Russia Against Napoleon

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.

It is true that in this emergency the crown had the right to require the nobles’ assistance. A hundred years before, in the reign of Peter the Great, male nobles were forced to serve as officers for as long as their health permitted. After Peter’s death compulsory service was first reduced in length and then in 1762 abolished. Catherine II subsequently confirmed the nobles’ freedom from compulsory service to the state but the charter she issued to the nobility made an exception for emergencies.

Since the title and dignity of noble status from ancient times, now and in the future is won by service and labour useful to the empire and to the throne, and since the existence of the Russian nobility depends on the security of the fatherland and the throne: for these reasons at any time when the Russian autocracy needs and requires the nobility to serve for the common good then every nobleman is bound at the first summons of the autocratic power to spare neither his labour nor his very life for the service of the state.¹³

Though no one could deny that the present situation was precisely the kind of emergency envisaged by Catherine II, her grandson with his usual tact ‘invited’ the nobility to contribute to the war effort and expressed his conviction that noble patriotism would respond to his call with enthusiasm. But the provincial governors often referred to these ‘requests’ as the emperor’s commands. When it came to sharing out the financial burden of providing supplies for the army or to finding officers for the militia the marshals of the nobility also assumed that all nobles had the obligation to serve the state at this time of crisis. Though they usually called first for volunteers, they had no doubt of their right to assign nobles to the militia when this was necessary. Many nobles volunteered for the army or the militia out of patriotism and on their own initiative. Others responded loyally to the noble marshals’ call. But there were also many examples of nobles who evaded service. Faced with evasion, provincial governors and noble marshals harangued and blustered but actually did very little to punish evaders. Probably the only effective response would have been imprisonment, confiscation of property and even execution, but none of these seems to have been even threatened.¹⁴

This says something fundamental about the Russia of Alexander I. Alexander’s regime was in some ways formidable and devastating in the demands it imposed on the Russian masses, especially in wartime. But this was not the Russia of Peter the Great, let alone of Stalin. It was not possible to control the elites through terror. Nobles could not openly oppose Alexander’s policies but they could drag their feet and subvert the execution of policy: their sabotage of attempts to increase tax revenue from noble estates in the months before the war illustrates this facet of their power. Noble sentiment therefore had to be taken into account and the elites needed to be wooed as well as constrained. Indeed, faced by Hitler’s invasion even Stalin’s regime realized that terror was not enough and that Russian patriotism must be mobilized. Alexander needed no reminding on this score, still less on the need to achieve harmony with the nobility in order to stabilize the home front and ensure commitment to the war. In late August he told one of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting that so long as Russians remained committed to victory and ‘so long as morale doesn’t collapse, all will go well’.¹⁵

The diary of Major-General Prince Vasili Viazemsky illustrates why Alexander did need to worry about noble ‘morale’. The Viazemskys were an ancient princely family but only a few of them were still rich and prominent by the reign of Alexander I. Vasili Viazemsky owned fewer than a hundred serfs and was definitely not in this group. His career had been spent far from Petersburg and the Guards, in ordinary jaeger regiments. Though well educated, his concerns and opinions were those of the middling provincial gentry. When the war began, Viazemsky was commanding a brigade of jaegers in Tormasov’s Third Army, guarding the approaches to the Ukraine.

Like almost all his peers, Viazemsky was baffled and dismayed by the retreat of the Russian army in the face of Napoleon’s invasion. By early September, as news arrived that Napoleon was approaching the Russian heartland, bafflement turned to anger.

One’s heart trembles at Russia’s condition. It is no wonder that there are intrigues in the armies. They are full of foreigners and are commanded by parvenus. Who is the emperor’s adviser at court? Count Arakcheev. When did he ever fight in a war? What victory made him famous? What did he ever contribute to his fatherland? And it is he who is close to the emperor at this critical moment. The whole army and the whole people condemn the retreat of our armies from Vilna to Smolensk. Either the whole army and the entire people are idiots or the person who gave orders for this retreat is an idiot.

In Viazemsky’s view his personal prospects and those of his country were intertwined and gloomy. Russia faced defeat and the loss of its glory. It would be reduced in size and population, its long and weak borders thereby becoming even more difficult to defend. A new system of administration would be needed and would be a source of much confusion. ‘Religion has been weakened by enlightenment and what therefore will be left to us as regards the control of our ungovernable, tempestuous and hungry masses?’ With new demands now being imposed on noble estates to support the militia, ‘my own position will be really good. Every tenth man taken as a militia recruit from my estate and I have to feed the people they leave behind: I don’t have a kopek, I have many debts, I have nothing to support my children and no secure future in my career.’¹⁶

In the summer of 1812 Alexander worried that the morale of Russia’s elites might collapse and they in turn harboured doubts about his strategy and the strength of his commitment to victory. Nevertheless the alliance between crown and nobility held firm. This was hugely important as regards the army’s supply during the 1812 campaign.

On the eve of the war Alexander appealed to Russian society to help provide food and transport for the army. In response, Moscow’s nobles and merchants donated a million rubles in one day. In far-off Saratov on the banks of the Volga the governor, Aleksei Panchulidzev, received Alexander’s appeal and a ‘request’ from the minister of police that Saratov province contribute 2,000 oxen and 1,000 carts to help with the army’s transport and an additional 1,000 cattle for its food. The nobles and town corporations of the province agreed but added an extra 500 cattle to this list on their own initiative. They reckoned that in Saratov a cart with two oxen would cost 230 rubles, of which the cart itself accounted for only 50. Beef cattle would cost 65 rubles a head. In addition, however, 270 workers would have to be hired for six months to get the carts and animals to the army. Their pay was 30 rubles a month, which came to 48,600 rubles in all. Even before the war had begun, Saratov had therefore committed more than 400,000 rubles to the army’s upkeep.¹⁷

During the 1812 campaign the field armies spent extremely little on food. Total expenditure by the Russian field armies was only 19 million rubles in 1812, most of which was the troops’ pay. In the initial stage of the campaign the army was partly fed from the magazines established in the western borderlands in the two previous years. Food and fodder sufficient to feed an army of 200,000 men and their horses for six months had been stored. These preparations were only partly successful, however, since there were too few small magazines (etapy) at intervals along the roads down which the army retreated. In any case, the stores had often been positioned to support a Russian advance into the Duchy of Warsaw. One Soviet source suggests that 40 per cent of the food stored in magazines was lost to the French or, much more often, burned, though the intendant-general, Georg Kankrin, had always denied this.¹⁸

From the start of the campaign food was requisitioned by the army’s intendancy or even just taken from the civilian population by the regiments in return for receipts. This made good sense. Any food not taken by the Russians would be seized by the French. The system of handing out receipts was supposed to ensure that