Russia Against Napoleon

The Home Front in 1812

Napoleon’s plan had been to wage a limited ‘cabinet’ war against Alexander I. The French emperor might contemplate wiping Prussia off the map but he believed that it was neither in his power nor in his interests to destroy the Russian Empire. Instead he hoped to weaken Russia, force her back into the Continental System, and make her accept French domination of Europe. Far from desiring to drive Alexander off his throne or throw Russian society into revolution and chaos, Napoleon looked to the tsar to agree peace conditions and then enforce them on Russian society. Partly for this reason, he stressed his personal respect for Alexander during the 1812 campaign and made clear his view that the true initiator of the war was Britain and her stooges in the Petersburg elite.

Alexander and his advisers well understood Napoleon’s aims and tactics. In this as in every other way, they sought to impose on him the kind of war he least wanted to fight. In political terms this meant a Spanish-style national war to the death, in which the emperor would refuse all negotiations and would seek to mobilize Russian society behind the war effort by appeals to patriotic, religious and xenophobic sentiment. In his memorandum of April 1812 Petr Chuikevich stressed that Russia’s key strengths must include ‘the resoluteness of its monarch and the loyalty to him of his people, who must be armed and inspired, as in Spain, with the help of the clergy’. In addition, in a national war fought on the nation’s soil Russian society would willingly provide the resources and make the sacrifices which victory over Napoleon’s immense empire would require.¹

The best source on Alexander’s own views about the war’s domestic political context is the record of a long conversation he had in Helsingfors (Helsinki) in August 1812 while on the way to his meeting with Bernadotte. The emperor noted that for the past century all Russia’s wars had been fought abroad and had seemed to most Russians to be far removed from their own immediate interests and concerns. The landowners had resented the conscription of their peasants and all setbacks resulted in relentless criticism of the government and its military commanders.

In present circumstances it was necessary to persuade the people that the government did not seek war and that it was arming only in order to defend the state. It was vital strongly to interest the people in the war, by waging it for the first time in over a hundred years on the territory of their motherland (rodina). This was the only way to make this a truly people’s war and to unite society around the government, of its own freewill and conviction, and in the cause of its own defence.

Alexander added that the united resolution shown by Russian society since Napoleon’s invasion showed that his calculation had proved correct. He added that, as for himself, he would never make peace so long as a single enemy soldier remained on Russian soil, even if that meant standing firm on the line of the river Volga after being defeated in battle and losing Petersburg and Moscow. The Finnish official to whom Alexander was speaking recorded in his memoirs that the intelligence, clarity and resolution with which the emperor spoke was impressive and inspiring.²

From the moment Napoleon crossed the frontier Alexander proclaimed the national character of the war. After the line of defence on the river Dvina was breached and the French approached Smolensk and the borders of Great Russia, this call was redoubled. In early August Barclay de Tolly wrote to the governor of Smolensk, Baron Casimir von Asch, that he knew that the loyal population of the province would rise up to defend ‘the Holy Faith and the frontiers of the Fatherland’, and that in the end Russia would triumph over the ‘perfidious’ French as it had in the past over the Tatars.

In the name of the Fatherland call upon the population of all areas close to the enemy to take up arms and attack isolated enemy units, wherever they are seen. In addition I have myself issued a special appeal to all Russians in areas occupied by the French to make sure that not a single enemy soldier can hide himself from our vengeance for the insults committed against our religion and our Fatherland, and when their army has been defeated by our troops then the fleeing enemy must everywhere meet ruin and death at the hands of the population.³

When Alexander left the army on 19 July and set off to Moscow to mobilize the home front for war, his immediate priority was to create a militia as a second line of defence against the invaders. Aleksandr Shishkov drafted the imperial manifesto appealing for the support of all estates of the realm for the new militia. The manifesto harked back to the so-called Time of Troubles exactly two hundred years before, when Russian society had risen up against an attempt to put a Polish prince on the throne and had ended a period of Russian powerlessness and humiliation by electing the first Romanov tsar and rebuilding a strong state.

The enemy has crossed our frontiers and is continuing to carry his arms into Russia, seeking to shake the foundations of this great power by his might and his seductions…With slyness in his heart and flattery on his tongue he brings us ever-lasting chains and fetters…We now appeal to all our loyal subjects, to all estates and conditions both spiritual and temporal, to rise up with us in a united and universal stand against the enemy’s schemes and endeavours.

After appealing to the nobility – ‘at all times the saviours of the Fatherland’ – and the clergy, the manifesto turned to the Russian people. ‘Brave descendants of courageous Slavs! You always smashed the teeth of the lions and tigers who sought to attack you. Let everyone unite: with the Cross in your hearts and weapons in your hands no human force will defeat you.’⁴

In the Soviet era it was an article of faith for Russian historians that the ‘patriotic masses’ were the key to resistance against Napoleon’s invasion. By far the greatest contribution of the ‘masses’ – which in this era really meant the peasantry – to the Russian war effort was their service in the armed forces and the militia. From 1812 to 1814 roughly one million men were drafted, more than two-thirds of them into the regular army. No peasant volunteered for the army. In the first place, it would have taken a saintly degree of patriotism to volunteer for twenty-five years’ service with minimal prospects of promotion to senior NCO, let alone into the officer corps. In any case peasants were not allowed to volunteer. Their bodies belonged to the state and to the landlords, not to themselves.

Nor were peasants allowed to volunteer for the militia. The latter was formed only from privately owned serfs, not from the state peasantry. It was entirely up to the landlord which peasants were assigned to serve. In principle, service in the militia was a less awful prospect than service in the regular army because the emperor had promised that militiamen would be released at the end of the war. The promise had to be renewed on many occasions and the militiamen were allowed to keep their beards and to dress in everyday peasant clothes, in order to underline the point that they were not soldiers. Nevertheless, no one could easily forget that at the end of the 1806–7 war the great majority of militiamen had in fact been transferred to the regular army.

In March 1813 John Quincy Adams was told by his landlord that none of the Petersburg militia would ever return home. Many had already perished. ‘The rest have been, or will be, incorporated in the regiments [i.e. of the regular army]. Not one of them will ever come back.’ In fact this was too pessimistic. Alexander kept his promise and the militia was disbanded and the men sent home at the end of the war. Losses had been immense, however, above all due to disease, exhaustion and the sheer shock of wartime military service for many peasants. Of the more than 13,000 men mobilized into the Tver militia in 1812, for example, only 4,200 returned home in 1814 and this was by no means exceptional.⁵

In Soviet times great stress was also laid on so-called ‘partisan warfare’ in 1812. The partisans of the Napoleonic era were portrayed as the ancestors of the partisan movement behind German lines in 1941–5 and as key heroes of a ‘people’s war’. The incautious Western reader thereby gets the impression that something akin to the French maquis played a major role in harrying Napoleon’s communications in 1812. In fact this is to misunderstand the meaning of the word ‘partisan’ in the Napoleonic era. The Russian partisan units which struck deep into the French rear in 1812 were commanded by officers of the regular army. The core of these units were usually squadrons of regular light cavalry detached from the main Russian armies. Around them were grouped Cossack regiments. Sometimes armed civilians joined these detachments but the most important role of the civilian population was to provide local guides and intelligence on French movements and whereabouts. Partisan raids began even before Napoleon advanced beyond Smolensk and they were to continue in 1813–14. In strategic terms the most important partisan raids actually occurred in early 1813. Led most famously by Aleksandr Chernyshev, these penetrated deep into Prussia and played a major role in bringing Prussia into the Russian camp.⁶

A much more genuine ‘people’s war’ was waged by the peasantry of provinces close to Napoleon’s line of advance in 1812. When the French army occupied Moscow it was forced to send out ever larger foraging parties to secure food and, above all, fodder for the horses. The resistance these parties encountered in the villages was a major nuisance to Napoleon and rammed home the point that if he tried to sit in Moscow through the winter his army would be without horses and thereby immobilized when the 1813 campaign began. Much of this peasant resistance was not completely spontaneous. The local noble militia commanders and officials organized cordons of ‘home guards’ to beat off French foraging parties and marauders. But in many cases the peasants organized resistance by themselves.

There are numerous reports of peasant ambushes of foraging parties, some of which developed into running battles that lasted a number of days. In early November 1812 Kutuzov reported to Alexander that in the great majority of cases the peasants of Moscow and Kaluga provinces had rejected all overtures from the French, had hidden their families and children in the forests, and had then defended their villages against foraging parties. ‘Quite often even the women’ had helped to trap and destroy the enemy. There is no reason to doubt accounts that the Russian peasants were infuriated by the way in which the French turned churches into stables, storehouses and dormitories. Even more obvious is the elemental small-scale patriotism involved in defending one’s home and family against alien plunderers.⁷

As regards spontaneous action by the peasantry, however, the most important issue was not what the masses did but what they did not do. The government’s appeals to the population, with their references to enemy slyness and seduction, reflect the elite’s worries about potential peasant insurrection. In fact this did not occur. In part this was because Napoleon did not try to launch a peasant war against serfdom. Until the French army reached Smolensk this would have been unthinkable because in Lithuania and most of Belorussia the landlords were Polish and therefore Napoleon’s potential allies. Beyond Smolensk, the French might have tried to incite insurrection but they only stayed in Great Russia for two months and in any case Napoleon’s strategy was to defeat the Russian army and then agree peace terms with Alexander. By the time he realized that the Russian emperor would not negotiate it was far too late to adopt an alternative strategy. In any case, though an appeal to the peasantry to throw off serfdom might well have increased the chaos in the Moscow area, the behaviour of Napoleon’s army made it unthinkable that Russian peasants would trust him or look to him for leadership. In the Russian heartland there were no alternative indigenous potential leaders or shapers of social revolution.

On the other hand, even without Napoleon’s incitement there was a good deal of anarchy in the Moscow region in the autumn of 1812. There were three times more peasant disturbances than in an average pre-war year and most of these disturbances occurred in the areas close to military operations, where the state’s authority had been weakened. The effects of shaken authority were apparent to all. One week after the fall of Moscow Prince Dmitrii Volkonsky recorded in his diary that a drunken NCO had insulted him in an inn, which was not at all a normal experience for a Russian lieutenant-general. He added, ‘The people are ready for disturbances, assuming that everyone in authority has fled in the face of the enemy.’ In some cases these ‘disturbances’ were serious, though always very localized, and they required the detachment of small regular units from the field army.⁸

The worst peasant disturbances occurred in and around Vitebsk province, which was the area of operations of Peter Wittgenstein’s First Corps. A number of landowners were murdered or assaulted in the summer and autumn of 1812, sometimes by crowds of 300 peasants or more. On one notorious occasion a troop of forty dragoons was routed by the rioters, two dragoons were killed, twelve taken prisoner and their officer badly beaten up. The civil authorities could not cope with this level of trouble and appealed to Wittgenstein for help. In the short run he refused, saying that he had too few cavalry and only one regiment of Cossacks. These had to concentrate on the autumn counter-offensive to drive the French out of Polotsk. Wittgenstein added that the disturbances had been caused by the French incursion into the region and would quickly cease once the enemy was ejected, which in fact occurred soon after.⁹

In time, however, Wittgenstein was able, for example, to deploy a squadron of Bashkirs on one particularly troublesome estate. This underlines a general point. In some areas close to the war authority briefly tottered, though it never collapsed in any large area unoccupied by the French. But the Russian Empire was enormous and the government could draw on resources from regions untouched by crisis. On 21 November, for example, Alexander wrote to the war minister, Prince Aleksei Gorchakov, that there were no fewer than twenty-nine irregular cavalry regiments, twenty of them Bashkir, en route from the Urals and western Siberia. These might often be of limited use against the French but they were more than adequate to overawe the peasants of Vitebsk.¹⁰

For the government, the loyalty of the peasantry was closely connected to the issue of order in the towns, and especially in Moscow. Only one-third of the city’s population were full-time, deeply rooted urban residents. Nobles and their horde of household serfs migrated to their estates in the late spring and returned as winter approached. In addition, many peasant workmen and artisans worked for part of their lives in the city but retained their links to their villages. The household serfs, concentrated in large numbers and with their ears open to their masters’ gossip, were of particular concern to the authorities. Calm and order in Moscow was the responsibility of Fedor Rostopchin. In the empire as a whole it was the responsibility of the minister of police, Aleksandr Balashev. Rostopchin employed all his wiles to divert and pacify Moscow’s masses, but his letters to Balashev suggest confidence in public order and the masses’ loyalty in the late spring and early summer of 1812. Only at the last, after the authorities had evacuated the city and during the French occupation, did anarchy take hold in Moscow. Servants looted their masters’ homes, respectable women turned to prostitution in order to survive and the general mayhem was increased because gaols emptied and prisoners roamed the streets in search of easy pickings. As in the countryside, however, this was anarchy pure and simple, without any of the leadership or ideology to fuel social revolution.¹¹

The government had no reason to fear for the loyalty of the urban elites. Russian merchants were usually deeply conservative and Orthodox in their mentalities, and contributed generously to the war effort. Moscow showed the lead here. When Alexander visited the city in late July to appeal for support for the militia, the city’s merchants instantly pledged 2.5 million rubles, over and above their other existing contributions to the war effort. Even less need the government fear the Church, which was its main ideological ally in mobilizing mass resistance to the invader. In the war of 1806–7 the Orthodox Church had issued an anathema against Napoleon which caused 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 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, ‘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 levée 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 seriously affected production for many weeks and infuriated Alexander. Subsequently much effort had to be directed into manufacturing pistols for the cavalry reserves and for a time the main source of Russian muskets was the 101,000 imported from Britain and the many thousands captured from the French. Correctly, Kutuzov put top priority on arming the new recruits destined for the field army. The militia came at the back of the queue for firearms. The leftovers it received were usually of wretched quality and most militiamen in December 1812 were still armed with pikes.³⁹

All of this was a big disappointment to Kutuzov. On appointment as commander-in-chief, one of his first concerns was to learn what reserve forces stood behind the armies in the field. The truth was discouraging. The last remnant of what had initially been seen as a second line of defence were Miloradovich’s battalions, most of which joined Kutuzov before Borodino. All that now remained were Lobanov and Kleinmichel’s regiments, and the militia. Even if Lobanov could arrive in time to defend Moscow, Alexander forbade Kutuzov to use his regiments. In the emperor’s opinion the men were insufficiently trained and, more importantly, it was crucial to retain a cadre around which the horde of new recruits could be formed into an effective army. Part of the Moscow and Smolensk militias did arrive in time to defend the city. After Borodino Kutuzov incorporated some of them into his regiments in order to make up for his enormous losses. With so many untrained and sometimes even unarmed men in the ranks, however, it is not at all surprising that he and Barclay rejected the idea of risking a battle on the outskirts of Moscow.⁴⁰

As a result, the city was lost. Thanks to Miloradovich and Barclay, the army did not disintegrate as it retreated through Moscow but in the following days it came closer to doing so than on any previous occasion. For the first time Kutuzov was not greeted with cheers as he rode past his marching regiments. To exhaustion and enormous losses were now added the shame and despair of abandoning Moscow without a fight. As always, a thin line could divide official requisitioning from arbitrary theft. Discipline suffered and many soldiers began to plunder the countryside. The Cossacks took the lead here but they were by no means alone. An impromptu market for plunder – officially taken from the French – was established near the camp at Tarutino.⁴¹

Even a few junior officers joined in the plundering. Most felt deep gloom and a sense of betrayal at Moscow’s abandonment. Lieutenant Radozhitsky recalls that ‘superstitious people, unable to comprehend what was going on in front of their eyes, thought that Moscow’s fall meant the collapse of Russia, the triumph of the Antichrist and soon after a terrible judgement and the end of the world’. Far away with Tormasov’s army a despairing Major-General Prince Viazemsky asked God why he had allowed Moscow to fall: ‘This is to punish a nation that so loves thee!’ But Viazemsky had no lack of mundane villains on whom to blame disaster. They included ‘allowing foreigners to take root, enlightenment…Arakcheev and Kleinmichel and the degenerates of the court’. If this already came very close to blaming the emperor, the Grand Duchess Catherine was even more explicit in her letters to her brother. She told him that he was widely condemned for poor direction of the war and for dishonouring Russia by abandoning Moscow without a fight.⁴²

Although the despair was fierce, it was also rather brief. Within a few days moods were changing. A staff officer wrote that the sight of Moscow on fire, though initially contributing to the gloom, soon transformed it into anger: ‘In the place of despondency came courage and a thirst for revenge: at that time no one doubted that the French had deliberately set fire to it.’ The view began to spread that all was far from lost and that, as young Lieutenant Aleksandr Chicherin of the Semenovskys put it, the barbarians who had invaded his country would be made to pay for their ‘impertinence’. Barclay de Tolly contributed to the change of mood by visiting every unit in his army to explain why the Russians now had the upper hand and would win the campaign. Lieutenant Meshetich recalled how Barclay explained to the men of his battery that he had operated according to a plan and that ‘the long retreat had denied any successes to the enemy and would lead to his ruin, since he had fallen into a trap which had been prepared for him and would cause his destruction’.⁴³

At Tarutino the army resumed some elements of its normal life. Kutuzov insisted that religious services should be compulsory every Sunday and feast day, and he set an example by attending them all himself. That other great institution of Russian life, the bath-house, also came to the rescue as regiments got down to constructing banias for themselves. The fierce disciplinary code of the army also made its mark, on this occasion usefully. On 21 October, for example, Kutuzov confirmed a court martial’s death sentence on Ensign Tishchenko, who had turned his platoon of jaegers into a robber band, robbing and even killing the local population. The death sentence on eleven of his jaegers was reduced to running the gauntlet three times between 1,000 men.⁴⁴

Perhaps as much as anything, however, the change of mood was owed to the fact that after months of movement and exhaustion, the army finally had a few weeks rest in the camp at Tarutino. The position and fortifications of the camp were not particularly strong but the French army had shot its bolt and left the Russians in peace. Just after the harvest in fertile central Russia the army could remain sedentary for a few weeks without going hungry. Abundant supplies came up through Kaluga from the rich agricultural provinces to the south. Reinforcements moved up too. Lieutenant Chicherin of the Semenovskys arrived in Tarutino soaked to the skin, penniless and without any change of clothes, since all his baggage had been lost in Moscow. But his family came to the rescue, bringing him among other things a tent so palatial that it was temporarily borrowed by Kutuzov himself. He recalls that the weather was perfect and that the officers indulged in conversations, music and reading – all enjoyed with the special flavour of a wartime camp. Only one point truly worried them and that was the fear that their emperor might make peace with the French. One of the officers commented that if that happened he would emigrate and fight Napoleon in Spain.⁴⁵

The decision on war or peace rested with the emperor in Petersburg. In all reason there was no cause to expect him to make peace. Frederick William III had fought on after the fall of Berlin and Francis II had refused to make peace after the fall of Vienna both in 1805 and 1809, though in the latter case the Austrians were fighting without allies. Moscow was not even Alexander’s real capital. In addition, to make peace after Moscow’s fall, in the teeth of elite opposition, was to put his life and throne at risk, as the emperor well knew. Underlying many of the tensions of 1812, however, was the fact that neither Alexander nor the Russian elites fully trusted the other to keep their nerve or preserve their commitment to victory amidst the great strains of Napoleon’s invasion.⁴⁶

After leaving the army on 19 July Alexander had paused briefly in Smolensk to consult with his provincial governor and generals before pressing on to Moscow. He arrived in the city late in the evening of 23 July. The next day provided one of the most striking images and memories of 1812 and was immortalized by Leo Tolstoy. At nine in the morning of a bright summer day, when Alexander emerged onto the ‘Red Steps’ outside his Kremlin palace in order to make his way to the Uspensky cathedral he was greeted by an immense crowd, packed so tightly that his adjutants-general had a great battle to force a path through to the church. One of these generals, Evgraf Komarovsky, wrote, ‘I never saw such enthusiasm among the people as at that time.’ The emperor was greeted with the ringing of the bells of all the Kremlin churches and wave after wave of cheers from the crowd. The ordinary people pressed forward to touch him and implored him to lead them against the enemy. This was the union of tsar and people, the core political myth of imperial Russia, in its fullest and most perfect form. Even more than in normal times, at this moment of threat and uncertainty, for most ordinary Russians the monarch was the supreme focus for their loyalty and a vital part of their identity.⁴⁷

The next day Alexander met the nobles and merchants of Moscow, who greeted him with promises of massive support in men and money for the new militia. The emperor was moved, subsequently commenting that he felt unworthy to lead such a people. Delighted by Rostopchin’s achievement in mobilizing this vast show of loyalty and support, Alexander kissed him on both cheeks on his departure. Aleksei Arakcheev congratulated Rostopchin on this unique mark of imperial approval. ‘I who have served him since the day he began his reign have never received this.’ Aleksandr Balashev, the minister of police, overheard this remark and subsequently muttered to Rostopchin, ‘You may be very sure that Arakcheev will never forgive or forget that kiss.’ Amidst all the patriotic enthusiasm normal political life continued in other ways too. When Alexander was leaving Rostopchin asked him for instructions as to future policy but the emperor responded that he had full confidence in his governor-general, who must act according to circumstances and his own judgement. In the midst of war’s chaos this was fair enough but it did mean that Rostopchin ultimately bore sole responsibility for the fire which destroyed the city.⁴⁸

Except for a brief expedition to Finland to meet Bernadotte, Alexander spent the rest of the summer and autumn in Petersburg. When he returned from Finland on 3 September he found waiting for him Sir Robert Wilson, a British officer who had been attached to the Russian army in 1806–7 and who had just arrived in Petersburg from Barclay de Tolly’s headquarters. Wilson spoke to Alexander about dissension among his generals and their opposition to Barclay, which came as no surprise to the emperor. Far more shocking was his generals’ request that he rid himself of Rumiantsev or, as Wilson put it, if his generals ‘were but assured that His Majesty would no longer give his confidence to advisers whose policy they mistrusted, they would testify their allegiance by exertions and sacrifices which would add splendour to the crown, and security to the throne under every adversity’.⁴⁹

Fine rhetoric aside, this was a demand by his generals to impose their will on the monarch. It was certainly not made more palatable to Alexander by being conveyed through the agent of a foreign power. Wilson recorded that ‘during this exposition the Emperor’s colour occasionally visited and left his cheek’. Alexander took some time to regain his composure, though he handled Wilson’s démarche with skill and patience. Calling Wilson ‘the rebels’ ambassador’, he reacted calmly to his generals’ request, saying that he knew and trusted these officers: ‘I have no fears of their having any unavowed designs against my authority.’⁵⁰

Alexander insisted, however, that his generals were wrong to believe that Rumiantsev had ever advised submission to Napoleon. He could not dump a loyal servant ‘without cause’, especially as ‘I have a great respect for him, since he is almost the only one who never asked me in his life for anything on his own account, whereas everyone else has always been seeking honours, wealth, or some private object for himself and connections’. Above all, there was a vital principle involved. The emperor must not be seen to give way to such pressure, which would set a very dangerous precedent. Meanwhile, however, Wilson must ‘carry back to the army pledges of my determination to continue the war against Napoleon whilst a Frenchman is in arms on this side of the frontier. I will not desert my engagements, come what may. I will abide the worst. I am ready to remove my family into the interior, and undergo every sacrifice; but I must not give way on the point of choosing my own ministers.’⁵¹

During the summer Alexander lived in the small palace – really little more than a villa – on Kamennyi Ostrov, a small island in one of the branches of the river Neva in Petersburg’s northern suburbs. There were no guards in sight and Alexander lived in great simplicity. It was here that he learned the news of Moscow’s fall, all the more shocking because of Kutuzov’s previous claims to have held the French at Borodino. His wife’s lady-in-waiting, Roxandra Stourdzha, recalled that rumours flew round Petersburg. Riots among the plebs were feared and widely expected. ‘The nobility loudly blamed Alexander for the state’s misfortunes, and in conversations it was a rare person who tried to defend and justify him.’ September the twenty-seventh was the anniversary of the emperor’s coronation. For once Alexander bowed to his advisers’ fears for his safety and travelled to the Kazan cathedral in a carriage, rather than on horseback as usual. When the imperial party went up the stairs into the cathedral they were greeted by absolute silence. Roxandra Stourdzha was no faint-heart but she remembered that she heard the echo of every step and her knees trembled.⁵²

A foolish letter from his sister Catherine attacking his performance drove Alexander over the edge, his reply illustrating just how strained his feelings were at this critical time. After pointing out to Catherine that it hardly made sense to criticize him both for undermining his generals by his presence with the army and for not taking over command and saving Moscow, he wrote that if his abilities were not sufficient for the role which fate had given him, that was not his fault. Nor was the poor quality of so many of his military and civilian lieutenants.

With such poor backing as I have, lacking adequate means in all areas, and guiding such a vast machinery in a time of terrible crisis and against an infernal opponent who combines the most awful evil with the most transcendent talent, and is backed by the whole power of Europe and by a group of talented lieutenants who have been honed by twenty years of war and revolution – in common justice is it surprising if I meet with reverses?

But the sting of Alexander’s letter was in the tail, where he wrote that he had been warned that enemy agents would even seek to turn his family against him, with Catherine herself as their first choice. Even the very self-confident grand duchess was shocked by this response and Alexander subsequently relented by adding, ‘If you find me too touchy, begin by putting yourself in the cruel position where I am.’⁵³

At a time when his own blood relations were proving worse than useless, Alexander did get loyal support from his wife, the sensitive and beautiful Empress Elizabeth. She remained calm and confident throughout these weeks, writing to her mother that ‘in truth we are prepared for everything except negotiations. The further Napoleon advances the less he should believe that any peace is possible. That is the unanimous view of the emperor and all classes of the population…each step he advances in this immense Russia brings him closer to the abyss. Let us see how he copes with the winter.’ She added that peace would be the beginning of Russia’s destruction but fortunately it was impossible: ‘The emperor does not even conceive of the idea and even if he did want to do this, he would not be able to.’⁵⁴

If Alexander drew comfort from his wife and from walking in the groves on Kamennyi Ostrov, his main solace was religion. The emperor had been brought up in Catherine II’s court on a combination of Enlightenment rationalism and aristocratic hedonism. The Orthodox clergy who tutored him in their religion left little mark. But the sensitive and idealistic sides of his personality increasingly inclined him towards seeking answers to life’s problems in Christianity. He had in fact been reading the Bible for some time before Napoleon’s invasion but amidst the tremendous strains of 1812 his religious sense grew much stronger. Alexander would read the Bible every day, underlining in pencil the parts he found most relevant. To his old friend and fellow-convert to Christian belief, Prince Aleksandr Golitsyn, he wrote even in early July 1812 that ‘in moments such as those in which we find ourselves, I believe that even the most hardened person feels a return towards his creator…I surrender myself to this feeling, which is so habitual for me and I do so with a warmth, an abandon, much greater than in the past! I find there my only consolation, my sole support. It is this sentiment alone that sustains me.’⁵⁵

It was in this mood that Alexander heard the news of Moscow’s loss and the city’s subsequent destruction by fire. By the time Kutuzov’s own messenger, Colonel Alexandre Michaud de Beauretour, came with this news, the emperor was well prepared to meet him and send a firm message back to his army. Amidst much emotion on both sides, Alexander and Michaud reassured themselves on the points that concerned them most. The emperor was promised by Michaud that the abandonment of Moscow had not undermined the army’s morale or its total commitment to victory. Michaud, and through him the army, in return received the pledge they wanted to hear. Far from undermining the emperor’s confidence or will, the loss of Moscow had hardened his determination to achieve total victory. Alexander ended the conversation with the words:

‘I will make use of every last resource of my empire; it possesses even more than my enemies yet think. But even if Divine Providence decrees that my dynasty should cease to reign on the throne of my ancestors, then after having exhausted all the means in my power I will grow my beard down to here’ (he pointed his hand to his chest) ‘and will go off and eat potatoes with the very last of my peasants rather than sign a peace which would shame my fatherland and that dear nation whose sacrifices for me I know how to appreciate…Napoleon or me, I or him, we cannot both rule at the same time; I have learned to understand him and he will not deceive me.’⁵⁶

This was fine theatre and fighting words, which in the circumstances was just what was required. But there is no reason to doubt Alexander’s sincerity or commitment when he said them. They spelled the ruin of Napoleon’s strategy and pointed to the destruction of his army.