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

by Dominic Lieven

  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 governmen
t 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 fee
d 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