18 B. F. Frolov, ‘Da byli liudi v nashe vremia’: Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda i zagranichnye pokhody russkoi armii, Moscow, 2005.
19 See the discussion and bibliography in D. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals, London, 2001.
20 There are some parallels in Chinese and Turkish historiography concerning the Manchu and Ottoman empires.
21 Anyone touching this theme owes much to John Keegan, The Face of Battle, London, 1978, pp. 117–206. There were great similarities and relatively few differences between the values of the British officers he discusses and their Russian counterparts.
22 Pamfil Nazarov and Ivan Men’shii.
23 J. P. Riley, Napoleon and the World War of 1813, London, 2000, is an interesting and original study of world war in 1813 by a senior British officer. It is true that the Anglo-American war of 1812–14 was directly linked to the Napoleonic Wars though not part of them: see Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America, Cambridge, Mass., 2007.
Chapter 2: Russia as a Great Power
1 See the chapters by Paul Bushkovitch and Hugh Ragsdale in D. Lieven (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, Cambridge, 2006, vol. 2, pp. 489–529, for surveys of Russian foreign policy in the eighteenth century.
2 On Catherine and her reign, the bible is Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, London, 1981. On the ‘Greek project’, see Simon Sebag Montefiore’s splendid Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin, London, 2000, pp. 219–21, 241–3.
3 The fullest recent survey of eighteenth-century Ottoman developments is Suraiya Faroqhi (ed.), Turkey, vol. 3: The Later Ottoman Empire 1603–1839, Cambridge, 2003. On the Ottoman army, see Virginia Aksan, Ottoman Wars 1700–1870: An Empire Besieged, Harlow, 2007. I attempted Russo-Ottoman comparisons in D. Lieven, Empire: TheRussian Empire and its Rivals, London, 2001, ch. 4, pp. 128 ff.
4 There is a vast literature on the European Old Regime. For the long view of state formation in Europe, see Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States: A.D. 990–1992, Oxford, 1990. Equally thought-provoking are Perry Anderson, Lineages of the AbsolutistState, London, 1974, and Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change, Princeton, 1992.
5 The best recent survey of the Russian peasantry is by David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 1600–1930, London, 1999. On comparative European landholding by elites, see D. Lieven, Aristocracy in Europe 1815–1914, Basingstoke, 1992, chs. 1 and 2, pp. 1–73.
6 The exact figure is 7.3 per cent, and is derived from the nearly 500 generals included in Entsiklopediia. On education and Enlightenment in the Baltic provinces, see G. von Pistohlkors, Deutsche Geschichte in Osten Europas: Baltische Länder, Berlin, 1994, pp. 266–94.
7 The best source is the official history of Russian military engineering: I. G. Fabritsius, Glavnoe inzhenernoe upravlenie, SVM, 7, SPB, 1902. On doctors see: A. A. Baranov, ‘Meditsinskoe obespechenie armii v 1812 godu’, in Epokha 1812 goda: Issledovaniia, istochniki, istoriografiia, TGIM, vol. 1, Moscow, 2002, pp. 105–24.
8 D. G. Tselerungo, Ofitsery russkoi armii, uchastniki Borodinskogo srazheniia, Moscow, 2002, p. 81. The best source on the origins of the general staff is N. Glinoetskii, ‘Russkii general’nyi shtab v tsarstvovanie Imperatora Aleksandra I’, VS, 17/10, 1874, pp. 187–250. See also: P. A. Geisman, Vozniknovenie i razvitie v Rossii general’nago shtaba, SVM, 4/1/2/1, especially pp. 169 ff: ‘Svita Ego Imperatorskago Velichestva po kvartirmeisterskoi chasti’.
9 This is to borrow the term used by John Brewer in the context of eighteenth-century Britain.
10 The Russian statistics are inexact because the government only counted the number of subjects who owed compulsory military service. This did not include women, nobles, priests, merchants or all non-Russian minorities. For the basic statistics on European populations, see R. Bonney (ed.), Economic Systems and Finance, Oxford, 1995, pp. 315–19 and 360–76. For a more detailed breakdown of the European population in 1812, see the statistics compiled by Major Josef Paldus which are contained in the appendix to Geschichte der Kämpfe Österreichs: Kriege unter der Regierung des Kaisers Franz. Befreiungskrieg 1813 und 1814, vol. 1: O. Criste, Österreichs Beitritt zur Koalition, Vienna, 1913. All these statistics have to be watched carefully. For example Paldus’s figure for the Russian population is much too low, though it may well be that he is using estimates for ethnic Russians rather than for all subjects of the emperor. Bonney cites P. G. M. Dickson for the Habsburg figure (Finance and Government under Maria Theresa 1740– 1780, 2 vols., Oxford, 1987, vol. 1, p. 36), but Dickson does not include the population of the Habsburg Netherlands or Italy.
11 On Russian pay and rations, see F. P. Shelekhov, Glavnoe intendantskoe upravlenie: istoricheskii ocherk, SVM, 5, SPB, 1903, pp. 87, 92. On Wellington’s troops, see Matthew Morgan, Wellington’s Victories, London, 2004, pp. 33, 74.
12 E. K. Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian Soldier, Princeton, 1990, ch. 4, pp. 74–95.
13 On Russian conscription, see Janet Hartley, Russia, 1762–1825: Military Power, London, 2008, ch. 2, pp. 25–47. On French conscription, see Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civil Order, 1789–1820s, London, 1994, ch. 13, pp. 380–426, and David Hopkin, Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture, Woodbridge, 2003, pp. 125–214. On the nation in arms, see MacGregor Knox, ‘Mass Politics and Nationalism as Military Revolution: The French Revolution and After’, in MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray (eds.), The Dynamics of Military Revolution. 1300–2050, Cambridge, 2001, ch. 4, pp. 57–73.
14 ‘Zapiski I. V. Lopukhina’, RA, 3, 1914, pp. 318–56, at p. 345. On the militia and the debate that surrounded its mobilization, see V. V. Shchepetil’nikov, Komplektovanie voisk v tsarstvovanie imperatora Aleksandra I, SVM, 4/1/1/2, SPB, 1904, pp. 18–40, 69–72.
15 I. Merder, Istoricheskii ocherk russkogo konevodstva i konnozavodstva, SPB, 1868: the quote is on pp. 84–5. V. V. Ermolov and M. M. Ryndin, Upravlenie general-inspektora kavalerii o remontirovanii kavalerii. Istoricheskii ocherk, SVM, 3/3.1, SPB, 1906. This is a key work.
16 Marquess of Londonderry, Narrative of the War in Germany and France in 1813 and 1814, London, 1830, p. 31. Sir Robert Wilson, Campaigns in Poland. 1806 and 1807, London, 1810, p. 14.
17 Apart from Merder, see Shelekhov, Glavnoe intendantskoe upravlenie, for the purchase and upkeep of horses: e.g. purchase prices are on p. 104. A useful modern history of the Russian cavalry is A. Begunova, Sabli ostry, koni bystry, Moscow, 1992. On the incident with the Austrians, see T. von Bernhardi, Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem Leben des kaiserlichen russischen Generals der Infanterie Carl Friedrich Grafen von Toll, 5 vols., Leipzig, 1858, vol. 4, book 7, pp. 183–4.
18 There are two extremely useful unpublished Russian candidates’ dissertations (i.e. roughly equivalent to a contemporary British Ph.D.) on the military economy: S. V. Gavrilov, Organizatsiia i snabzheniia russkoi armii nakanune i v khode otechestvennoi voiny 1812g i zagranichnykh pokhodov 1813–1815gg: Istoricheskie aspekty, candidate’s dissertation, SPB, 2003, and V. N. Speranskii, Voenno-ekonomicheskaia podgotovka Rossii k bor’be s Napoleonom v 1812–1814 godakh, Gorky, 1967. The basic statistics on raw materials are in Gavrilov, pp. 39–42. Speransky is a mine of useful information: his only weakness appears to be that he neglects the crucial production of field artillery at the Petersburg arsenal. See the following note for references to this production. Viktor Bezotosnyi kindly confirmed that the arsenal did indeed produce most Russian field artillery.
19 For the basic statistics, see L. Beskrovnyi, The Russian Army and Fleet in the Nineteenth Century, Gulf Breeze, 1996, pp. 196–7. Speranskii, Voenno-ekonomicheskaia, pp. 38–58, on production at the Petrozavodsk and other works. On the artillery’s equipment, guns and tactics in 1812–14, see A. and Iu. Zhmodikov, Tactics of the Russian Army, 2 vols., West Chester, Ohio, 2003, vol. 2, chs. 10–15. See also: Anthony and Paul Dawson and Stephen Summerfield, Napoleonic Artillery, Marlborough, 2007, pp. 48–55.
20 On the three arms works, t
he best introduction are the articles in Entsiklopediia, pp. 296, 654 and 724–5.
21 Speranskii, Voenno-ekonomicheskaia, ch. 2, especially pp. 82 ff., 362 ff. Much the most detailed primary source on the Tula works is an exceptionally interesting article by P. P. Svinin, ‘Tul’skii oruzheinyi zavod’, Syn Otechestva, 19, 1816, pp. 243 ff. Though naively Soviet-era in many of its judgements, V. N. Ashurkov, Izbrannoe: Istoriia Tul’skogo kraia, Tula, 2003, contains interesting details.
22 On the French tests, see K. Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815, Princeton, 1997, p. 339. On English criticism, see Philip Haythornthwaite, Weapons and Equipment of the Napoleonic Wars, London, 1996, p. 22. Speranskii, Voenno-ekonomicheskaia, pp. 458–9, on the sources of the muskets distributed to the army in 1812–13.
23 Even Wellington’s men did not usually expect to beat off attacks by musketry alone. Volleys were followed up by rapid counter-attacks with the bayonet.
24 Two recent surveys of Russian finance and taxation are: Peter Waldron, ‘State Finances’, in Lieven (ed.), Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2, pp. 468–88, and Richard Hellie, ‘Russia’, in R. Bonney (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe c. 1215–1815, Oxford, 1999, pp. 481–506.
25 All these statistics should be viewed with a certain scepticism. The Russian ones are specially to be distrusted because of uncertainties as to whether sums are being cited in silver or paper rubles. Most of the statistics are drawn from Bonney, Economic Systems, pp. 360–76. The French figure is from Michel Bruguière, ‘Finances publiques’, in J. Tulard (ed.), Dictionnaire Napoléon, Paris, 1987, pp. 733–5. The British figure is from J. M. Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder: British Foreign Aid in the Wars with France 1793– 1815, Cambridge, Mass., 1969, p. 96.
26 W. M. Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I, Ithaca, NY, 1967, ch. 5. There is a useful table on p. 186 which shows the volume of paper money issued annually and its value vis-à-vis the silver currency. A well-informed source stated that the peasants’ obligation to feed the soldiers for very inadequate compensation from the state was a well-established custom: L. Klugin, ‘Russkaia soldatskaia artel’, RS, 20, 1861, pp. 90, 96–7.
27 Most of the subsequent discussion is gleaned from basic texts, with the addition of some of my own ideas: see in particular Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848, Oxford, 1994; H. M. Scott, The Emergence of the Eastern Powers, 1756–1775, Cambridge, 2001; H. M. Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System 1740– 1815, Harlow, 2006; A. N. Sakharov et al. (eds.), Istoriia vneshnei politiki Rossii: Pervaia polovina XIX veka, Moscow, 1995.
28 Isabel de Madariaga, Britain, Russia and the Armed Neutrality of 1780, London, 1962. There is a good description of the realities behind these disputes over maritime rights in ch. 1 of Ole Feldbaek, The Battle of Copenhagen 1801, Barnsley, 2002. Pitt’s miscalculation is analysed by Jeremy Black, ‘Naval Power, Strategy and Foreign Policy, 1775–1791’, in Michael Duffy (ed.), Parameters of British Naval Power 1650–1850, Exeter, 1998, pp. 93–120.
29 Apart from the general diplomatic histories, see in particular H. Heppner, ‘Der Österreichisch-Russische Gegensatz in Sudosteuropa im Zeitalter Napoleons’, in A. Drabek et al. (eds.), Russland und Österreich zur Zeit der Napoleonischen Kriege, Vienna, 1989, pp. 85 ff.
30 Elise Wirtschafter, ‘The Groups Between: raznochintsy, Intelligentsia, Professionals’, in Lieven, Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2, pp. 245–63, is a good introduction to the evolution of the Russian middle classes. On state and society in the Napoleonic era, Nicholas Riasanovsky, A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia 1801–1855, Oxford, 1976, remains valuable.
31 Jerzy Lukowski, The Partitions of Poland, Harlow, 1999, is a reliable introduction to this issue.
32 J. Hartley, Alexander I, London, 1994, pp. 58–72. A. A. Orlov, Soiuz Peterburga i Londona, Moscow, 2005, ch. 1, pp. 7 ff.
33 The key text for this is Alexander’s instructions for his envoy to the British government, Nikolai Novosil’tsev: VPR, 1st series, 2, pp. 138–46 and 151–3, 11/23 Sept. 1804. See also Patricia Grimsted, The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I, Berkeley, 1969, pp. 32–65.
34 On the 1805 campaign, see above all two recent works: R. Goetz, 1805 Austerlitz: Napoleon and the Destruction of the Third Coalition, London, 2005; Frederick W. Kagan, Napoleon and Europe 1801–1805: The End of the Old Order, Cambridge, Mass., 2006.
35 For an interesting defence of Prussian policy, see Brendan Simms, The Impact of Napoleon: Prussian High Politics, Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Executive 1797–1806, Cambridge, 1997. Russia’s foreign minister in 1806, Prince Adam Czartowski, was very unsympathetic to the Prussian dilemma. See W. H. Zawadski, A Man of Honour: Adam Czartoryski as a Statesman of Russia and Poland 1795–1831, Oxford, 1993, pp. 61–136.
36 The best source on this is Shelekhov, Glavnoe intendantskoe upravlenie, chs. VI–XIV; F. Zatler, Zapiski o prodovol’stvii voisk v voennoe vremia, SPB, 1860, is also an excellent source and provides statistics on relative population densities on pp. 23 and 78–9: even in 1860, after decades of rapid population growth, densities in Belorussia and Lithuania were one-quarter of what one found in Silesia, Saxony, Bohemia or north-eastern France. Gavrilov, Organizatsiia, p. 59. On salaries, see PSZ, 30, 23542, 17 March 1809 (OS), pp. 885–6. In 1809 the salaries of all junior officers had to be raised 33 per cent to offset the depreciation of the paper ruble.
37 There is a good, detailed article on this in Drabek et al. (eds.), Russland und Österreich by Rainer Egger: ‘Die Operationen der Russischen Armee in Mahren und Österreich ob und unter der Enns im Jahre 1805’, pp. 55–70.
38 See above all E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, Stanford, Calif., 1976, especially ch. 6, pp. 67 ff.
39 This statistic is based on a survey I carried out of 1,500 NCOs whose details are recorded in the personnel records (formuliarnye spiski) in RGVIA, Fond 489. I included all NCOs whose records were legible and who were not the sons of soldiers and clergy, from the following regimental lists: Preobrazhensky Guards (Ed. Khr. 1); Little Russia Grenadiers (Ed. Khr. 1190); Kherson Grenadiers (Ed. Khr. 1263); Murom (Ed. Khr. 517), Chernigov (Ed. Khr. 1039), Reval (Ed. Khr. 754), Kursk (Ed. Khr. 425) infantry regiments; the 39th (Ed. Khr. 1802) and 45th (Ed. Khr. 1855) Jaegers; His Majesty’s Life Cuirassiers (Ed. Khr. 2114) and the Mitau (Ed. Khr. 2446), Borisogleb (Ed. Khr. 2337), Narva (Ed. Khr. 2457), Iamburg (Ed. Khr. 2631) and Pskov (Ed. Khr. 212) dragoons; the 2nd (Ed. Khr. 3798), 5th (Ed. Khr. 3809) and 10th (Ed. Khr. 3842) artillery brigades.
40 There is much information on this in A. N. Andronikov and V. P. Fedorov, Prokhozhdenie sluzhby, SVM, 4/1/3, SPB, 1909, pp. 1–59, and Shchepetil’nikov, Komplektovanie, pp. 41–55.
41 On the artel, see the comments of William Fuller in Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914, New York, 1992, pp. 172–3; also L. Klugin, ‘Russkaia soldatskaia artel”, pp. 79–130; Andronikov and Fedorov, Prokhozhdenie sluzhby, pp. 112–14. On the formation of new regiments, see A. A. Kersnovskii, Istoriia russkoi armii, 4 vols., Moscow, 1992, vol. 1, p. 206.
42 Eugen, Memoiren, vol. 2, p. 49; S. F. Glinka, Pis’ma russkogo ofitsera, Moscow, 1987, p. 347.
43 In 1806, for example, a circular from Alexander’s Personal Military Chancellery stressed that ‘the transfer of officers from one regiment to another is wholly contrary to the emperor’s wishes’: Andronikov and Fedorov, Prokhozhdenie sluzhby, p. 112. In 1812 Baron Cyprian von Kreutz became chief of the Siberian Lancer Regiment. Next year his two young brothers-in-law transferred into the regiment. Within thirty months one of them had been promoted twice and the other three times: RGVIA, Fond 489, Opis 1, Ed. Khr. 2670, fos. 34–45: ‘Spisok o sluzhbe i dostoinstv Sibirskago ulanskago polka generaliteta’ and ‘Spisok o sluzhbe i dostoinstv Sibirskago ulanskago polka rotmistrov i shtab-rotmistrov’. See the personnel records e.g. of the Preobrazhensky Guards (Ed. Khr. 1), the Little Russia and Kherson Grenadiers (Ed. Khr. 1190 and 1263), the K
ursk and Briansk (39th Jaegers) regiments (Ed. Khr. 425 and 1802) and the Pskov Dragoons (Ed. Khr. 212).
44 On Karneev, see RGVIA, Fond 489, Ed. Khr. 1, fo. 506: ‘Formuliarnyi spisok leib gvardii Preobrazhenskago polka, generalam, shtab i ober ofitseram i drugim chinam’, dated 1 Jan. 1808 (OS). On the Briansk, Narva and Grenadier regiments, see the sections on NCOs in their personnel records listed in n. 39 above. On soldiers’ sons and NCOs, see Komplektovanie, SVM, pp. 173–208. On Russian NCOs, see D. G. Tselerungo, ‘Boevoi opyt unter-ofitserov russkoi armii – uchastnikov Borodinskago srazheniia’, in Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda: Istochniki, pamiatniki, problemy. Materialy XII vserossisskoi nauchnoi konferentsii. Borodino, 6–8 sentiabria 2004 g., Moscow, 2005, pp. 21–6.
45 Much the best evaluation of the Russian army’s performance in 1805–7 is in vol. 1 of Zhmodikov, Tactics.
46 Eugen, Memoiren, vol. 1, p. 136.
47 This information comes from the biographical sketch which introduced Osten-Sacken’s own diaries when these were published by Russkii arkhiv in 1900: RA, 1, 1900, pp. 6–25.
48 ‘Iz zapisok fel’dmarshala Sakena’, RA, 1, 1900, pp. 161–80. Langeron’s memoirs are a useful source on this dispute, since he had a healthy respect for both Bennigsen and Sacken. Langeron’s letter to Bennigsen, dated 10 Dec. 1816, is in vol. 1, pp. xxvii–xxix, of Mémoires du Général Bennigsen, 3 vols., Paris, n.d. The comments in his own memoirs are in Mémoires de Langeron, Général d’Infanterie dans l’Armée Russe: Campagnes de 1812, 1813, 1814, Paris, 1902, pp. 15–18.
49 The best source on the views of both Alexander and his advisers is the many letters of Prince Aleksandr Kurakin to the Dowager Empress Marie, in RA, 1, 1868. See also A. Gielgud (ed.), Memoirs of Prince Adam Czartoryski, 2 vols., London, 1888, vol. 2, pp. 174–83. V. Sirotkin, Napoleon i Aleksandr I, Moscow, 2003, is a good introduction to opinion within the Russian ruling elite on foreign policy.
Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace Page 72
