The Burning of Moscow

by Alexander Mikaberidze

  For the Russian government it was important to maintain this perception since it offered the higher moral ground in the war. The Russian struggle thus became, in the words of Emperor Alexander, the fight against ‘the modern-day Attila who, furious at finding neither the treasures he thirsted for in Moscow nor the peace which he hoped to dictate there, chose to turn my beautiful capital into ashes and ruins’.21 In October 1812, just weeks after the city was destroyed, the government’s official proclamation placed the sole responsibility on the Grande Armée, describing the fire as the action of ‘crazed and deprived individuals’.22 A month later, with Napoleon’s army already in full retreat and the outcome of the war all but clear, an imperial letter to Rostopchin reiterated the enemy’s culpability in the devastation of Moscow but also spoke of the fire as an act of divine providence: ‘As we cast our sights on the city of Moscow that has suffered so terribly at the hands of the enemy, we contemplate with extreme sadness the fate of its many victims and impoverished inhabitants. But God willed it this way! And He works in miraculous ways. Oftentimes, in the midst of violent storms, He sends us salvation, and through His rage shows us His mercy. No matter how painful it is for the Russian heart to see our ancient capital turned into ashes, and no matter how upsetting it is to gaze at the burnt churches of our Lord, we can seek solace in the fact that the enemy’s misdeeds did not go unpunished and the Moscow fire was extinguished with his own blood. The ashes of Moscow have buried his pride and power …’23

  The purpose of this and other similar proclamations by the Russian government became evident as time passed. They served to portray the Franco-Russian conflict in apocalyptic undertones and to unite the Russian populace against the enemy. The destruction of Moscow served as just another arrow in this anti-French ideological quiver – here was an example of barbarism perpetrated by the representatives of the people considered among the most civilized in the world. In October 1812 the Russian authorities explained:

  We cannot say that we are waging war against an enemy [original emphasis] … Such a statement would be too ordinary and insufficient to describe all that rabid violence that has been perpetrated [by the Grande Armée]. War, in general, causes incalculable disasters on the mortals but when it is waged by enlightened nations, its wickedness is alleviated by certain rules of honour and humanity … Yet we are now witnessing the nation that in this enlightened era had once enjoyed a reputation for compassion but is now perpetrating abuses of such ferocity and cruelty that it would be difficult to find similar mistreatment even among the most uncultured residents of Africa and the Americas.24

  In such a context, the Russian occupation of Paris – without plunder and destruction – in 1814 offered a rather dramatic contrast to the French entrance into Moscow and was used to augment the positive reputations of Russia and, above all, Alexander I himself. In June 1814 Semen Vorontsov, the former Russian ambassador to Britain, observed ‘We are considered barbarians and the French, inexplicably, are perceived as the most civilized nation. Yet they burned Moscow while we protected Paris.’25

  The government’s desire to frame the debate of the Moscow fire was not entirely successful. Russian society and historians actively debated the causes of the fire and either acknowledged Russian involvement in it or squarely laid the blame on Napoleon’s shoulders. In June 1813 Joseph de Maistre was surprised to see that ‘there are still many among the commoners and [classes] above them who believe that the French burned Moscow – this only shows how powerful prejudices remain and how they suffocate any other thoughts’.26 Over time, however, new explanations of the burning of Moscow emerged and some Russians came up with rather novel rationalizations of the event. Dmitri Runich, the infamous curator of the St Petersburg school district, rejected the accusations against Napoleon, noting that ‘it would be foolish to assume that the French burnt the city where they found everything they needed to survive in abundance, and which represented a secure location from which they could conduct negotiations or military operations’. Instead, Runich claimed that ‘this important undertaking [burning Moscow] could have been only conceived and carried out by the emperor [Alexander] himself’,27 who chose to sacrifice his capital but fight on! Meanwhile Sergei Glinka, editor of a prominent Russian literary journal and a close companion of Rostopchin, rejected the Moscow governor’s involvement and could not make himself believe that a few ‘dozen Russian peasants and foreigner craftsmen’, who were executed by the Allied forces on charges of igniting fire, would have indeed ‘set fires in Moscow in the presence of Napoleon’s army’. For him, just as for Leo Tolstoy and others,28 the destruction of Moscow was not premeditated but rather accidental, even a natural by-product of war. ‘Moscow burnt down [because] it was supposed to burn,’ proclaimed Glinka. ‘Who burned Moscow? The war! It was without a doubt the result of a war the likes of which the world had never seen before …’29 About forty years later Leo Tolstoy, whose War and Peace had a profound impact on popular Russian perceptions of the 1812 campaign, reiterated Glinka’s assertions when he famously stated that,

  In reality, however, it was not, and could not be, possible to explain the burning of Moscow by making any individual, or any group of people, responsible for it. Moscow was burned because it found itself in a position in which any town built of wood was bound to burn, quite apart from whether it had, or had not, a hundred and thirty inferior fire engines. Deserted Moscow had to burn as inevitably as a heap of shavings has to burn on which sparks continually fall for several days. A town built of wood, where scarcely a day passes without conflagrations when the house owners are in residence and a police force is present, cannot help burning when its inhabitants have left it and it is occupied by soldiers who smoke pipes, make campfires of the Senate chairs in the Senate Square, and cook themselves meals twice a day. In peacetime it is only necessary to billet troops in the villages of any district and the number of fires in that district immediately increases.30

  The nineteenth-century Russian imperial historians, however, followed a different path and from early on they pointed the finger towards the governor of Moscow. Dmitri Buturlin believed that, with the enemy army at the gates of Moscow, ‘Rostopchin could not neglect the only means left at his disposal to remain useful to his Fatherland. No longer able to save the city entrusted to him, he set out to destroy it completely and to make the loss of Moscow beneficial to Russia’s cause.’ For Buturlin, Rostopchin had long prepared for this ‘deed worthy of a true Roman’, preparing incendiary materials and recruiting incendiaries who then scattered throughout the city under the direction of undercover police officers. But Buturlin offers no tangible evidence in support of such claims and admits that some Russians may have soberly turned to arson as a patriotic gesture.31 More than a quarter of a century after Moscow’s destruction, the Russian court historian Alexander Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii still noted that ‘nowadays opinions remain divided on the Moscow fire’. His own efforts to explain what had happened produced only a contradictory account of the events: he initially rejected claims of deliberate Russian destruction of the city, focusing instead on the patriotic fervour of the Muscovites who had burned their estates, and on the plundering by Moscow’s criminals and poor as well as by drunken Allied troops. Along the way he also inadvertently included sufficient information to implicate both Rostopchin and Kutuzov of contributing to the initial outbreaks of fire on 14 September. Nevertheless, in his final analysis, he blamed Napoleon and his forces for the burning of Moscow.32 In the mid-nineteenth century Modest Bogdanovich, one of the brightest of the Russian imperial historians, published his classic three-volume history of the Patriotic War of 1812 in which he devoted one chapter to the fire of Moscow and argued that the city was destroyed not by Napoleon or the Grande Armée (although, he argued, the latter did contribute to the fires) but through the activities of Rostopchin and zealous Muscovites.33 Similar conclusions can be found in the works of many other late nineteenth-century Russian imperial historians,34 although some in Rus
sian society remained doubtful of such claims.

  Following the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, Soviet historians carried on a heated debate about the Moscow conflagration throughout the seven decades of the Soviet regime’s existence; a recent study estimated that over 200 articles and books had been devoted to this issue between 1920 and the 1990s.35 Interestingly, the first generation of Soviet historians, writing between the 1920s and the 1940s, believed that Moscow was burned by the Russians. Framing his discussion within a Communist ideological framework, Mikhail Pokrovskii spoke openly of Moscow being abandoned by the aristocracy and of ‘[Russian] police burning the city on the orders of Rostopchin’. These aristocratic elites could not care less about the impact the fires would have on the common people, the historian argued.36 A more nuanced explanation was offered by the renowned Soviet historian Eugène Tarle, who spoke of several factors in the destruction of Moscow, including the carelessness of enemy soldiers. But above all, Tarle argued, Moscow was destroyed through the actions of the governor and the patriotic zeal of its residents, who preferred to have the city they loved so much destroyed rather than surrendered to the enemy.37

  This apparent consensus on the Russian responsibility for the fire broke down after the Second World War, when the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin sought to exploit national history to justify his own actions during the war. Stalin helped create the cult of Field Marshal Kutuzov, who was credited with developing an overarching Russian strategic plan of luring Napoleon deep into Russia and then destroying him with a masterful counterattack – ostensibly just like Stalin himself did with the invading Nazi armies in 1941–1945! After the war the Soviet historian I. Polosin sought to prove that the destruction of Moscow was just one element in Kutuzov’s ingenious plan to destroy the invading enemy forces. Undaunted by the lack of concrete evidence for this plan, Polosin used circumstantial evidence to argue that the city was burned on the orders not of Rostopchin but of Commander-in-Chief Kutuzov himself. Polosin believed that Kutuzov had a plan for burning Moscow, which entailed the destruction of depots of supplies and ammunition as well as igniting fires to deceive the enemy on the direction of the Russian retreat.38

  But this interpretation proved to be short-lived and by the early 1950s the Moscow fire was no longer thought to have been a deliberate Russian act. With the Cold War under way, it was increasingly discussed within the larger narrative of the Soviet struggle against the bourgeois and capitalist West. Any suggestions of Russian involvement in the fire were denounced as unpatriotic and were subjected to severe criticism. Scholars quickly adhered to this new official dictum. The 1950s saw the appearance of several publications by Liubomir Beskrovnyi, Nikolay Garnich and Pavel Zhilin, who claimed that the Allied forces conscientiously and deliberately destroyed Moscow. This trio of scholars (and their supporters) closely controlled Soviet publications on the subject, reviewing manuscripts for publications and ensuring they conformed to the official doctrine.39 The sesquicentennial celebrations in the 1960s produced dozens of publications on the Patriotic War of 1812 but they were largely dominated by the Beskrovnyi–Garnich–Zhilin school of thought, while the few more balanced accounts, the most promising being the works of V. Kholodkovskii and A. Tartakovskii,40 were tossed aside. Kholodkovskii’s sensible questions on what benefit the Grande Armée could have garnered from burning the city where it hoped to spend the winter were simply ignored. The Beskrovnyi–Garnich–Zhilin ‘doctrine’ remained dominant throughout the 1970s and 1980s, influencing generations of Soviet youngsters. As late as 1987 the Soviet historian O. Orlik assured her readers that the ‘fires were produced by pillaging, marauding and other excesses committed by the French troops’.41 Not to be outdone, N. Ryazanov went even further, writing of special French incendiary detachments (!) ‘galloping through Moscow with burning torches in hand. If a certain building failed to ignite, it was loaded with gunpowder and burnt, or ignited with incendiary shells fired from cannon.’42

  The start of the glasnost and perestroika era allowed some Soviet scholars to defy established dogma. One of the first among them was Professor Nikolay Troitskii of Saratov State University, whose new history of the Patriotic War of 181243 offered a profound reassessment of the war in 1988. He rightly argued that the Beskrovnyi–Garnich–Zhilin school of thought ‘simplified the debate on the Moscow fire and, most importantly, distorted its essence’. The Russian government and the church had indeed accused the French of burning the city but, Troitskii argued, one could hardly expect anything else from the authorities. He then rightly pointed to ‘those great Russian historians and writers like A.S. Pushkin and N.M. Karamzin, M.Yu. Lermontov and A.I. Herzen, V.G. Belinskii and N.G. Chernyshevskii, M.I. Bogdanovich and A.I. Popov … as well as the heroes of 1812, notably A.P. Yermolov, D.V. Davydov, P.Kh. Grabbe and F.N. Glinka, not to mention M.I. Kutuzov himself, who, contrary to the official version, insisted with complete certainty that Russians themselves had burnt Moscow’.44

  Troitskii’s book played an important role in prompting both academic and public discussion of the Moscow fire, which continues to the present day. While some Russian popular history books repeat claims of the Allied involvement in the destruction of Moscow,45 Russian scholars – notably V. Zemtsov and A. Popov – have joined their Western counterparts in holding the Russians themselves responsible for the burning of the city. Thus, V. Zemtsov’s fascinating Pozhar Moskvy offers the most in-depth and up-to-date account of the Moscow fire based on a wide range of Russian, French, German and Polish sources. The book explores the topic thematically, looking at the fire first from the Russian perspective then ‘through the eyes of the French’, before concluding with three absorbing vignettes on personal experiences of the war. However, the author shies away from attributing responsibility, stating that the book does not aim to ‘provide an unequivocal answer to what is often considered as the sole important question of who precisely burned Moscow: Russians or Napoleon?’ Instead, he seeks to offer a ‘much more multifaceted approach’ on ‘major issues of life and death’.46 On the other hand, A. Popov believes that ‘the question of who ignited the Moscow fire has been long resolved’ and only the ‘patriotic arrogance’ of Russian historians ‘does not allow them to accept this plain conclusion but rather compels them to reiterate propagandistic false claims that are far removed from historical truth’. In his insightful study on the Patriotic War, Popov does not loiter long on this issue but he effectively absolves the Grande Armée of the outbreak of the fires and states that ‘the fire of Moscow was disadvantageous to Napoleon’s army from economic, political and military points of view, and neither could it be ascribed [to the Allies] on the grounds of “plunder-marauding”’. Instead, he directly accuses Governor Rostopchin of burning the Russian capital.47 However, it is difficult to agree with Popov’s complete absolution of the Grande Armée’s role in the destruction of Moscow. One cannot but wonder what part was played by the hundreds of Allied soldiers who entered the city in defiance of imperial orders and began looting the suburbs.

  The purpose of this book, therefore, is to build upon the existing literature and provide an in-depth account of one of the most dramatic events of the Napoleonic Wars. It will attempt to address several important questions in this tragic story. Was the fire part of a deliberate plan conceived by Governor Rostopchin? Or was it the result of spur-of-the-moment decisions made by the governor and city officials? What was the role of common Muscovites in the event? And finally, what about the responsibility of the Grande Armée itself? In writing this book, I tried to consult the widest possible array of sources to produce a balanced account. In the process I have examined more than two hundred Russian, French, German, Polish and Dutch memoirs, diaries and private correspondences. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to peruse the archival holdings of the Russian State Military Historical Archive (RGVIA), the Service historique de la Défense at Château de Vincennes in Paris and the Central Historical Archive of Moscow (TSIAM), all of which offer unparallele
d insights into the events of 1812.

  This book would not have been possible without the support of many individuals. I am grateful to Rupert Harding, my editor at Pen & Sword, for his willingness to continue our collaboration after two prior volumes on the 1812 campaign. For three years he patiently waited for me to complete this book, gently reminding me of the numerous deadlines I missed and urging me forwards. In the process of researching this book, I was able to utilize materials from dozens of university libraries and am extremely grateful to Susie Davison of the Noel Library at Louisiana State University in Shreveport (LSUS) for her steadfast support. Over the last six years, as I toiled on what has now turned into the 1812 trilogy, she procured hundreds of titles from all across the United States, always attentively listening to my inquiries and quickly locating requested items. Also worthy of mention here are the staffs of the various research libraries in the United States and Europe for their generous help with materials. I would like to thank the College of Liberal Arts at LSUS for granting me the Hubert Humphreys Endowed Professorship that facilitated this research.