The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  As for love, Alexander’s relationship with Naryshkina was fracturing: their daughter Zinaida died. ‘I have lost my child and with her a part of the happiness I enjoyed in this world,’ he told Catiche. He was unfaithful with one of his sister’s ladies-in-waiting, while Naryshkina too started affairs so that when she gave birth to her son Emmanuel the only certain thing about his paternity was that it could not be attributed to his father.* Yet their ‘little family’ remained the most cherished part of his life. A letter from their daughter Sophie, aged five, catches their intimacy: ‘My dear papa, I’m so sorry you hurt yourself. I hope you will soon be well for I long to see you. I think of you every day. I send you my love and a kiss. Your little affectionate Sophie.’

  ‘The horizon grows darker and darker,’ Alexander told Catiche on 24 December. Napoleon, ‘the curse of the human race, becomes daily more abominable’. In February 1812, Napoleon told Alexander: ‘I cannot disguise from myself that Your Majesty no longer has any friendship for me.’

  ‘Neither my feelings nor my politics have changed,’ replied Alexander. ‘Am I not allowed to suppose it is Your Majesty who has changed to me?’ But he ended ominously: ‘If war must begin, I will know how to sell my life dearly.’

  In early 1812, War Minister Barclay warned him that he must wind up the Ottoman war: Napoleon was coming. Kutuzov forced the surrender of the Ottoman army, signing on 16 March the Peace of Bucharest, in which Russia gained Bessarabia and returned Wallachia.* Alexander hated Kutuzov for being correct at Austerlitz – but he rewarded him with the title of prince.

  Catiche, aided by much of noble society, intensified her campaign against Speransky. Alexander appointed Rostopchin as governor-general of Moscow; while, inspired by Catiche and Arakcheev, his inquisitor Balashov fabricated a case against the loyal Speransky, who, in a bon mot true enough to hurt, had described Alexander as ‘too weak to govern and too strong to be governed’. They discovered that Speransky had failed to share intelligence reports from Paris.

  At 8 p.m. on 17 March, Alexander summoned Speransky for an agonizing two-hour confrontation at which the servitor, unjustly accused of treason, was sacked. Speransky found his wife in tears and Balashov waiting for him at his house, where he was arrested and exiled that very night. Alexander suffered: he admitted that ‘If someone cuts off your arm, you would shout and cry in pain,’ and he was full of resentment that the grandees had forced him to sacrifice his favourite. ‘They took away Speransky, who was my right hand,’ he complained pathetically – though he mused that Speransky ‘was really guilty only towards me alone having paid back my confidence with the blackest and most abominable ingratitude’. Alexander knew he was ‘no traitor’, but ‘the situation didn’t allow a strict rigorous examination of the denunciations . . .’, he told Novosiltsev. ‘The enemy was knocking at the door of the empire’ so ‘it was important to me not to seem guilty in the eyes of my subjects’.

  The sacrifice was for a higher cause. ‘I am playing the great game,’ Alexander said, adding that ‘The war about to break out is one for the independence of nations,’ for Napoleon now ruled a multinational empire of 45 million. If anything, Napoleon’s Grande Armée was an army of nations, including a large Polish contingent, as well as Spaniards, Germans, Dutch, Italians, Austrians and even a squadron of Egyptian Mamluks.

  On 14 April, as Napoleon prepared to leave his young wife and new baby son, the king of Rome, in Paris to take command of the largest invasion force so far in history, Alexander arrived in Vilna.11

  On the night of 11 June, Alexander, now thirty-five, plump and balding, still dashing in his Semyonovsky uniform, was attending a ball at Bennigsen’s estate near Vilna when Balashov whispered in his ear that Napoleon had crossed the Niemen. The invasion of Russia had started. He left the party to consult with his staff. Since Napoleon had gathered 615,000 men in total, with 415,000 in his initial force, he far outnumbered the Russians, who fielded roughly 250,000 in three armies. The First Army of the West of 136,000 was under the uninspiring war minister Barclay de Tolly. The Second Army of the West, deployed further south, numbering 57,000, was commanded by Prince Bagration, while the Third Army of 48,000 covered the south. Alexander agonized between the stolid Barclay, the leader of a ‘German’ faction who favoured a staged withdrawal to lure the enemy into the interior, and the reckless Bagration, backed by the Russian faction who favoured immediate battle. If Alexander had appointed Bagration, the Russians would probably have been defeated somewhere around Vilna. But Alexander did not rate Bagration, so ‘I had no one better’ than Barclay. Arakcheev became his indispensable henchman, running the rear as secretary for the empire for military affairs. ‘The entire French war’, boasted Arakcheev, ‘passed through my hands.’

  Alexander – no tactician and always afraid of his father’s fate – lacked the advantages possessed by Napoleon, who united in his person absolute command of politics and war. The invasion now looks like a supreme gamble, but Napoleon had thrice defeated Russian armies and, having studied Charles XII’s invasion, he had no intention of conquering Russia nor of penetrating the interior. In a short three-week campaign, he would briskly destroy the Russian army in ‘one good battle’ and force the weak tsar to accept terms. Alexander’s advantages all depended on the unglamorous tactics of retreat, patience, endurance.

  Alexander sent Balashov to offer Napoleon the choice of withdrawal or war ‘until Russian soil is entirely purged of the enemy’. Napoleon advanced, but wrote back to claim that ‘The private feelings I bear for you are not in the least affected by these events.’ As Balashov left with his letter, Napoleon jokingly asked which was the best road to Moscow. ‘Sire, one can take whichever one wants,’ replied Balashov. ‘Charles XII went by way of Poltava.’ Napoleon had still not computed that this would be a different sort of war with a different species of enemy.

  On 15 June, hours ahead of Napoleon himself, Alexander withdrew from Vilna as Barclay with the main army headed towards the fortified military camp at Drissa, the brainchild of a Prussian general. On 5 July, Barclay swiftly retired from the ill-chosen camp, aiming to meet up with Bagration’s army. Some of Alexander’s advisers realized that his presence with the army was not an advantage. Deference to the emperor inhibited frank expression of opinion. Arakcheev, Balashov and his new state secretary Admiral Shishkov, prompted by Catiche, signed a petition, left among his papers, asking him to leave the army. ‘You must be enduring a martyrdom,’ Catiche wrote, ‘but the more you can conquer yourself and be emperor, the more you will do your sheer duty. I believe you quite as able as your generals but you have to play the role not only of captain but of ruler. If you make mistakes it all falls on your head.’ Next day, Alexander told Arakcheev: ‘I’ve read your paper.’

  Alexander agreed to sacrifice my ‘pride on the altar of utility because I . . . inspired no trust in the troops’ and would leave the army, telling his soldiers: ‘I shall never abandon you.’ But the strategy had not changed. ‘Our entire goal’, he wrote to Bagration, who was crying out for battle, ‘must be directed towards gaining time and drawing out the war as long as possible.’ As he left, to everyone’s relief, he told Barclay: ‘Goodbye, general, goodbye again. I entrust to you my army; don’t forget I have no other.’

  On 11 July Alexander rallied the home front in Moscow, where he was moved by a crowd whose size and fervour ‘brought tears to my eyes’. But Empress Elizabeth put it best: ‘From the moment Napoleon crossed our borders it was as if an electric spark burst over Russia.’12

  *

  As Napoleon pursued Barclay in search of his decisive victory, the war minister withdrew eastwards and joined up with Bagration close to Smolensk. The Russians stalwartly defended the city and Napoleon thought that finally he would get his battle: ‘At last I have them.’ Again Napoleon was disappointed. He had planned to spend the winter in Smolensk; instead he occupied a ruined city. He should have withdrawn; disease was already ravaging the Grand Armée – but pride drew him on.
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  The fighting allowed Barclay to retreat once again. His withdrawals and vacillations drove Bagration, Suvorov’s fierce protégé, into a rage. ‘Russians are not made to flee,’ he protested to Arakcheev, his way of informing the emperor. ‘We’ve become worse than Prussians!’

  When Napoleon took Smolensk, Bagration was ‘ashamed to wear the uniform. What an imbecile. Minister Barclay is running away . . . This disgusts me so much I’ll go crazy!’ Catiche later admitted, ‘The thing I most regret in life is not having been a man in 1812,’ and she blamed Alexander for his generals’ disagreements: ‘You’ve left them in perfect indecision.’

  Back in Petersburg, where he spent the summer, Alexander recognized the ‘great ferocity against the war minister due to the irresolution of his conduct and the disorder with which he does his duties’, which had not been helped by ‘the feud between him and Bagration’. Serfs were restive, nobles panicking, the Motherland in jeopardy. Russia had to give battle – or the tsar would lose his throne.

  Alexander was tempted to take command of the army himself, but Catiche warned him starkly that though ‘the enemy will be in Moscow in ten days, in God’s name do not command in person for we need without delay a leader in whom the troops have confidence and on that score, you inspire none!’ Alexander wanted anyone except the popular Kutuzov, who was in Petersburg in charge of the militia, while Catiche’s husband urged, ‘Bagration is adored, the army longs for him. You don’t like him but your glory is at stake. Trust the prince with the command!’

  Alexander called an Extraordinary Committee of veteran retainers and new favourites to choose a commander. ‘Everyone wanted Kutuzov,’ whom ‘we chose as being the oldest’, Alexander reported to Catiche, and ‘in great favour among the public’. Bennigsen became his chief of staff. ‘I find it necessary to appoint one general-in-chief for all the active armies,’ Alexander wrote to Kutuzov on 8 August, ‘and your distinguished military rank, patriotism and long record of great deeds wins my confidence.’

  The sixty-six-year-old Kutuzov possessed the Slavic charisma lacked by Barclay and the world-weary caution lacked by Bagration. In the 1860s, Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace presented him as an oracular personification of the soul of the Russian nation; in 1941, Stalin promoted him as a genius; he was neither. But this protégé of Potemkin and Suvorov had vast experience, having served as a governor-general and as ambassador to the sultan. He was wise, unflappable and sly, a nature symbolized by his eye wound: bullets had twice (in 1773 and 1787) hit him in the eye and then exited through his temple without affecting his judgement or shaking his sangfroid. If he could no longer stay awake during a war council nor mount a horse, this priapic antique concealed two peasant-girl mistresses disguised as Cossack boys among his staff. Kutuzov promised the tsar that he would rather die than surrender Moscow. He was to fight a battle yet preserve the army, two contradictory promises that could not possibly be fulfilled.

  Far from the fray, Alexander, almost alone at Kamenny Ostrov, had to watch impotently as Kutuzov made the decisions. So instead he concentrated on diplomacy and logistics, ruling through Arakcheev, their intimacy revealed by this note from the tsar insisting that the general change his plans for dinner: ‘The simplest thing is to say you’re ill or that I’ve invited you to dinner. My dinner will certainly be better!’

  Alexander opened relations with Britain and signed an alliance with Bernadotte of Sweden, freeing up his Finnish corps to fight the French. But he found consolation in mysticism inspired by a childhood friend, Prince Alexander Golitsyn. Until 1803 Golitsyn had been a notorious Lo-thario, but after Alexander unexpectedly appointed him ober-procurator of the Holy Synod, he underwent a Damascene conversion to mysticism.

  ‘In moments such as those in which we find ourselves,’ Alexander wrote to Golitsyn, ‘even the most hardened person feels a return towards his Creator . . . I surrender myself to this feeling . . . I find there my only consolation, my sole support. This sentiment alone sustains me.’ Golitsyn was not only his spiritual brother and minister for religion – but also one of his secret policemen: as postmaster, he perlustrated private letters and reported on their contents to the tsar.

  Alexander started to see the war against Napoleon as a way to create a new Christian fraternity of kings that would bring about the reign of peace on earth. Golitsyn advised reading the Bible. ‘My dear, it seems to me a whole new world is revealed to my eyes,’ Alexander wrote, thanking him for his suggestions. His new beliefs, however, a universalist Christianity, with elements of freemasonry and pantheism based on a mixture of biblical reading and evangelical fervour, had more in common with Protestantism than with Orthodoxy.

  Far to the south, as Kutuzov took command of the army, he faced a cruel dilemma, telling Rostopchin, governor-general of Moscow: ‘I haven’t yet resolved what is more important: to lose the army or to lose Moscow. In my opinion, the loss of Moscow would entail the loss of Russia.’13

  On 26 August, Kutuzov chose to make his stand near the village of Borodino, ninety miles from Moscow, in a battle between 125,000 Russians with 624 guns, who were packed into a salient defended by newly built redoubts, and 130,000 men of the Grande Armée with 587 guns. Kutuzov planned for a defensive battle. The redoubts were to bleed the French. In his earlier battles, Napoleon had prided himself on devising an ingenious flanking manoeuvre, but at Borodino he ordered repeated frontal assaults against the dug-in Russians and particularly their Grand Redoubt. The fighting, often hand to hand, bayonet to bayonet, was primal in its savagery, and the firing-power of the cannonades of a thousand guns on a tiny battlefield, packed with men and animals, in the flamboyant uniforms of its time, turned it into the most gorgeously dressed abattoir in history; the redoubts changed hands repeatedly, taking an atrocious toll on both sides. The slaughter was astonishingly intense, ‘the bloodiest single day in the history of warfare’ until the First World War: the French lost 35,000 wounded or dead, the Russians 45,000, with Bagration fatally wounded. Just as the battle might possibly have been won, Napoleon was asked to throw in his reserves. He refused to commit his elite Imperial Guards. As night fell, both dazed commanders believed uneasily that they had just won; Kutuzov felt sure that the battle would extend into a second day – but it was Napoleon who had failed to win a clear victory out of a lack of both imagination and boldness, two qualities which he had never lacked before.

  ‘The battle was the bloodiest of recent times,’ Kutuzov reported to Alexander, declaring that the Russians had kept possession of the battlefield, definition of victory. ‘I defeated Napoleon,’ he boasted to his wife. The tsar promoted Kutuzov to marshal and awarded him 100,000 roubles. As the news of the butcher’s bill came in, Kutuzov realized that his plan to fight on the next day was impossible: ‘Our extraordinary losses, especially the wounding of key generals, forced me to withdraw down the Moscow road.’ During the night – and contrary to his report to Alexander – Kutuzov pulled back several miles. Napoleon claimed victory: the road to Moscow was open, and he dubbed Borodino ‘the battle of Moscow’. Ultimately both Napoleon and Kutuzov saw that Borodino had been a ghastly draw. ‘I ought to have died at the battle of Moscow,’ Napoleon later admitted in exile, but it did decide the fate of the city.

  On 1 September, Kutuzov held a war council in a peasant hut in Fili, where the old general understood that, now facing the choice of losing the army or Moscow, he must save the army: ‘Napoleon is a torrent but Moscow is the sponge that will soak him up.’ Kutuzov took the decision but this was exactly the choice that Alexander had avoided by leaving the army, and it would have been an impossible one for a monarch to make. Kutuzov marched his army through the streets of Moscow and out the other side; he abandoned the ancient capital, without fully informing the governor-general, Count Rostopchin, who ordered the evacuation of the entire population. Captured capitals, from Vienna to Berlin, had usually greeted Napoleon with cowed aristocratic politeness. This was a sign that this was a new national war à l’outrance.
In scenes of dystopic exodus, the roads teemed and seethed with the long-suffering, trudging masses, carts heaped with a lifetime’s belongings, as multitudes, half a million people, the entire Muscovite population, fled the city, heading eastwards. Rostopchin opened the jails and, as the city emptied, he decided that ‘If I am asked, I won’t hesitate to say, “Burn the capital rather than deliver it to the enemy.”’ Kutuzov and his generals had already blown up ammunition stores as they left. At a secret meeting in the governor’s house, Rostopchin and Police Minister Balashov ordered the burning of further buildings, which started an unstoppable conflagration that tore through the wooden structures. Embarrassingly, Rostopchin’s two city mansions were among the few buildings that did not catch fire. Afterwards, when the French approached his estate at Voronovo, a palace packed with French luxuries and Roman antiquities, Rostopchin ordered it burned, leaving a sign that read: ‘Frenchmen, I abandon to you my two houses in Moscow . . . with their contents worth half a million roubles. Here you will find only ashes.’

  On 3 September, as Kutuzov headed south-westwards and set up a well-placed camp on the Old Kaluga Road, no one greeted Napoleon at the gates of Moscow. Only a few French tutors, actresses and lethiferous bands of looters haunted the streets as Moscow burned for six days. Napoleon was spooked by what he saw. He should have withdrawn at once; his presence in Moscow broke his cardinal rule that he must conquer armies, not cities – but he had not been able to resist the storied city of golden domes. He moved into the Kremlin and waited to negotiate from within a city of ashes.14

  ‘Moscow is taken,’ Catiche informed Alexander on 6 September in a scrawled note. ‘Some things are beyond comprehension. Don’t forget your resolution: no peace and you have hope of recovery of your honour!’ Alexander was devastated by this news, exasperated by Kutuzov and his own helplessness. ‘Kutuzov had not warned me he had decided to retreat four miles to recover,’ he told Catiche, and ‘Those fatal four miles poisoned all the delight I had in victory.’ Alexander protested: ‘From 29 August, I’ve had no reports from you,’ he told Kutuzov. ‘Then on 1 September, I heard the sad news that you’ve decided to leave Moscow with the army. You can imagine the effect of this news and your silence torments my astonishment!’