Germany after Frederick William III’s appeal ‘To My People’.
One entirely true reason why Russia defeated Napoleon was that many able young officers were promoted on merit to key positions during the war. Among the Russian leaders, Aleksandr Chernyshev and Johann von Diebitsch became lieutenant-generals aged 28, and Mikhail Vorontsov aged 30. They were just the tip of the iceberg. Count Karl von Nesselrode was only 28 when he took control of Russian espionage in Paris in 1808. He served subsequently as Alexander’s chief diplomatic adviser in 1813–14. Even the older generation of military leaders was often not that old: Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky, who served as Alexander’s chief of staff, was only 38 when the war ended. These men were to dominate Russia’s army and government for many subsequent decades. The official histories of the war by Dmitrii Buturlin and Aleksandr Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky were very careful not to offend these grandees. There are British parallels. The Duke of Wellington lived for almost four decades after Waterloo and was in a position to make his own view on the battle almost canonical in Britain.16
There were, however, important differences between Wellington and the Russian leaders. Although the duke had many political enemies in the 1820s and 1830s, by the time he died he was a national icon. The same was far from true of the Russian generals who lived as long as him. Just after Alexander I’s death in 1825 a group of officers, the so-called Decembrists, attempted to overthrow the absolute monarchy and install a constitutional regime or even a republic. Among them were officers such as Mikhail Orlov and Prince Serge Volkonsky who had distinguished themselves in the wars. The coup was crushed. Key heroes of the wars such as Aleksandr Chernyshev, Alexander Benckendorff and Petr Volkonsky played a part in its suppression and went on to serve as ministers under Nicholas I well into the mid-nineteenth century.
The Decembrist revolt and its suppression was the beginning of the exceptionally bitter split between right and left in Russia which ended in the revolution of 1917. The violent hatred between the two camps helped to poison and distort memories of 1812–14. In the Winter Palace in Petersburg there is a fine gallery with portraits of almost all the generals from 1812–14. As a graduate student in the Soviet Union in the 1970s I once got into a fierce argument with a young woman who was furious at the fact that among the portraits is that of Alexander Benckendorff, who subsequently served as Nicholas I’s chief of the security police. My attempts to argue that Benckendorff was a war hero got nowhere. When I called him a partisan leader, which is exactly what he was for much of 1812–14, she stormed off in disgust. The young student was not at all pro-Communist but she was a product of the Moscow radical-liberal intelligentsia. For her, heroes of 1812 in general and partisans in particular were ‘friends of the people’ and therefore by definition honorary members of her radical political camp and tradition.
When it took over the 1812 myth and made it an integral part of Soviet patriotism, the Communist regime to a great extent set such ideas in stone. The historical reality of Russia’s war effort had to be startlingly distorted to suit official ideology in the Stalinist era. Alexander I had to be marginalized and vilified, and the war’s international context distorted; Kutuzov was elevated to the level of Napoleon or higher, while his aristocratic origins and court connections (together with those of Prince Petr Bagration) had to be overlooked; the significance of mass resistance to Napoleon had to be exaggerated and occasional resistance to landlords and government officials somehow interpreted as constructive elements in the people’s war against both domestic tyranny and the French. Official norms of this sort crippled Russian scholarship on the Napoleonic era for a time and have left a mark on how many ordinary Russians of the older generation think about 1812–14. Contemporary Russian historians have mercifully long since escaped the Stalinist myths about the Napoleonic era, however.17
Nevertheless, for all its crude distortions, the Soviet-era official interpretation of the Napoleonic Wars still in many ways remained true to the spirit of Leo Tolstoy, who was by far the most important nineteenth-century mythmaker as regards his impact on Russian (and foreign) understanding of Russia’s role in the Napoleonic era. Tolstoy depicts elemental Russian patriotism as uniting in defence of national soil. He paints Kutuzov as the embodiment of Russian patriotism and wisdom, contrasting him with the idiocy of so-called professional military experts, whom he sees as Germans and pedants. His conception of history in any case leaves little room for skilful leadership or even for the attempt to direct events in rational fashion. Instead, he celebrates the moral strength, courage and patriotism of ordinary Russians. Perhaps most important in the context of the present book, Tolstoy ends his novel
The popular or ‘Tolstoyan’ Russian interpretation of the war fits rather well with foreign accounts that play down the role of Russia’s army and government in the victory over Napoleon. Napoleon himself was much inclined to blame geography, the climate and chance; this absolved him from responsibility for the catastrophe. Historians usually add Napoleon’s miscalculations and blunders to the equation but many of them are happy to go along with Tolstoy’s implied conclusion that the Russian leadership had little control over events and that Russian ‘strategy’ was a combination of improvisation and accident. Inevitably too, Russian lack of interest in 1813–14 left the field free for historians of other nations who were happy to tell the story of these years with Russia’s role marginalized.
Of course it is not difficult to understand why Russians found it easiest to identify with a war fought on national soil in defence of Moscow and under a commanding general called Kutuzov. It was harder to be as enthusiastic about campaigns waged in Germany and France under commanders called Wittgenstein and Barclay de Tolly in defence of a true but somewhat metaphysical concept of Russian security rooted in ideas about the European balance of power. As the war’s centenary approached in 1912 there was great interest, and many new publications resulted. By this time, however, Russia was on the eve of war with those very same Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs with whom she had allied herself in 1813. Obviously, this was not the best of moments to celebrate Russo-German solidarity. In 1813–14 the two most brilliant Russian staff officers were Karl von Toll, a Baltic German, and Johann von Diebitsch, the son of a Prussian staff officer who had transferred to the Russian service. Almost two-thirds of the troops in the most successful allied force – Field-Marshal Blucher’s so-called Army of Silesia – were in fact Russian but Blucher’s two Russian army corps’ commanders were Alexandre de Langeron and Fabian von der Osten-Sacken. By now too Nikolai Rumiantsev and Aleksandr Kurakin had been marginalized and there were no ethnic Russians at all among Alexander’s chief advisers on foreign policy. Meanwhile the emperor himself gave many Russians even at the time the feeling that he saw Russia as backward and unworthy of his ideals, and was willing to sacrifice Russian interests in the name of European security or even so as to win applause for himself in fashionable Europe.
At the root of all these issues is the contrast, very familiar to historians, between Russia as empire and Russia as nation and people.19 In 1814 the British, French and Germans were, or were in the process of becoming, nations. The nationalist myths generated from the Napoleonic Wars suited this reality and endeavour. Russia in 1814 was a dynastic, aristocratic and multi-ethnic empire. Its core was the Russian land, people and nobility but these did not yet constitute a nation and could never entirely do so as long as the dynastic empire existed. The Russian Empire won the war of 1812–14 but the myths which have subsequently lived in Russian memory have above all been ethno-national ones. That is the most important reason why – uniquely, and in total contrast to the Germans, French and British – Russian national myths derived from the Napoleonic Wars greatly underestimate the Russian achievement in 1812–14.20
A key aim of this book is to get back beyond the Russian myths to the realities of the Russian war effort in 1812–14. I am above all interested in establishing how and why Russia overcame the enormous challenge presented by Napoleon in these years. There are also other reasons for questioning aspects of Russian mythology about the Napoleonic era.
One reason is a reflection on empires and nations. Both generally and in the Russian case it seems to me a mistake to see everything in the imperial tradition as harmful and the nation as the inevitable embodiment of virtue. This is in no sense a justification for neo-empire in today’s world. But empire in its day – unlike very many nations – was often relatively tolerant, pluralist and even occasionally benevolent in its attitude towards the many communities who sheltered under its protection. This was true too as regards the Russian Empire’s treatment of most non-Russians, most of the time. It was certainly one of the empire’s strengths in the era of Alexander I that it was willing and able to employ and trust the loyalty of so many non-Russian elites. More specifically, it seems a
