requisition was conducted in orderly fashion and did not become mere plunder. It was also designed so that the government could compensate the population later for the food supplied. The Russian government did actually do this, after the war setting up special commissions to collect the receipts and offset them against future taxes. In a way, therefore, when it worked properly the system of requisitioning and providing receipts was a sort of forced loan, which allowed the state to defer wartime expenditure until its finances returned to peacetime order.19
How Russian troops were supposed to feed themselves when on campaign was set out in great detail in the new law on field armies issued early in 1812. The basic principle was that the army must requisition all the food it needed from the local population. The catch was that the new law was designed to cover Russian armies operating abroad. Two months later, however, in late March 1812 the scope of this law was extended to campaigns in the Russian interior as well. Provinces declared to be in a state of war would come under the authority of the army’s commander-in-chief and of his intendant-general, to whom all civil officials were subordinated. As one might expect of a law designed for the administration of conquered territory, the powers given to the military authorities were sweeping. The supplementary law only envisaged border regions coming within its scope but by September 1812 a swath of provinces reaching as far as Kaluga to the south of Moscow had been declared to be in a state of war. In these provinces much of the business of feeding the army, caring for its sick, and even levying winter clothing for the coming campaign was dumped on the shoulders of the provincial governors.20
Between them the army’s intendants, the provincial governors and the nobility ensured that Russian troops seldom went hungry in the first half of the 1812 campaign. This was not too difficult in the prosperous Russian heartland of the empire during and just after the harvest season. It helped that a network of magazines existed in the Russian countryside as a guarantee against harvest failure and famine. On a number of occasions the nobles agreed to feed the army from these magazines which they would then refill at their own expense. Voluntary contributions of food, fodder, horses, transport, equipment and clothing were very numerous. As one might expect, the biggest donations came from nearby provinces which felt the enemy threat and could most easily transport supplies to the army. Probably no other province quite matched the scale of Pskov’s contribution to Wittgenstein’s corps but Smolensk and Moscow were not far behind, and Kaluga’s governor, Pavel Kaverin, proved immensely efficient and hard-working in channelling supplies to Kutuzov’s army in the camp at Tarutino. One rather sober contemporary historian puts the voluntary contributions to the war from Russian society in 1812 at 100 million rubles, the great majority of which was provided by the nobles. Accurate estimates are very difficult, however, since so much of this contribution came in kind.21
At the same time as they were helping to feed the army, the provincial governors and nobles were also being asked to help with the creation of new military units which would form a second line of defence behind Barclay’s and Bagration’s armies. The first requests for assistance went out from Alexander in Vilna in early June, in other words before Napoleon had crossed the Russian border.
Part of this new military reserve was to be the recruits currently assembled in the ten so-called ‘second-line’ recruit depots. Major-General Andreas Kleinmichel was given the task of forming six new regiments – in other words somewhat fewer than 14,000 men – from these conscripts. With Napoleon now advancing through Belorussia, Kleinmichel was ordered to concentrate and train his six regiments well to the rear, in the area between Tver and Moscow. He was given an excellent cadre of officers and veteran troops to help him in this task. They included all the training cadres from the second-line recruit depots and all the officers and NCOs left behind to evacuate stores and close down the twenty-four first-line depots. In addition, he was sent two battalions of the Moscow garrison regiment and two fine battalions of marines from Petersburg. In time Kleinmichel had enough officers to be able to dispatch some of them to help Prince Dmitrii Lobanov-Rostovsky, who was struggling to form twelve new regiments in the central Russian provinces.22
Alexander’s orders to create these twelve regiments were drafted on 25 May in Vilna. The great novelty was that these regiments were supposed to be created and paid for by the efforts of provincial society. The state would supply recruits and muskets but it was hoped that nobles who had previously served in the army would come out of retirement and provide all the officers. A province’s nobles were expected to pay for their regiment’s uniforms, equipment and food. The town corporations must pay for their transport. The twelve regiments would be formed in six provinces: Kostroma, Vladimir and Iaroslavl to the north, and Riazan, Tambov and Voronezh to the south. Each of these six provinces was supposed to officer and equip one regiment. Nine other provinces were to share responsibility for the formation of the six remaining regiments.23
As usual when receiving orders of this sort, the governor’s first move was to discuss the matter with his province’s marshal of the nobility. The district noble marshals were summoned to the provincial capital to organize the new decree’s execution. Given the size of Russian provinces, it was seldom possible to arrange the governor’s crucial meeting with the district marshals within less than eight days. Both the nobles and the town corporations immediately accepted the task set by the monarch. Alexander had suggested that the three southern provinces – Riazan, Tambov and Voronezh – coordinate their efforts to form their regiments. Their governors reckoned that it would cost 188,000 rubles to feed, clothe and equip each regiment and a further 28,000 rubles to build its transport wagons. Prices differed greatly across Russia’s regions, however. The Kostroma noble marshals believed that in their province 290,000 rubles would be needed. The marshals agreed to divide the required sum equally among all the province’s serfowners.24
Raising the money was relatively simple. Acquiring the uniforms, equipment and wagons was far more complicated. The governors and noble marshals had little experience of forming regiments and these weeks of dire emergency as Napoleon advanced into Russia were not the easiest time to learn. All the provinces agreed that most of the equipment and materials would have to come from Moscow. Since a single regiment required, for example, 2,900 metres of dark-green cloth and almost 4,500 pairs of boots, a great deal of transport had to be arranged. The three southern provinces opted to have the uniforms tailored in Moscow because they did not have sufficient workers competent to do the job in time themselves. The result was that, for example, 1,620 uniforms for the Riazan regiment never left Moscow and were destroyed in the fire. The northern provinces were much less purely agricultural, however, and Governor Nikolai Pasynkov was convinced that the tailors of Kostroma could handle the task for themselves.25
All the provinces baulked at the need to construct ammunition and provisions wagons on the models supplied by the army, though in Kostroma Governor Pasynkov told the local artisans to construct an approximation to the model. Much more common was the wail from the governor of Penza, deep into the agricultural region south-east of Moscow: ‘For all my desire and zeal to help with the actual construction of the ammunition and provisions wagons, it is totally impossible for me to do so because we completely lack artisans who could do such work.’ Very soon the governors were relieved to hear that they need only provide the money for the wagons, which would be built in Moscow under the supervision of the city’s commandant, Lieutenant-General Hesse. Unfortunately, however, Alexander and Balashev had neglected to forewarn Hesse, who reacted to the governors’ joyous thanks for his help with bafflement. It was to avoid messes like this in the future that on 29 June Alexander made Aleksei Arakcheev his chief assistant for military administration. Arakcheev never had much influence on strategy or operations but for the rest of the war he was to be a very effective overlord of all matters concerning the mobilization, training and equipment of Russia’s reserve and militia forces.26
The desperate efforts required to form the new regiments tell one much about Russian provincial life in Alexander’s reign. In Riazan, the local merchants tried to charge exorbitant sums to feed the regiments forming around the town. Perhaps because they would have to pay for half of this food anyway, the nobility offered to provide it all for free. The provincial marshal, retired Major-General Lev Izmailov, who had a vicious reputation for mistreating his serfs, took a large proportion of this burden on himself. More difficult was medical help for the new regiments. There only appear to have been two doctors available in Riazan in 1812. One of them, young Dr Gernet, behaved heroically, adding care for the regiments’ sick to his usual job, volunteering to accompany them when they went on campaign, and even paying for some of their medicines out of his own pocket. Dr Moltiansky on the other hand did everything possible to avoid helping the soldiers even when they were in Riazan and flatly refused to accompany them on campaign. In the end Governor Bukharin forced him to do so by threatening to exile him from the province and thereby destroy his practice.27
The most difficult task of all was to find enough officers for the new regiments. Alexander clearly overestimated nobles’ willingness to return to service, and failed to offer sufficient incentives for them to do so. The governor of Voronezh province reported to Lobanov in early July that although he had summoned an emergency assembly of the province’s nobles not one of those present had volunteered to return to military service. In Riazan,
