Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace

by Dominic Lieven

  In his March 1810 memorandum Barclay had stated that Russia’s western borderlands were very weakly defended by man or nature. Many other officers expanded on this theme in reports written between then and June 1812. Russian military engineers were badly overstretched in these years. In 1807–11 the small corps of engineers was deployed in the Baltic seaport fortresses against possible British attack, in the Caucasus and in attempts to refortify strong-points taken from the Ottomans in the Balkans. From March 1810 it was also lumbered with the immense task of fortifying the western borderlands at breakneck speed. As was pointed out in a number of memorandums, fortresses bypassed by Napoleon would be a big threat to his fragile communications. This would slow down his advance. More importantly, a retreating army with no fortresses in its rear had nowhere secure for its supplies and baggage, and was therefore always obsessed with the need to protect them. In this situation an army tended to retreat quickly since only distance provided security.50

  But fortresses, however necessary, could not easily be built from scratch in two years. On their southern flank, the Russians succeeded in preparing Kiev’s defences for a siege and constructed a strong fortress at Bobruisk. On their northern flank, Riga was strengthened though the commander of the corps of engineers, General Oppermann, doubted whether it could hold out for long against a serious siege unless its garrison was very large. Once the new fortress of Dünaburg on the Dvina was completed, Oppermann wanted to move all supplies and stores there from Riga, since he feared that the latter’s fall to the French would otherwise threaten the logistics of the main Russian armies.

  Unfortunately, however, Dünaburg could not be completed by the summer of 1812. This meant that the entire central sector of the Russian defence line was open. As Bennigsen pointed out, this central sector gave access to the core territories of the Russian Empire, including the army’s likely supply bases in Moscow and Smolensk. To make matters worse, this huge central sector had no natural defences of real value. Wolzogen had obeyed his orders to choose a defensive position on the river Dvina and had selected the spot for a fortified camp at Drissa. Nevertheless he warned that the upper two-thirds of the Dvina was shallow and easily forded in summer. Moreover at most points the west bank was higher than the east, which put defenders at a serious disadvantage. Barclay received the same advice from an even more authoritative voice, namely General Oppermann, who told him in August 1811 that the river Dvina could not be defended against a serious enemy advance, ‘however good any specific position may be’. The reason for this was that ‘in summer the river is easily crossed, the areas close to its banks are almost everywhere open and easily traversed, and any position on or near the river’s banks can be outflanked’.51

  Between Riga on the Baltic coastline and Bobruisk far to the south the only significant defence-works in June 1812 were the fortified camp at Drissa, way upriver on the Dvina towards Vitebsk, whose construction began in the spring of 1812. Alexander’s unofficial adviser, General Pfühl, made the camp at Drissa the key to his plan for the defence of the empire’s heartland. By the time Napoleon’s forces approached Drissa, Pfühl expected them to be exhausted and reduced in number after crossing a devastated Belorussia and Lithuania. If they attempted to storm the fortified camp in which the bulk of First Army had taken refuge they would be at a great tactical disadvantage. If they tried to move beyond Drissa then First Army could attack their flank. Meanwhile Bagration and Platov’s forces would be striking deep into Napoleon’s rear.

  In principle Pfühl’s plan had much in common with Barclay’s proposals in March 1810. There was the same reliance on strategic retreat and devastating the abandoned territory; on fortified camps as a means to strengthen the defending army when it finally turned at bay; on the role of other Russian forces in striking into Napoleon’s flanks and rear. Pfühl had merely transported Barclay’s concept from the two flanks, where Barclay had seen the greatest threat, to the centre of the Russian line, which now seemed the likeliest target for Napoleon’s main blow. But Barclay’s fortified camps were to rely on the support of fortresses, Riga in the north and Bobruisk in the south. With Dünaburg gone, Drissa must stand alone. In addition, in 1810 Barclay had not anticipated that Russia would be invaded by an army of anything like half a million men.

  Even in 1812 Pfühl was probably not fully aware of the size of Napoleon’s invasion force. Access to Russian intelligence material was confined to a very tight circle. By March 1812 Alexander, Barclay and their de facto chief intelligence officer, Petr Chuikevich, knew that even the first wave of Napoleon’s army would be 450,000 strong. A force of this size could both mask and outflank Drissa without danger. It could also block any attack by Bagration and Matvei Platov without difficulty. If First Army took refuge in Drissa, it might be surrounded and captured as easily as Mack’s troops in Ulm had been at the beginning of the 1805 campaign.

  Nevertheless Alexander’s plan of campaign in 1812 at least on the surface revolved around the fortified camp at Drissa. The Russian army was to make a strategic withdrawal to Drissa at the war’s outbreak and would then attempt to hold the French on the line of the river Dvina. Perhaps Alexander genuinely believed in Pfühl’s plan. He always tended to value foreign soldiers’ opinions above those of his own generals, in whose abilities he usually had little confidence. In addition, Pfühl’s ‘scientific’ predictions as to the precise moment when Napoleon’s supplies would run out may have appealed to Alexander’s liking for tidy, abstract ideas. Undoubtedly the emperor believed that Pfühl’s plan was based on the same concept as Barclay’s earlier proposals. He will also have remembered that in 1806–7 Bennigsen had kept at bay for six months an enemy double his numbers. Nevertheless there is room for some cynicism. Alexander did not want Napoleon to penetrate into the Russian heartland, though he feared that he might do so. Any open admission that Napoleon might reach Great Russia in his initial campaign, let alone the circulation of plans based on such an idea, would have destroyed the emperor’s credit. If Napoleon was to be stopped short of the Great Russian border, Pfühl’s plan seemed the only one currently available. Should it fail, Alexander knew that Pfühl would be the perfect scapegoat. A foreigner without protection, he was also despised by the Russian generals as the epitome of a German pedantic staff officer who knew nothing about war.52

  Though Alexander may have retained faith in Pfühl’s plan even in June 1812, it is very hard to believe that the experienced Barclay allowed it greatly to affect his thinking on how the war should be conducted, given the advice he had received from the army’s chief engineer. From Barclay’s perspective, however, the camp at Drissa did no harm. It absorbed almost none of his resources, since it was built with local labour. It was also a useful stopping point in the army’s retreat and almost unique as a place where stores could be established for the retreating army under some kind of protection. In any case, final decisions on Russian strategy rested with the emperor, not with Barclay. But the best guide to Barclay’s thinking immediately before the war is provided by a memorandum written by Chuikevich in April 1812. It says nothing about fortified camps in general or the camp at Drissa in particular.

  Chuikevich’s analysis was close to the ideas expressed earlier by Aleksandr Chernyshev. He argued that Napoleon’s whole system of war depended on big battles and rapid victories. For the Russians, the key to victory was ‘to plan and pursue a war exactly contrary to what the enemy wants’. They must retreat, raid enemy communications with their much superior light cavalry, and wear down Napoleon’s forces. ‘We must avoid big battles until we have fallen right back on our supply bases.’ In previous wars, when frustrated, Napoleon had made serious mistakes but his enemies had not exploited them. Russia must not miss this opportunity. Its cavalry could prove lethal in pursuit of a beaten foe. Determination not to negotiate and to continue the war until victory was vital but so too was caution; Fabius, the Roman general whose refusal of battle had so frustrated Hannibal, must be their guide. So too must Wellington
’s policy of strategic withdrawal in the Peninsula. ‘However contrary this strategy based on caution is to the spirit of the Russian people, we must remember that we have no formed reserve units behind our front-line forces and the complete destruction of the First and Second armies could have fateful consequences for the Fatherland. The loss of a few provinces must not frighten us because the state’s survival depends on the survival of its army.’ Chuikevich also advocated a number of ways in which Europe might be incited to rise up in Napoleon’s rear. Though unrealistic, they do serve as a useful reminder that for him, Barclay and Alexander the 1812 campaign in Russia was merely the first act in a longer war designed to destroy Napoleon’s domination of Europe.53

  Chuikevich’s memorandum did not go into details. It said nothing specific about where Napoleon’s advance might be stopped. Unlike Pfühl, Chuikevich was a practical soldier who understood the uncertainties of warfare. But no one who read the memorandum could be confident that Napoleon’s advance would be halted within the western borderlands. The danger that the war would spread into the Russian heartland was obvious. In reality Barclay and Alexander had always understood this possibility. Any Russian leader knew how Charles XII had marched deep into the empire’s interior and had been destroyed by Peter the Great. The parallels were clear enough. On the very eve of Napoleon’s invasion, Count Rostopchin wrote to Alexander that ‘if unfortunate circumstances forced us to decide on retreat in the face of a victorious enemy, even in that case the Russian emperor will be menacing in Moscow, terrifying in Kazan and invincible in Tobolsk’. While recovering from his wounds in 1807 Barclay himself apparently spoke at length of the need to defeat Napoleon by drawing him into the depths of Russia and inflicting on him a new Poltava. Before 1812 Alexander and his sister Catherine spoke privately about the possibility of Napoleon taking both Moscow and Petersburg in the event of a war. Early in 1812 the emperor made quiet arrangements to evacuate his mistress and child to the Volga if the need arose.54

  All this was a long way from concrete plans to lure Napoleon into the Russian interior or prepare for his destruction there. In reality no such plans or preparations existed. This was sensible. Barclay’s brother was a colonel on the general staff: he wrote in 1811 that it was pointless to make plans for military operations beyond the first stages of any war, so great were the uncertainties involved in any campaign. This was doubly the case in 1812 since Russia’s defensive strategy had left the initiative in Napoleon’s hands. If Napoleon crossed the Dvina he might head for Moscow. On the other hand, he could make for Petersburg or even shift the main thrust of the war southwards towards Ukraine, as his Polish advisers were urging. More likely, he could end his campaign with the conquest of Belorussia and devote his energies to restoring the Polish kingdom and organizing a supply base for a campaign into the Russian heartland in 1813. Before the war began Napoleon told Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, that this was what he intended to do and at least one senior Russian general staff officer believed that if Napoleon had stuck to this idea the consequences for Russia would have been disastrous.55

  For the Russian leadership, how their own subjects would respond to the French invasion was a matter of immense importance and uncertainty. Above all, this meant the Poles, not least because they dominated the region which Russian strategy intended to surrender to the invaders. There was considerable debate among Russian generals and statesmen before the war began about how the Poles would respond to a French invasion. It was felt that many of the great landowners preferred Russian rule because they disliked the abolition of serfdom in the Duchy of Warsaw and feared further radical measures. As to the region’s peasants, they might indulge in anarchic assaults on property and order but the Russian leadership was confident that they neither understood nor cared about nationalist or Jacobin ideas. The big danger was the mass of the Polish gentry. Most Russian generals agreed that, if Napoleon invaded Russia and proclaimed Poland’s restoration, the great majority of educated Poles in Lithuania and Belorussia would support him, partly out of nationalist enthusiasm and partly because they believed that he would win. Of course this reinforced the generals’ unwillingness to withdraw from the borderlands, not least for fear that Napoleon would turn them into a fruitful base for subsequent operations against the Russian heartland. Alexander and Barclay could not deny this possibility. But they believed that Napoleon’s overwhelming numbers left them no alternative to their strategy. They knew that restoring the Polish kingdom could not be done overnight. They banked on Napoleon’s temperament, as well as on the nature of his regime and military system, making a strategy of sustained patience unlikely.56

  As regards the emperor’s Russian subjects, much the most important ‘constituency’ was the army itself. For any army, maintaining discipline and morale during a long retreat is extremely difficult. The Prussian army disintegrated after Jena-Auerstadt and the French were little better during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 and from Leipzig in the autumn of 1813. British discipline collapsed during Sir John Moore’s retreat to Corunna in 1808 and again during the retreat from Burgos back into Portugal in 1812. As one historian of the Peninsular War comments, ‘retreats were not the British army’s forte’. Though the Russian army was famous for its discipline, a retreat not just across the whole of Belorussia and Lithuania but also deep into Russia itself was bound to test morale and order within the regiments to the limit. In stressing the impact of retreat on his troops’ morale just before the war Prince Bagration had his own axe to grind because the very idea of retreating in the face of an enemy was anathema to him. Nevertheless, his fears were by no means groundless.57

  It is a truism among military historians that armies can only fight wars in line with their ‘military doctrine’, which is elaborated in the pre-war years. In the early nineteenth century formalized military doctrine in the modern sense existed nowhere. This would have to wait for staff colleges and the whole paraphernalia of modern military education and training. In an informal sense, however, the Russian army did have a ‘doctrine’ in 1812 and it was wholly committed to offensive strategy and tactics. From his first moments in his regiment the young officer was encouraged to be daring, fearless, confident and aggressive. Every lieutenant was expected to believe that one Russian was worth five Frenchmen. Male pride was at stake in the ‘game’ to capture trophies such as flags and drive the enemy off the battlefield. Many Russian generals in 1812 had this mentality too. To retreat before the enemy was almost as shocking as failing to defend one’s honour in a duel when challenged. In addition, in the previous century the army had experienced only victory. Its great triumphs over Frederick II and the Ottomans had been won on the offensive and on enemy soil. The greatest eighteenth-century Russian generals, Aleksandr Suvorov and Petr Rumiantsev, stressed speed, aggression, surprise and shock. An army bred on such ideas and traditions was bound to mutter if forced to retreat hundreds of kilometres deep into Russian territory on the basis of calculations about logistics and numbers made by ‘German’ staff officers.58

  It was also hard to predict how the Russian civilian population would respond if Napoleon entered the Great Russian provinces. After all, the army of a great power was supposed to protect the property of its compatriots, not retreat for hundreds of kilometres without a battle and open the country’s core to devastation. Above all, the elites had to worry about how their serfs would react to Napoleon, particularly if he issued promises of emancipation. In pre-war military documents there is very little on this subject. One interesting (though unique) war ministry document did raise the spectre of Russian peasant disturbances, arguing that the experience of the Pugachev rebellion showed that house serfs and peasants working in factories were the least reliable elements.59

  Inevitably such fears grew as Napoleon approached the Russian borders in July 1812. The private secretary to Alexander’s wife Empress Elizabeth, Nikolai Longinov, wrote in July that ‘although I am convinced that our people would not accept the gift of freed
om from such a monster, it is impossible not to worry’. In December 1812, with the danger passed, John Quincy Adams wrote that among the Petersburg elite there was great relief that ‘the peasants had not shown the least disposition to avail themselves of the occasion to obtain their freedom…. I see this is what most touches the feelings of all the Russians with whom I have conversed on the subject. This was the point on which their fears were the greatest, and upon which they are most delighted to see the danger past.’ The influence of such fears on pre-war planning or wartime operations must not be exaggerated, however. Petersburg’s salons might shiver at the word ‘Pugachev’ but fears of peasant insurrection barely figure in the correspondence of Alexander, Barclay or Kutuzov.60

  At the beginning of April 1812, as they struggled to prepare their armies to oppose the invasion, Russia’s generals had more pressing concerns than serf rebellion. At this time Barclay was still hoping to mount a pre-emptive attack into the Duchy of Warsaw and East Prussia, though he realized that by now this could only be a quick and limited spoiling action. He awaited with impatience the emperor’s arrival at headquarters and permission to start the attack. In fact, however, Alexander was delayed and permission never came. The emperor had always preferred to await the attack and to adopt a defensive strategy. His determination to follow that line was confirmed by news of the Franco-Austrian alliance. If a Russian army advanced into the Duchy of Warsaw, Austria might well be impelled by this treaty to mobilize all its military forces and could push forward from Galicia into the rear of the advancing Russian armies.61