have to give battle before abandoning Russia’s ancient capital, and so he selected the field near Borodino, which he prepared with field fortifications.
Napoleon, chastened by his experience at Smolensk and desperate for a decisive battle, refused the advice of his subordinates to envelop the Russian position at Borodino and on September 7 launched a bloody frontal assault instead. The Russian army held, and Kutuzov mustered it to continue its retreat that night. Barely pausing in Moscow, Kutuzov withdrew to the south in order to prevent Napoleon from marching into the rich fields of Ukraine to replenish his supplies, and also to protect Russian reinforcements coming from those regions. Napoleon occupied Moscow on September 14 and remained in the city for more than a month before abandoning it on October 18. During the French occupation, the city was destroyed almost completely in an enormous fire, although the exact cause of the blaze remains unclear and controversial to this day. Having decided to leave Moscow when Alexander refused to make any move toward peace, Napoleon tried to march southward but found Ku-tuzov’s army arrayed against him at Maloyaroslavets. The bloody battle there on October 24-25 forced Napoleon back to the Warsaw- Moscow highway along which he had originally invaded, and he began the long retreat by the way he had come.
Napoleon’s retreating forces suffered horribly. They had eaten most of the supplies along the road on their inward march, and the Russians had deliberately pursued a scorched-earth policy to destroy the remaining supplies. The burning of Moscow had also deprived Napoleon of valuable supplies, and when Kutuzov cut him off from Ukraine, the fate of the Grande Arm?e was sealed. All the way back to the Russian border, peasants, Cossacks, and Russian regular troops harried the French, who died in droves. The Russians attempted to cut off the French retreat altogether at the Battle of the Berezina on November 27-28. Although Napoleon managed to batter his way through, his casualties were staggering. When the remnants of the French army struggled across the Russian frontier, one of the most powerful armies ever assembled to that point in history had been virtually wiped out.
It is customary to credit the Russian winter with the destruction of the French army, but this notion is greatly exaggerated. The most critical events in the campaign-Napoleon’s initial operations, the maneuver at Smolensk, the Battle of Borodino, the seizure of Moscow, and even the Battle of Maloyaroslavets-were fought before hard cold and snow set in. The Russian army was forced to confront the vast French force on its own without climatological aids for four months, and literally hundreds of thousands of French soldiers perished in that time. The hard winter that followed merely added to the misery and completed the destruction of a French force that had already been defeated by Russian arms.
The invasion of Russia set the stage for the collapse of Napoleon’s hegemony in Europe. In the wake of Napoleon’s flight, the Prussian auxiliary corps he had forced to advance into the Baltic States made peace with the Russia on its own accord and committed Prussia to fight against France. As Russian forces crossed their own frontier and marched westward, Austria, Britain, and Sweden were persuaded to join the now-victorious Russian army,
FRUNZE, MIKHAIL VASILIEVICH
and the final coalition against Napoleon was born. By catalyzing this last great and victorious coalition, the War of 1812 marked a profound turning point in European history and also in Russian history. Pursuing the French back to France, Russian troops found themselves in Paris itself. Alexander committed himself absolutely to a prominent role in the affairs of the entire European continent. Russian soldiers who had the unique chance to see the French capital, on the other hand, would ultimately become so frustrated with Alexander’s conservative regime as to stage the Decembrist Rebellion in 1825. The costs of this greatest of Russian victories were, in every respect, staggering. See also: BORODINO, BATTLE OF; DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION; FRANCE, RELATIONS WITH; HOLY ALLIANCE; KUTUZOV, MIKHAIL ILARIONOVICH; QUADRUPLE ALLIANCE AND QUINTUPLE ALLIANCE
Duffy, Christopher. (1973). Borodino and the War of 1812. New York: Scribner. Tarle, Evgeny Viktorovich. (1942). Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia, 1812. New York: Oxford University Press.
FREDERICK W. KAGAN
station several thousand troops along the Bank Line (Bereg), an especially vulnerable 250-kilometer (155.3- mile) stretch of the Oka between Kolomna and Kaluga, every spring and summer. By century’s end the Abatis Line (Zasechnaya cherta), an additional network of forest abatis and fortifications almost 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) in span, had arisen another 100 kilometers (62 miles) farther south; the field army was restationed along it, providing central Muscovy with greater defense in depth and also encouraging military colonization of the forest-steppe zone. From 1637 to 1658 a new Belgorod Line was built along most of the southern edge of the forest-steppe, from Akhtyrka in northeastern Ukraine to Chelnavsk; it consisted of earthen fortifications built in the new Dutch manner, as well as abatis, and linked twenty-five garrison towns. From 1646 it became the new line of deployment for the corps of the southern field army as well as a place d’armes for aggressive operations down the Don (against the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman fortress of Azov) and in Ukraine (against the Commonwealth during the Thirteen Years War). In 1679-1680 most of the steppe along the Northern Donets and Oskol rivers was enclosed behind yet another new line, the Izyuma Line, another 160 kilometers (99.42 miles) southeast of the Belgorod Line.
FRONTIER FORTIFICATIONS
Fortified lines played a major role in Muscovy’s southern frontier defense strategy. The great scale of these fortifications projects testified to the Muscovite state’s considerable powers of resource mobilization.
The defense of Muscovy’s southern frontier relied heavily upon long fortified lines linking garrison towns and serving as stations for the corps of the southern frontier field army. These lines were never intended to be impermeable walls keeping out the Tatars, but rather a supporting infrastructure for reconnaissance patrols, signaling, and corps movements beyond or behind the defense line. The gradual extension of these defense lines deeper into the steppe over the course of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reflected the Muscovite state’s successes in the military colonization of its southern frontier and in its command and control of much larger field armies.
To stop the Crimean Tatars from invading central Muscovy, it had become necessary by 1512 to See also: CRIMEAN TATARS; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; MUSCOVY; THIRTEEN YEARS’ WAR
BRIAN DAVIES
(1885-1925), military leader and theoretician.
Mikhail Vasilievich Frunze was a native of Semirchesk oblast, the son of an orderly, and a student in the Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, from which he failed to graduate. He joined the social democratic movement (1904) and led strikes in Ivanovo (May 1905). Arrested and twice sentenced to death, he was exiled instead and managed to escape. He did party work in Belorussia (1917), was head of the militia in Minsk, and was a member of the Party committee of the West Front. Frunze was head of the Party Soviet in Shuia (September 1917). Opposed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he joined the “Left-Communists.” Frunze
was military commissar of Yaroslavl Military District. From February 1919, he was at the front as commander of the Fourth and Turkestan Armies, then he was commander of the south wing of the East Front, fighting against Kolchak. From July 1919, Frunze was commander of the East Front deployed in the Urals, and from September 1919, he commanded the Turkestan Front. From September 1920, Frunze served as commander of the South Front deployed in Crimea and accepted the surrender of Pyotr Wrangel’s remaining forces in the Crimea, who were later massacred by the Party and Cheka operatives, despite his disapproval. From December 1920, he headed the Revolutionary Military Soviet (RVS) and commanded the Crimea and Ukraine forces, which embarked on various punitive operations. He was elected to the Party Central Committee (1921), appointed as Deputy People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs (March 1924), and later (April 1924) served as the Chief of Staff of the Red Army. Frunze was a candidate member of the Politburo (1924). He authored a number of studies, including a guide on reorganizing the Red Army (1921), on military doctrine (1921, 1924), and on Vladimir Lenin and the Red Army (1925). He led the military reforms in 1924-1925. Frunze’s ideas, formed in bruising battles with Leon Trotsky, involved a “unified doctrine” and setting up of a bureaucratically structured Red Army high command to meet
