Russia Against Napoleon

by Lieven, Dominic

  Nevertheless, the greatest bearers of regimental loyalty and tradition were the non-commissioned officers. In the regiments newly formed in Alexander’s reign, the senior NCOs arrived when the regiment was created and served in it for the rest of their careers. Old regiments would have a strong cadre of NCOs who had served in the unit for twenty years or more. In a handful of extreme cases such as the Briansk Infantry and Narva Dragoons every single sergeant-major, sergeant and corporal had spent his entire military life in the regiment. In the Russian army there was usually a clear distinction between the sergeant-majors (fel’dfebeli in the infantry and vakhmistry in the cavalry) on the one hand, and the ten times more numerous sergeants and corporals (unterofitsery) on the other. The sergeants and corporals were mostly peasants. They gained their NCO status as veterans who had shown themselves to be reliable, sober and skilled in peacetime, and courageous on the battlefield. Like the conscript body as a whole, the great majority of them were illiterate.

  The sergeant-majors on the other hand were in the great majority of cases literate, though particularly in wartime some illiterate sergeants who had shown courage and leadership might be promoted to sergeant-major. Many were the sons of priests, but above all of the deacons and other junior clergy who were required to assist at Orthodox services. Most sons of the clergy were literate and the church could never find employment for all of them. They filled a key gap in the army as NCOs. But the biggest source of sergeant-majors were soldiers’ sons, who were counted as hereditary members of the military estate. The state set up compulsory special schools for these boys: almost 17,000 boys were attending these schools in 1800. In 1805 alone 1,893 soldiers’ sons entered the army. The education provided by the schools was rudimentary and the discipline was brutal but they did train many drummers and other musicians for the army, as well as some regimental clerks. Above all, however, they produced literate NCOs, imbued with military discipline and values from an early age. As befitted the senior NCO of the Russian army’s senior regiment, the regimental sergeant-major of the Preobrazhenskys in 1807, Fedor Karneev, was the model professional soldier: a soldier’s son with twenty-four years’ service in the regiment, an unblemished record, and a military cross for courage in action.44

  Although the fundamental elements of the Russian army were immensely strong, there were important weaknesses in its tactics and training in 1805. With the exception of its light cavalry, this made it on the whole inferior to the French. The main reason for this was that the French army had been in almost constant combat with the forces of other great powers between 1792 and 1805. With the exception of the Italian and Swiss campaigns of 1799–1800, in which only a relatively small minority of regiments participated, the Russian army lacked any comparable wartime experience. In its absence, parade-ground values dominated training, reaching absurd levels of pedantry and obsession at times. Partly as a result, Russian musketry was inferior to French, as was the troops’ skill at skirmishing. The Russians’ use of massed bayonet attacks to drive off skirmishers was costly and ineffective. In 1805–6 Russian artillery batteries were often poorly shielded against the fire of enemy skirmishers.45

  The army’s worst problems revolved around coordination above the level of the regiment. In 1805 there were no permanent units of more than regimental size. At Austerlitz, Russian and Austrian columns put together at the last moment manoeuvred far less effectively than the permanent French divisions. In 1806 the Russians created their own divisions but coordination on the battlefield remained a weakness. The Russian cavalry would have been hard pressed to emulate Murat’s massed charge at Eylau. The Russian artillery certainly could not have matched the impressive concentration and mobility of Senarmont’s batteries at Friedland.

  Most important, however, were weaknesses in the army’s high command, meaning the senior generals and, above all, the supreme commanders. At this level the Russians were bound to be inferior to the French. No one could match a monarch who was also a military genius. Although the Russian military performance was hampered by rivalry among its generals, French marshals cooperated no better in Napoleon’s absence. When Alexander seized effective command from Kutuzov before Austerlitz the result was a disaster. Thoroughly chastened, Alexander kept away from the battlefield in 1806–7. This solved one problem but created another. In the absence of the monarch the top leader needed to be a figure who could command obedience both by his reputation and by being unequivocally senior to all the other generals. By late 1806, however, all the great leaders of Catherine’s wars were dead. Mikhail Kutuzov was the best of the remaining bunch but he had been out of favour since Austerlitz. Alexander therefore appointed Field-Marshal Mikhail Kamensky to command the army on the grounds of his seniority, experience and relatively good military record. When he reached the army Kamensky’s confused and even senile behaviour quickly horrified his subordinates. As one young general, Count Johann von Lieven, asked on the eve of the first serious battles with the French: ‘Is this lunatic to command us against Napoleon?’46

  Kamensky quickly abandoned the army and took himself off to the rear. He was ordered by Alexander to retire to his estates, where soon afterwards he was murdered by his peasants. In Kamensky’s absence the more junior of his two corps commanders, Levin von Bennigsen, more or less seized control of the army, consolidating his position by exaggerating the Russians’ success in the rearguard actions at Golymin and Pultusk in his reports to the monarch. Bennigsen’s allies in Petersburg whispered in Alexander’s ear about his skill and achievement. The emperor responded by overlooking Bennigsen’s role in his father’s murder, appointing him to be supreme commander and loading him down with decorations and financial rewards. To do Bennigsen justice, he certainly was the most competent replacement available for Kamensky, and somebody needed to take control of the situation quickly. He also performed creditably in extricating the army from the dangerous position in which it found itself at the beginning of the campaign. This did not stop his army from becoming a nest of intrigue among the senior generals. The other corps commander, Friedrich von Buxhoeweden, loathed Bennigsen, refused to collaborate with him, and challenged him to a duel. Alexander himself sent General Otto von Knorring to keep an eye on his supreme commander.

  A particularly bitter dispute broke out at the beginning of the spring 1807 campaign between Bennigsen and his senior divisional commander, Lieutenant-General Baron Fabian von der Osten-Sacken, yet another Baltic German. The battle between the two men is worth a moment’s attention, not just because it was symptomatic of a major and lasting problem in the army’s upper ranks, but also because the individuals concerned were to play vital roles in the years 1812–14.

  Like many of the senior Russian commanders, Osten-Sacken was tough, jealous, stubborn, ambitious and proud. Charming and witty in society, he could be a very different man in his treatment of the officers and men under his command. His personality was probably affected by a sense of unfairness and bitterness which did not finally leave him until he achieved glory and universal respect in 1813–14. In 1740 his father Wilhelm had been the aide-de-camp to Field-Marshal Münnich, the key figure in the army and government of the Empress Anna. Had the regime of Anna and her nephew Ivan VI survived, Wilhelm could have expected a glorious career. His son Fabian would have been enlisted in the Guards almost from birth and by his mid-twenties he would have been a colonel and an imperial aide-de-camp. Instead, Ivan VI was toppled, Münnich exiled, and Wilhelm von der Osten-Sacken banished to a garrison regiment, where he spent the rest of his long career without any further promotion. His son Fabian lived a childhood of poverty and made his way up the military ladder the hard way, through the ranks of the line infantry with every step won by courage and hard work. The progress began when he won promotion to the rank of ensign, the first officer rank, for bravery in action against the Turks in 1769.47

  Osten-Sacken loathed Bennigsen. His diaries in 1806–7 are a list of complaints against a commander whom he considered to have mismana
ged the army’s medical and commissariat services, failed to seize the opportunities for victory at Eylau, and – perhaps most significantly – neglected ever to consult his second-in-command, namely Osten-Sacken himself, about how to conduct the campaign. At the beginning of the 1807 campaign Bennigsen planned to surprise and trap the isolated corps of Marshal Ney by coordinated movements from different directions by the Russian divisions. Osten-Sacken moved slowly and Ney escaped. Bennigsen accused Osten-Sacken of deliberately sabotaging his plans in order to discredit him and take over the army. Osten-Sacken claimed that the orders were contradictory. The initial inquiry got nowhere: in predictable fashion Bennigsen and Osten-Sacken were supported by their networks of ‘friends’. The process then dragged on for months and only in 1808 did a court martial find against Osten-Sacken.48

  By then the war had long since been concluded. On 14 June 1807 Napoleon defeated the Russian army at the battle of Friedland and drove it back to the empire’s border. Friedland was a serious defeat: initial Russian estimates suggested that they had suffered up to 20,000 casualties. Nevertheless it was not a rout like Austerlitz, let alone on the scale of Jena-Auerstadt. The great majority of the Russian army got back safely and in relatively good order across the river Neman. With the river between themselves and Napoleon, the Russian regiments quickly regained their habitual discipline, order and fearlessness. Two fresh divisions under princes Dmitrii Lobanov-Rostovsky and Andrei Gorchakov had just arrived from Russia to reinforce them. Two hundred thousand militiamen had been mustered in Russia and would in time be used to fill the ranks of the army. New regular regiments were being raised, and new recruit levies witnessed to the fact that Russia’s manpower resources were far from exhausted. At present Napoleon had not even crossed the Russian border. He still had a very long way to go before he could threaten the centres of Russian military, political and economic power in the Moscow and Petersburg regions. If Russia needed to continue the war after Friedland, there was no doubt that she could do so.

  Nevertheless there were excellent reasons for the Russians to seek peace. The treasury was bankrupt, the army’s arsenals and stores were empty and it would take a long time to train, arm, officer and equip the new recruits. Tens of thousands of soldiers and many generals had been lost to wounds and sickness in the previous six months. Alexander no longer had any faith in Bennigsen but saw no other general as adequate to replace him. If the war continued then in practice Russia would be fighting alone. Prussian military power had been destroyed and the British not merely had no troops on the continent but were unwilling to allow Russia subsidies or even loans. Meanwhile London still seemed able to send military expeditions to conquer the Cape and parts of Spanish America. By now Napoleon controlled most of western and central Europe and could mobilize enormous resources for a war against Russia. No doubt it would take him some months to mount an invasion of the Russian heartland but this was not a major concern of Alexander’s advisers. What worried them enormously was that Napoleon was now positioned on the borders of the provinces – most of them in present-day Ukraine and Belarus – which Russia had acquired after Poland was partitioned in the previous generation. Polish landowners and officials still dominated this region. There was every reason to fear that, if Napoleon invaded the empire’s western borderlands, the Poles would rise up in his support.49 After hearing the news of Friedland Alexander agreed to Bennigsen’s appeal for an armistice and sent Lieutenant-General Prince Dmitrii Lobanov-Rostovsky to conduct the armistice negotiations with the French. The emperor’s instructions to Lobanov told him ‘not himself to propose peace negotiations but if the French were the first to express a desire to put an end to the war then he should respond that the Emperor Alexander also desires peace’.50

  In some ways Lobanov was a strange choice for what was a semi-diplomatic mission. He had no diplomatic experience and neither looked nor behaved like a diplomat. On the contrary, he was a rather brusque, impatient and slightly awkward man, not at all the person to smooth over misunderstandings by flattery and politeness. Of medium height, with a somewhat oriental slant to his eyes, Lobanov’s posture may not have been improved by the fact that he had twice been severely wounded in the Russo-Ottoman war of 1788–92, once in the head. The fact that he was a courageous soldier, however, might perhaps win him respect among the French generals with whom he was to negotiate. Lobanov did also have other advantages. Having just arrived from Russia with his division, he was wholly independent of Bennigsen and of the other generals in his faction-ridden army. Lobanov was also loyal and dependable. Unlike some senior officers and officials, he could be relied on to carry out Alexander’s orders to the letter.51

  Lobanov quickly discovered that Napoleon wanted not just peace but also an alliance with Russia. On the Russian side the detailed negotiations for both peace and an alliance treaty were conducted by Lobanov and Prince Aleksandr Kurakin. In June 1807 Kurakin was the most senior statesman and diplomat at Alexander’s headquarters. For a time in Paul I’s reign he had run Russian foreign policy. Currently he was preparing to depart for his new post as ambassador in Vienna. Kurakin was obsessed with the minutiae of rank, status and appearance. He could be pedantic. But he was more intelligent, shrewder and more worldly-wise than his critics allowed. He belonged to that section of the ruling elite which had always seen Anglo-French competition for global dominion as the key cause of the wars that had wracked Europe since 1793. Kurakin believed that if possible Russia must remain neutral in this conflict, using Anglo-French rivalry to enhance Russian interests. Though after Austerlitz he had come to see Napoleonic France as a threat to Russian security, he believed that the best way now to protect Russia was to come to an agreement with Napoleon to divide Europe into French and Russian spheres of interest.52

  Lobanov and Kurakin were first cousins. Both came from ancient aristocratic families. Whereas the Kurakins were rich, by 1800 Dmitrii’s branch of the Lobanov-Rostovskys was relatively poor. Above all that was because Kurakins had occupied top positions in government throughout the eighteenth century in an era when political power usually brought rich financial rewards. Their marriage alliances placed them at the very heart of the Russian aristocracy. The Kurakins also produced only one or at most two sons in each generation, so the family’s wealth was not dissipated. By contrast, it was a long time since a Prince Lobanov had played a key military or political role and Dmitrii Lobanov’s wealthy great-grandfather seems to have sired twenty-nine children from three marriages. When Tolstoy in War and Peace needed a fictional family to embody the world of the court and Petersburg high society he called them the Kuragins, though the real-life Kurakins were much more interesting and many-sided than Tolstoy’s parody of the cynical aristocratic courtier, Prince Vasilii Kuragin, and his unpleasant brood of spoiled children. Like Tolstoy’s fictional character Prince Boris Drubetskoy, Dmitrii Lobanov was brought up and educated in the family of his rich cousins, in this case the Kurakins.53

  Although Kurakin and Lobanov discussed details with Talleyrand and Marshal Berthier, Russia’s true chief negotiator was Alexander I, who spent hours in one-to-one conversations with Napoleon. The first meeting between the two monarchs was the famous encounter on a ceremonial raft which took place in the middle of the river Neman on 25 June 1807. The river was the dividing line between the two armies, with the Russians on the east bank and the French on the west.

  Of the six men – all of them generals – who accompanied Alexander to his meeting with Napoleon, the senior was his younger brother and heir, the Grand Duke Constantine. The emperor was fortunate in resembling his tall and handsome mother rather than his short, ugly and snub-nosed father. Constantine was not so lucky, and he resembled his father not just in looks but also in personality. Both men were obsessed with the minutiae of correct military drill and uniforms. More important, they were both very excitable and inconsistent, swinging between moods and ideas in a bewildering fashion. Above all, both were subject to terrifying fits of temper, in which
threats and insults would rain down on anyone unfortunate enough to be the target of their wrath. Both men were actually also capable of great generosity and kindness but for proud aristocrats, acutely sensitive to public dishonour, Paul’s insults had been as intolerable as his wayward policies or his blows to their careers.

  In 1807–14 Constantine was not just the heir to the throne but, apart from Alexander, the only adult male in the Romanov family. In the Russia of that time, it was unthinkable to overthrow the monarchy or displace the Romanov family by other candidates for the throne. Memories of the anarchy two hundred years before – the so-called Time of Troubles – when the extinction of the ruling dynasty had led to civil war, foreign invasion and the state’s disintegration, put a taboo on any such ideas. But however frustrated Russian aristocrats might be with Alexander, few would dream of putting Constantine on the throne in his place. In any case, to do the Grand Duke justice, he revered his brother and was very unlikely to offer support to any conspiracy. If this strengthened the emperor’s position at home, the fact that Constantine was one heartbeat from the throne had to worry foreign statesmen. Both Constantine’s father and his grandfather, Peter III, had been notorious for sudden and dramatic shifts in foreign policy. The inherently unpredictable nature of foreign policy under an autocracy was already sufficient reason to worry about relying on Russia, even without a personality such as Constantine’s lurking in the wings.54

  The youngest general in Alexander’s entourage was Major-General Count Christoph von Lieven. Calm, tactful, self-effacing and hardworking, Lieven occupied the modest-sounding job of head of the emperor’s personal military secretariat. In reality this was a position of great power. Paul I had introduced into Russia the Prussian system of military administration, whereby the monarch operated as his own commander-in-chief and ran the army through his adjutant-general, who in principle was no more than a glorified secretary. The actual minister of war sat in Berlin, rarely met the king, and ensured that the army had proper boots. Even in Prussia, the king’s adjutant-general inevitably accrued great power. In Russia neither Paul nor Alexander could equal Frederick’s detailed knowledge of military affairs. That necessarily increased the role of their adjutant-general, Lieven, whom one historian rightly called the ‘first deputy of the emperor for military affairs’.55