1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. Adam Zamoyski
people, who had confounded the evil one. This being so, French assertions that they had been defeated by the Russian winter rather than the Russians themselves were dismissed as irrelevant.
It was against the backdrop of this fundamentally spiritual interpretation that in the summer of 1863 Tolstoy began work on his novel War and Peace, in which he was to add his own highly personal gloss on the events.
Tolstoy had originally been enthusiastic about the programme of liberal reforms launched by Tsar Alexander II when he came to the throne in 1855. He had even tried to pre-empt them by offering the serfs on his estate a deal that would free them from their obligations and give them the land they worked. But the serfs were suspicious and rejected his offer. Instead of turning Tolstoy against the peasants, this helped to put him off liberalism in general. He embraced the slavophile view that the liberals would destroy Russia by imposing foreign ideas and institutions alien to the Russian character. He also reacted against the wave of self-abasement among intellectuals who had turned the recent defeat in the Crimean War into a paradigm for Russian backwardness. In his depiction of the events of 1812, Tolstoy traces a metaphor of the penetration of Russia by foreign influences: Napoleon is the harbinger of an ‘alien’ order, which some of Alexander’s ‘contaminated’ entourage favour. But it is rejected by the Russian nation. Yet this is no glorification of the Russian common people – the hero of Tolstoy’s novel is a deferential peasantry led by the minor nobility who, unlike the Frenchified aristocrats, have remained true to Russian values. But Tolstoy’s work is not all fantasy, and he did his homework.
The first sentence of War and Peace expresses outrage at French doings in Genoa and Lucca in 1799, while on the next page one of the protagonists affirms that Russia will be ‘the saviour of Europe’. With this opening, Tolstoy firmly dismissed the notion of the French invasion of 1812 as an act of gratuitous aggression: to him it was clear that it was merely part of a prolonged struggle between France and Russia for hegemony over Europe. Yet it was to be some time before a Russian historian would mention this.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw the publication of a great many diaries, recollections and letters of participants in the events; of staff documents giving troop numbers and dispositions; and of official documents, orders and letters. It also brought forth a number of very useful studies of specific aspects of the campaign, of individual battles, and of social reactions to the events.
The next generation of Russian historians to deal with the subject in any depth were influenced by the works of Marx and Engels and took a more pragmatic view. It is true that Aleksandr Nikolaevich Popov, writing in 1912, idealised Kutuzov and ‘Russian society’, but his more down-to-earth contemporary Vladimir Ivanovich Kharkievich admitted that Kutuzov had faults, and rejected the image of Russia as innocent victim. Konstantin Adamovich Voensky took a similar line, and related Russian military failures in 1812 to the shortcomings of the country’s constitution and social structure. A number of other historians produced studies of specific aspects, in which they turned up evidence of a less glorious response by Russian society than had been represented hitherto, and confirmed that logistics and climate had been largely responsible for the outcome.
Perhaps the most forceful of this generation of historians, and the one who reacted most vigorously against the old pieties, was Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovsky. According to him, the Tsarist state was bent on extending Russian hegemony beyond its borders in order to guarantee the survival of an essentially feudal system at home. He went so far as to say that Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was ‘an act of necessary self-defence’ on his part. He was deeply critical of Kutuzov and other Russian generals. He stressed the role of the weather in the defeat of the French, and belittled the role of ‘Russian society’, questioning the myth of the patriotic peasants. Those who did resist the invader did so, according to him, in defence of their chickens and geese, not their fatherland.3
This view was endorsed by Lenin, and held sway during the first two decades of Soviet rule. The war was not referred to as the ‘Patriotic War’ during this period, as it concerned only the respective economic interests of the Russian imperialists and the French bourgeoisie. The Russian army had made a mess of defending the country precisely because it was commanded by nobles, and the government’s fear of arming the peasants prevented the development of a guerrilla war against the French.
At Stalin’s prompting, a ruling of the Central Committee on 16 May 1934 recommended a fresh approach to the study of history, aimed at engaging the masses. How that would affect the representation of the events of 1812 was not immediately clear. Writing in 1936, the historian Evgenii Viktorovich Tarle affirmed that the Russian people had played no part in the war, dismissing evidence of peasant guerrilla activity as no more than the opportunistic murder of French stragglers. The following year he published an account of the war in which he said almost exactly the opposite, representing it as the triumph of the patriotic Russian people. After a certain amount of hair-splitting argument couched in the language of Marxist dialectics, it was once again dubbed the ‘Patriotic War’, but only in inverted commas. Tarle also admitted that the weather might have had something to do with the French débâcle, but was later accused of retailing the ideas of what one writer termed ‘the Trotskyite-Bukharinite counter-revolutionary enemies of the people’ and ‘the lying inventions of foreign authors’ – even the account by the great military theorist Karl von Clausewitz, himself a participant in the campaign on the Russian side, was dismissed as ‘lies’.
Tarle adopted a traditional spiritual view of the events, representing the French victory at Borodino as ‘a moral victory’ for the Russians and the war itself as the crucible of all that was best in Russian history over the next decades. He also built up the image of Kutuzov, as a kind of metaphysical emanation of the Russian people, their true leader in every sense.4 But it was his colleague P.A. Zhilin who made the obvious connection between Kutuzov and Stalin as saviours of the fatherland.
Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941 and the titanic struggle that followed added substance to this connection, and the events of 1812 provided a wonderful source of propaganda material. The ‘Patriotic War of 1812’, as it would henceforth be known, could be viewed as a dress rehearsal for what became the ‘Great Patriotic War’. Tarle’s book was translated and published widely in the West, in order to help make the point that a peace-loving Russia had been attacked for no reason at all – deftly burying the embarrassing fact that, just as in 1812, Russia had been a complicitous ally of the other side up to the very outbreak of hostilities – but that her people and the great leaders that sprung from their bosom were invincible.
For a brief period following Stalin’s death in 1953 an element of objectivity entered Russian historiography, and a number of solid studies on the economic, political and diplomatic background, the military preparations and other aspects saw the light of day. But the advent of Brezhnev put the lid on this. Historians such as L.G. Beskrovny plugged the old patriotic nostrums and shamelessly repeated obvious falsehoods. French numbers were regularly inflated and those of the Russian forces scaled down. The persona of Kutuzov took on a life of its own. The luxury-loving prince was transformed into a kind of peasant leader who was in some mysterious way ‘in conflict’ with the Tsar and the system. Every blunder he made was represented as a piece of cunning, the actual effect of which was not defined, and every failure to act as a brilliant strategic ploy.
This kind of interpretation went unchallenged until the late 1980s, when a new generation of historians, such as A.A. Abalikhin, V.G. Sirotkin, S.V. Shvedov, Oleg Sokolov and N.A. Troitsky brought a freshness and honesty to the subject never known before. But it will probably be some time before a satisfying synthesis emerges from this.
The handful of Western historians who have written on the subject have made modest use of available Russian primary sources, relying instead on the works of their Russian colleagues. Not surprisingly, they have accepted the facts and figures they found in these. More surprisingly, most have also accepted some of the interpretations and ingested, albeit unconsciously, a dose of their emotional and political flavour.
Virtually all the extant documentary material concerning the political