were now added the shame and despair of abandoning Moscow without a fight. As always, a thin line could divide official requisitioning from arbitrary theft. Discipline suffered and many soldiers began to plunder the countryside. The Cossacks took the lead here but they were by no means alone. An impromptu market for plunder – officially taken from the French – was established near the camp at Tarutino.41

  Even a few junior officers joined in the plundering. Most felt deep gloom and a sense of betrayal at Moscow’s abandonment. Lieutenant Radozhitsky recalls that ‘superstitious people, unable to comprehend what was going on in front of their eyes, thought that Moscow’s fall meant the collapse of Russia, the triumph of the Antichrist and soon after a terrible judgement and the end of the world’. Far away with Tormasov’s army a despairing Major-General Prince Viazemsky asked God why he had allowed Moscow to fall: ‘This is to punish a nation that so loves thee!’ But Viazemsky had no lack of mundane villains on whom to blame disaster. They included ‘allowing foreigners to take root, enlightenment…Arakcheev and Kleinmichel and the degenerates of the court’. If this already came very close to blaming the emperor, the Grand Duchess Catherine was even more explicit in her letters to her brother. She told him that he was widely condemned for poor direction of the war and for dishonouring Russia by abandoning Moscow without a fight.42

  Although the despair was fierce, it was also rather brief. Within a few days moods were changing. A staff officer wrote that the sight of Moscow on fire, though initially contributing to the gloom, soon transformed it into anger: ‘In the place of despondency came courage and a thirst for revenge: at that time no one doubted that the French had deliberately set fire to it.’ The view began to spread that all was far from lost and that, as young Lieutenant Aleksandr Chicherin of the Semenovskys put it, the barbarians who had invaded his country would be made to pay for their ‘impertinence’. Barclay de Tolly contributed to the change of mood by visiting every unit in his army to explain why the Russians now had the upper hand and would win the campaign. Lieutenant Meshetich recalled how Barclay explained to the men of his battery that he had operated according to a plan and that ‘the long retreat had denied any successes to the enemy and would lead to his ruin, since he had fallen into a trap which had been prepared for him and would cause his destruction’.43

  At Tarutino the army resumed some elements of its normal life. Kutuzov insisted that religious services should be compulsory every Sunday and feast day, and he set an example by attending them all himself. That other great institution of Russian life, the bath-house, also came to the rescue as regiments got down to constructing banias for themselves. The fierce disciplinary code of the army also made its mark, on this occasion usefully. On 21 October, for example, Kutuzov confirmed a court martial’s death sentence on Ensign Tishchenko, who had turned his platoon of jaegers into a robber band, robbing and even killing the local population. The death sentence on eleven of his jaegers was reduced to running the gauntlet three times between 1,000 men.44

  Perhaps as much as anything, however, the change of mood was owed to the fact that after months of movement and exhaustion, the army finally had a few weeks rest in the camp at Tarutino. The position and fortifications of the camp were not particularly strong but the French army had shot its bolt and left the Russians in peace. Just after the harvest in fertile central Russia the army could remain sedentary for a few weeks without going hungry. Abundant supplies came up through Kaluga from the rich agricultural provinces to the south. Reinforcements moved up too. Lieutenant Chicherin of the Semenovskys arrived in Tarutino soaked to the skin, penniless and without any change of clothes, since all his baggage had been lost in Moscow. But his family came to the rescue, bringing him among other things a tent so palatial that it was temporarily borrowed by Kutuzov himself. He recalls that the weather was perfect and that the officers indulged in conversations, music and reading – all enjoyed with the special flavour of a wartime camp. Only one point truly worried them and that was the fear that their emperor might make peace with the French. One of the officers commented that if that happened he would emigrate and fight Napoleon in Spain.45

  The decision on war or peace rested with the emperor in Petersburg. In all reason there was no cause to expect him to make peace. Frederick William III had fought on after the fall of Berlin and Francis II had refused to make peace after the fall of Vienna both in 1805 and 1809, though in the latter case the Austrians were fighting without allies. Moscow was not even Alexander’s real capital. In addition, to make peace after Moscow’s fall, in the teeth of elite opposition, was to put his life and throne at risk, as the emperor well knew. Underlying many of the tensions of 1812, however, was the fact that neither Alexander nor the Russian elites fully trusted the other to keep their nerve or preserve their commitment to victory amidst the great strains of Napoleon’s invasion.46

  After leaving the army on 19 July Alexander had paused briefly in Smolensk to consult with his provincial governor and generals before pressing on to Moscow. He arrived in the city late in the evening of 23 July. The next day provided one of the most striking images and memories of 1812 and was immortalized by Leo Tolstoy. At nine in the morning of a bright summer day, when Alexander emerged onto the ‘Red Steps’ outside his Kremlin palace in order to make his way to the Uspensky cathedral he was greeted by an immense crowd, packed so tightly that his adjutants-general had a great battle to force a path through to the church. One of these generals, Evgraf Komarovsky, wrote, ‘I never saw such enthusiasm among the people as at that time.’ The emperor was greeted with the ringing of the bells of all the Kremlin churches and wave after wave of cheers from the crowd. The ordinary people pressed forward to touch him and implored him to lead them against the enemy. This was the union of tsar and people, the core political myth of imperial Russia, in its fullest and most perfect form. Even more than in normal times, at this moment of threat and uncertainty, for most ordinary Russians the monarch was the supreme focus for their loyalty and a vital part of their identity.47

  The next day Alexander met the nobles and merchants of Moscow, who greeted him with promises of massive support in men and money for the new militia. The emperor was moved, subsequently commenting that he felt unworthy to lead such a people. Delighted by Rostopchin’s achievement in mobilizing this vast show of loyalty and support, Alexander kissed him on both cheeks on his departure. Aleksei Arakcheev congratulated Rostopchin on this unique mark of imperial approval. ‘I who have served him since the day he began his reign have never received this.’ Aleksandr Balashev, the minister of police, overheard this remark and subsequently muttered to Rostopchin, ‘You may be very sure that Arakcheev will never forgive or forget that kiss.’ Amidst all the patriotic enthusiasm normal political life continued in other ways too. When Alexander was leaving Rostopchin asked him for instructions as to future policy but the emperor responded that he had full confidence in his governor-general, who must act according to circumstances and his own judgement. In the midst of war’s chaos this was fair enough but it did mean that Rostopchin ultimately bore sole responsibility for the f
ire which destroyed the city.48

  Except for a brief expedition to Finland to meet Bernadotte, Alexander spent the rest of the summer and autumn in Petersburg. When he returned from Finland on 3 September he found waiting for him Sir Robert Wilson, a British officer who had been attached to the Russian army in 1806–7 and who had just arrived in Petersburg from Barclay de Tolly’s headquarters. Wilson spoke to Alexander about dissension among his generals and their opposition to Barclay, which came as no surprise to the emperor. Far more shocking was his generals’ request that he rid himself of Rumiantsev or, as Wilson put it, if his generals ‘were but assured that His Majesty would no longer give his confidence to advisers whose policy they mistrusted, they would testify their allegiance by exertions and sacrifices which would add splendour to the crown, and security to the throne under every adversity’.49

  Fine rhetoric aside, this was a demand by his generals to impose their will on the monarch. It was certainly not made more palatable to Alexander by being conveyed through the agent of a foreign power. Wilson recorded that ‘during this exposition the Emperor’s colour occasionally visited and left his cheek’. Alexander took some time to regain his composure, though he handled Wilson’s démarche with skill and patience. Calling Wilson ‘the rebels’ ambassador’, he reacted calmly to his generals’ request, saying that he knew and trusted these officers: ‘I have no fears of their having any unavowed designs against my authority.’50