The Burning of Moscow

by Alexander Mikaberidze

  The Military Commission’s protocol, which was published in French and Russian, with a thousand copies distributed throughout the city, went beyond simply determining the guilt or innocence of the twenty-six men. It offered a broader look at the events in Moscow and, together with the imperial bulletins, laid the foundation for the official French version of the Moscow fire. The establishment of this commission was part of Napoleon’s attempt to defend himself against charges of culpability for the conflagration. In the words of Caulaincourt, Napoleon had to exculpate both the army and himself ‘of the odium of having caused the fire [which] it had in fact done its utmost to put out, and from which self-interest was enough to exonerate’. Napoleon understood that the ‘public opinion of the entire world would turn against him once it learned that the entrance of his troops into the abandoned ancient capital of Russia was accompanied by a devastating fire. He understood that responsibility for the fire would be placed, first of all, on his shoulders. Therefore, he thought it of paramount importance to shift the burden to the Russians and the Russian government.’92 The primary task of the Military Commission was not to deliver justice but rather to provide sufficient foundation for this official contention. The commission’s protocol thus dealt in passing with the twenty-six defendants, but was largely focused on proving the charge that the ‘Russian government’ had made preparations to burn Moscow since the start of the war. The Russian authorities, it concluded, recruited a ‘certain Englishman by the name of Smith who claims to be a German’, who designed a special machine – ‘une machine exterminatrice’ – that could carry incendiary material and burn the city. The Military Commission also cited Rostopchin’s broadsheets and his orders to remove the firefighting equipment as evidence for a plan to destroy Moscow, and claimed that ‘800 convicts’ were purposely released to ‘ignite the city within twenty-four hours after the entry of the French troops’.93

  Yet many of these claims are false. It was inconceivable that the Russian government could have planned the destruction of the city three months in advance, since no one expected that Napoleon would actually advance so far into Russia. The claim of the flying machine was factual, but Leppich’s device was not intended for burning the city and was nowhere near completion by the time Moscow fell. As seen above, Rostopchin’s broadsheets should not be taken at face value since their primary purpose was to shape public opinion, and Rostopchin frequently adopted colourful and inflated expressions to appeal to his audience. Yet, to drive its point home, the Military Commission even resorted to forgery by inserting direct references to the burning of Moscow into translated texts of Rostopchin’s broadsheets. Finally, it is rather peculiar that the Military Commission declared that hundreds of convicts had been ordered to burn the city, and yet not a single convict was arrested and present at its proceedings. Such flaws in the French court-martial caused many Russian historians to reject its findings. Modest Bogdanovich thus flatly refused to attach ‘any importance to the work of the French military commission’, in whose findings ‘falsehoods became interwoven with truth to such a degree that no clarity was brought to the issue that the commission was tasked with investigating’.94

  Similarly problematic are claims of police involvement in the burning of the city. Many Allied participants and historians speak of police officials being detained in the process of igniting fires, and accuse them of being incendiaries. Bogdanovich, for example, bluntly states that ‘some police officials were left in the capital to ignite fires in various points’,95 but to support this claim he cites only the French Military Commission’s protocol, despite the fact that just a few pages later he rejects its veracity outright. Of the twenty-six men tried by the Military Commission nine identified themselves as policemen, but only one was found guilty of incendiary activity and shot.96 Even if he wanted to utilize the police to burn the city, Rostopchin could hardly involve large numbers of police officials since they had been committed to more pressing tasks. On the eve of Moscow’s abandonment, Kutuzov had ordered Rostopchin to dispatch available police officers to guide the army through Moscow to the Ryazan road’.97 Throughout the evening of 13 September and the next morning the majority of police officials were busy maintaining a fragile order in the city, supervising the evacuation of various state and private property, and guiding columns of troops through the city, which they then left together with the Russian army. A few did stay in the city to serve as the governor’s eyes and ears, making clandestine trips to the Russian army’s headquarters with information about the enemy’s activities in the abandoned capital. Rostopchin later described how he asked police officers to volunteer for this mission. He wanted six ‘agents’ but only five volunteered, compelling Rostopchin to select the sixth one himself.98 The report by the acting Chief of Police, K. Gelman, prepared in late October 1812, reveals that, in total, twenty-two police officials had stayed behind in Moscow and were involved in clandestine work procuring information for the Russian authorities; based on available evidence, none of these officers had been arrested by the Allied authorities but some did choose to collaborate with the enemy.99 In contrast, there were also some policemen who stayed behind due to other circumstances and were captured by the enemy. Moscow’s Police Chief Ivashkin noted that ‘the order for the police to depart was received at midnight on 14 September. At 5am police squads were instructed to gather at designated spots’, but the passage of large numbers of people and the army meant that some police officials became separated and were unable to get to their squads in time. As a result, ‘some of the police rank-and-file, unable to get to the designated concentration points and unaware where to go next, were captured by the enemy’.100 Also among the captured were some members of the fire brigade, who had been sent to various stores to destroy barrels containing alcohol but seem to have enjoyed doing it a little too much. Thus Ivashkin complained that some firefighters were ‘senselessly drunk’ and had to be left behind.

  The People of Moscow

  So if neither convicts nor police officials played a decisive role in the start of the fire, who did? To this author, the answer lies in the multitudes of Russian army stragglers and Muscovite poor who had stayed behind. During the previous month Rostopchin had managed to inflame the inhabitants to such a degree that emotions had reached fever pitch by 14 September. At the start of the war his broadsheets and other appeals sought to calm down sentiments in the city by reassuring the residents that the enemy posed no direct threat to them. But as the war progressed, the governor completely reversed direction and sought to incite what he considered to be a patriotic zeal in the populace. This meant embracing increasingly xenophobic rhetoric and inciting people to violence and armed struggle. He carefully cultivated the idea that Moscow was central to Russian culture and must be protected at all costs. ‘Glory shall be the reward of those who take part in this struggle! Eternal memory awaits those who fall! And those who evade their duty shall receive retribution on the Day of Judgement!’101 Such appeals naturally had a profound impact on the Muscovites, especially the lower classes, who gathered in their tens of thousands on the Three Hills on 13 September. Glinka, one of Rostopchin’s keen companions, recalled that after writing his appeal to muster the Muscovites at the Three Hills, the governor instructed him to print it as a broadsheet and noted, ‘[As for ourselves,] we will have nothing to do at the Three Hills but this will teach our peasants what they should do if the enemy takes Moscow.’102 Consequently, as one Russian contemporary aptly commented, ‘Moscow and Rostopchin perfectly understood each other’.103

  Two principal factors influenced the actions of the Muscovites. One was the strong patriotic sentiment, which Rostopchin did his best to nurture, and which was easily inflamed by the news from the army and the influx of refugees from the western provinces already devastated by war. A number of eyewitnesses testified that many Muscovites chose to destroy their property instead of leaving it to be plundered by the enemy. Elizaveta Yankova, for example, recalled that ‘it was later discovere
d that many houses were set on fire by their owners, many of whom were driven by the sentiment, “Let my entire property perish and my house burn so none falls into the hands of the cursed dogs [the Grande Armée]. Let’s destroy whatever I cannot take so it does not belong to the abominable French.”’104 After the city fell, those merchants who had hoped that Moscow would fare no worse than Berlin or Vienna were quickly disillusioned by the widespread looting and burned their stores themselves. General Hermann von Boyen, deployed to the vicinity of Vladimir, recalled meeting a Muscovite merchant who had a small wooden store in the trading stalls near Red Square. The merchant told him that when the Allied troops began to plunder stores, he and his companions ‘became seized with the desire for revenge and burned their property with their own hands rather than let it fall into the enemy hands’. Boyen added that many other refugees from Moscow recounted similar experiences.105 In his La Vérité, Rostopchin cited his conversation with the owner of the carriage shop, who decided to burn his store when French officers began to take carriages for themselves.106 Such acts could easily have contributed to a general conflagration.

  But there was also a second, more powerful, factor at play. The absence of authority encouraged many Muscovites to steal, rob and cause mayhem. As early as the beginning of June Rostopchin complained about numerous ‘vagabonds who have flooded the city. They beg in the morning, steal in the evening and cause various disorders at night.’107 He later recounted that two merchants overheard men brawling in the streets, one of whom declared that ‘it was time to set fire to some suburbs, ring the tocsin and start robbing. The other man, however, counselled caution and suggested waiting, noting that it was still full moon.’ The alarmed merchants managed to seize one of the men and delivered him to the governor, who offered him freedom and money in exchange for full disclosure. The man declared that there were ‘twelve of them, all scoundrels’, and they intended to ignite fires to cause confusion so they could plunder the richest stores in town.108 It is probably that such sentiments are reflected in another Muscovite’s recollection that ‘for many months’ prior to September, ‘there was a [popular] rumour about the expected and, in a certain turn of military events, even very probable, burning of the city’.109 It was probably this rumour that prompted Dmitri Volkonskii, one week before the battle of Borodino and two weeks before the enemy approached Moscow, to comment in his letter of 31 August, ‘many residents are leaving Moscow fearful that all homes would be burned’.110 The Moscow police maintained control of public order throughout July and August but as the municipal authorities withdrew on 13–14 September, so the city’s riffraff emerged onto the streets. Bourgogne was probably describing some of them when he noted in his memoirs that on the outskirts of the town ‘we met several miserable creatures … they all had horrible faces, and were armed with muskets, staves and pitchforks’.111

  The chaos that enveloped Moscow in mid-September thus served as a catalyst for mischief perpetrated by the poor, who found themselves, probably for the first time in their lives, free from any supervision by higher authority and took advantage of the moment to seek quick enrichment and settle old scores.112 In addition, the presence of Russian soldiers hungry for some bounty – ‘many of our marauders stayed behind in Moscow’, admitted one Russian staff officer113 – would only have further exacerbated the situation. Maxim Nevzorov, head of the typography service at the University of Moscow, complained about ‘certain rascals who exploited these tragic circumstances and confusion among people to perpetrate their mischief’.114 The Allied participants do acknowledge that ‘there was a huge mass of people from the lower classes prepared to act as guides and assist the invaders in the hope of sharing in the spoils’.115 Rostopchin confided to the Russian Minister of Police S. Vyazmitinov that he was convinced that among ‘the 10,000 residents remaining in Moscow, probably 9,000 stayed behind because they intended to rob and plunder’.116 This is clearly an exaggeration but it still points to his belief in the presence of a large number of people capable of criminal enterprise. Indeed, we have numerous accounts of Muscovites wandering around the city, getting drunk, ransacking taverns and shops, and attacking the houses of the affluent, whom they resented for abandoning the city. For some of them, it was all part of a purposeful assault on the authorities that had long oppressed them. But for merchant’s wife Anna Kruglova, ‘this was a terrifying time: our own people burned Moscow’.117 Her sentiment was shared by Peter Chudimov, the archivist of the Mining Department, who lamented the sight of government buildings ransacked and ‘strewn with hay, potatoes, cabbages and wine barrels, with doors, windows and cabinets broken … The Russian people themselves plundered all of the government offices.’118 In some cases this popular anger was manifested in the deliberate burning of noble mansions and estates. Some domestic servants might have been tempted to ransack their masters’ estates and then set fires to cover up their actions. One of Soimonov’s serfs recounted a rumour that ‘our own people were burning Moscow to drive Bonaparte out of it. I do not know whether it was true or not but can testify that our house was set on fire [by Russians]. The fire was still far away from us when the house [suddenly] caught fire from inside.’119 At Prince Kurakin’s estate a drunken man dressed in a peasant’s smock was caught attempting to set fire to the house; when the estate’s steward and four footmen drove him out with blows, the man kept exclaiming, ‘Look how well it burns!’ The footmen finally gave the man up to the French, who promptly shot him. Upper-class Russians prided themselves on embracing French culture, language and fashion. But amidst the disorder reigning in Moscow, their appearance and manners could easily become a liability, since the peasants looked with suspicion at anyone dressed or behaving in a foreign manner. Thus some Russian nobles felt more ‘threatened by Russian peasants than by the French’.120 A priest recalled that the peasants ‘were merciless in pillaging Moscow and proffered all sorts of insults against the [affluent] inhabitants of Moscow, calling them runaways and traitors and declaring resolutely that whatever stayed behind in Moscow now belonged to them’.121 When the deacon of the Novodevichii Monastery returned to Moscow in October, he found his house still standing but already occupied by others. ‘Five or so peasants came suddenly running to him. “Where are you going?” they shouted. “Back home,” he answered. “I am the master of this house.” “There are no longer any masters here so get lost,” one of them screamed in response.’ The German physician Nordhof wrote of a crowd of peasants, led by a sabre-wielding priest who declared that it was not a crime to loot the houses of the affluent and foreigners because they were all traitors.122

  The presence of the Russian soldiers, who took what they wanted by force, further exacerbated the situation. Colonel Toll recalled that during the Russian army’s procession through Moscow, General Barclay de Tolly was informed that soldiers were looting the Merchant Court. He immediately dispatched there his aide-de-camp, who soon returned with the news that ‘the merchants themselves had invited the soldiers to plunder their stores because they were about to lose their riches and preferred to enrich their compatriots rather than the enemy’. Toll notes that more than six thousand soldiers were drawn in by this ‘enticing invitation’.123 ‘Near the Pokrovskii Monastery,’ wrote one eyewitness on 13 September, ‘we encountered some 5,000 wounded, who were ransacking shops.’124 Another Muscovite ‘saw our soldiers murdering a shopkeeper. Proceeding along Basmannaya street, I saw appalling scenes … wounded [Russian] soldiers and marauders were plundering everything.’125 Rostopchin later described the misery of Moscow’s residents, caused by ‘the wounded sick and [healthy] rank-and-file who were meandering around solely to despoil their own compatriots’.126

  Would it be far-fetched to suppose that in the chaos and turmoil of the first two days some of these newly minted pillagers accidentally caused fires in the buildings they were ransacking? The repeated references to numerous ‘criminals and convicts’ in the memoirs of Allied participants can perhaps thus be explained in the context of
actions perpetrated by the rabble, who certainly numbered in the hundreds. Seeking personal enrichment or avenging their past wrongs by society, these men were not inspired by any grand patriotic designs, nor did they follow any plans. If Rostopchin’s above-mentioned testimony is to be relied on, these criminally minded men (and probably women) would have been keen to cause confusion and mayhem to prevent the enemy authorities from establishing control over the city. The greater the disorder, the easier it was for them to steal and rob. But to a French, German or Polish observer, the actions of so many individuals, seemingly acting in concert in combing the streets, and robbing and burning houses, could easily have been perceived as part of a deliberate plan to destroy the city.

  The Grande Armée

  No discussion of the Moscow fire would be complete without some inquiry into the role of the Grande Armée. It is indeed remarkable that the majority of existing accounts focus exclusively on Russian culpability and ignore the possibility that the Allied forces might have had anything to do with the fire. To be fair, most accounts do acknowledge the widespread pillaging that the French, Germans, Poles and others committed but it is usually portrayed as a response to the fire. In fact, the soldiers of the Grande Armée began looting the city almost as soon as they had reached it and before the city-wide conflagration became apparent. It is certain that the soldiers, finding the town largely abandoned by its inhabitants, broke into the houses to search for plunder on the night of their arrival. As one prominent contemporary, evidently with considerable expertise in this subject, commented, ‘light for this purpose is generally procured by flashing off a firelock, and setting fire to the oil rag with which the musket is commonly kept clean. This oil rag is kept in the hand as long as the latter is not burnt; the rag is then thrown upon the ground or anywhere, and something is found and set fire to, to answer the same purpose. It is thus that a house abandoned by its inhabitants, if plundered by troops, is generally burnt.’127 Indeed, the immediate reaction of many Allied officers, generals and even Napoleon himself was to discount the initial fires simply as the result of carelessness among the troops.