Russia Against Napoleon

‘the number of men wanting to become officers was very small, even among the very numerous nobility of the province’. Returning to military service contradicted the basic pattern of life for Russian nobles, by which young men served for a number of years as bachelor officers and then retired to the provinces to marry, run their estates, or take up elected jobs in the local administration. In time the number of volunteers grew, and it may have helped that the emperor now allowed ex-officers to return at the rank to which they had been promoted on retirement, rather than the one last held when in their regiments. In some cases, however, dire poverty seems to have been the main motive for nobles to return to military service.²⁸

Lobanov did not help his own cause by interpreting Alexander’s decree in typically nit-picking and infuriating fashion. Among the governors, Prince Aleksei Dolgorukov of Simbirsk seems to have been the most enthusiastic about trying to mobilize volunteers to return to military service. By mid-August he had sent forty-two would-be officers to join Lobanov’s regiments. By Dolgorukov’s own recognition one of these men, retired Sub-Lieutenant Ianchevsky, was a marginal case, since he had at one point been censured for drunkenness. The governor wrote to Lobanov that he was submitting Ianchevsky’s case to him for decision, since the man was very repentant and wanted to redeem himself on the battlefield. Lobanov believed in fulfilling imperial orders down to the last comma, however, and promptly issued an official reprimand against Dolgorukov since the emperor’s decree inviting ex- officers to return to service had required them to have good records.²⁹

Even by mid-September Lobanov’s regiments had less than half their full complement of officers, and of the 285 men assigned to regiments only 204 were nobles returning to service, most of the rest coming from that thoroughly dubious source, the internal security troops. The urgent need for the 227 spare officers dispatched by Andreas Kleinmichel is clear. On the other hand Lobanov had been sent twelve excellent officers from the Petersburg cadet corps, as well as an almost complete battalion of trainee NCOs from one of the grenadier training units. He had also been promised officers, NCOs and the best unmarried veterans from the units patrolling the frontier in south-western Siberia, who had already set out on their long trek to join his command.³⁰

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 levee 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