1812. Adam Zamoyski
was certainly clear even to him that his State Secretary’s unpopularity was not only tainting him, but even exposing him to danger.
On the evening of 29 March 1812 Speransky was summoned to an audience with the Tsar in the Winter Palace. There were no witnesses to the two-hour interview, but those waiting in the antechamber could see that something was wrong when the Minister emerged from the Tsar’s study. Moments later the door opened again and Alexander himself appeared, with tears pouring down his cheeks, and embraced Speransky, bidding him a theatrical farewell. Speransky drove home, where he found Balashov waiting for him. He was bundled into a police kibitka and driven off through the night to exile in Nizhni Novgorod.15
His post as State Secretary was given to Aleksandr Semionovich Shishkov, a retired admiral and a particular hater of everything pertaining to France and her culture. He had denounced the Tilsit treaty and made frequent attacks on Speransky, and had of late achieved a certain notoriety through his Dissertations on the Love of One’s Fatherland. He was astonished, and somewhat overwhelmed, to be hauled out of obscurity. But nobles up and down the empire rejoiced.
The fall of the hated Minister was an unequivocal signal to them that Alexander had understood he needed them during the uncertain times ahead. He was acutely aware that an invasion of Russia might well trigger a new Time of Troubles similar to that two hundred years before. It was probably for this reason that he agreed to give the post of Governor General of Moscow, which had fallen vacant in March, to his sister Catherine’s protégé Count Fyodor Rostopchin. This erstwhile Foreign Minister to Tsar Paul was a lively, clever man, forthright in his opinions, but he was also something of a fantasist, and possibly mentally unbalanced. Alexander did not consider him up to the job, and had tried to resist his sister’s request. ‘He’s no soldier, and the Governor of Moscow must bear epaulettes on his shoulders,’ he argued. ‘That is a matter for his tailor,’ she riposted. Alexander gave way. It was, after all, a largely honorary post.16
He had removed the most obvious points of friction between himself and his people, and pacified the most vociferous centres of opposition. Now it was up to God. At 2 p.m. on 9 April, after attending a solemn service in the monumental new cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, Alexander left St Petersburg for the army, accompanied part of the way by a crowd of wellwishers who ran alongside his carriage cheering and weeping. He had decided that his place was with his troops.
The Russian army was unlike any other in Europe, and could not have been more different from the French, particularly where the common soldier was concerned. He was drafted for a period of twenty-five years, which effectively meant for life. He was unlikely to serve that term, as no more than 10 per cent survived the dreadful conditions and the frequent beatings – including the practice of making them run the gauntlet of two rows of their comrades beating them as they went – let alone disease or death in battle.
When he was drafted, his family and often the entire village would turn out to see him off, treating the event as a funeral. His family and friends excised him from their lives, never expecting to see him again. As the children of men drafted into the army could not be looked after by working single mothers, they were sent to military orphanages to be brought up and trained to become non-commissioned officers when they grew up. But conditions in these institutions were so poor that only about two-thirds of them survived into adulthood.17 If the conscript were to return after a quarter of a century (with no leave and no letters) he would be a stranger. And he would no longer be a serf, so there was no place for him in the rural economy any more. Those who did last out the twenty-five years would therefore either try to go on serving, or go off to towns looking for work.
When they entered their regiments the conscripts effectively joined a brotherhood, removed from the normal stream of Russian life and bound together by misery. Virtually the only respect in which they had an advantage over their French counterparts was that their uniforms, predominantly green in colour, were more practical and less constricting, as well as better made. In peacetime, their platoon functioned as a trading corporation, an artel, leasing their labour to local civilians, with the profits theoretically being shared out between them, though more often going into the pockets of their officers.
Desertion was difficult within the boundaries of the Russian empire, as an unattached peasant would stick out wherever he went. But when Russian armies were stationed along the western border it became frequent, and many would cross it and take service in the Polish or other forces. When they operated abroad, particularly when they were about to return home, desertion became common, and its scale testified to the misery of military life. In 1807, as they began their march back into Russia after Tilsit, Prince Sergei Volkonsky noted that his regiment, the élite Chevaliergardes, lost about a hundred men in four days, despite doubled sentries posted all around the camp perimeter.18 The men nevertheless behaved with the greatest patriotism and loyalty in the face of the enemy.
Much of the training in the Russian army was directed at good performance on the parade ground rather than on the battlefield. The men were drilled mercilessly and marched about in formation until they learnt to operate as a mass, and taught to rely on the bayonet rather than musketry. In battle, obedience was considered to be a key factor. A special instruction addressed to infantry officers stipulated that on the eve of an engagement they must give their men a talk, reminding them of their duty and that they would be severely punished for any signs of cowardice. Even trying to dodge a cannonball while the unit was standing to was to be punished by caning. If a soldier or non-commissioned officer showed cowardice in the field, he should be executed on the spot. The same went for one who created confusion, by, for instance, shouting ‘We’re cut off!’, as he was to be considered a traitor.19 All these factors conspired to generate solidarity, resilience and the ability to put up with almost any conditions. But they did not breed intelligence or initiative.
The chasm dividing officers from the other ranks was unbridgeable, and there was no possibility of promotion. The officers were drawn exclusively from the nobility. They were supposed to serve their apprenticeship in the ranks, but usually did this in cadet formations or officer schools, and kept contact with their troops down to a minimum. This was not a problem, since many could not sustain a conversation in Russian. But they did personally cane them for minor faults.
The pay of junior officers in the Russian army was lower than anywhere else in Europe. And as promotion to senior ranks was almost entirely dependent on influence at court, junior officers from the minor nobility were sentenced to a life of poverty and obscurity. As a result, such a career only attracted those of meagre talents. The operations of 1805–1807 had shown up grave faults in the command structure of the Russian army, lack of cooperation between units and arms, and other weaknesses, mainly to do with the low calibre and poor training of the officers. But all attempts at addressing these problems were vitiated by the rapid expansion of the armed forces over the next few years, which created a shortage of officers, with the result that in 1808 the length of training was actually cut.
Alexander did everything he could to prepare the army for its next showdown with Napoleon. He created a Ministry of the Armed Forces with the aim of making the army more effective, and lavished money on it. Military spending rose from twenty-six million roubles out of a total budget of eighty-two million at Alexander’s accession to seventy million out of a budget of 114 million by 1814. He raised the draft, which took four men out of five hundred souls in 1805, to five out of five hundred, yielding 100 to 120,000 men each year, which meant that he conscripted more than 500,000 men between 1806 and 1811. In the course of that year 60,000 retired but capable soldiers were brought back into service. The total number under arms in Russia’s land forces increased from 487,000 in 1807 to 590,000 in 1812, and in March of that year an extra draft of two men per five hundred souls yielded another 65 to 70,000 men. By September 1812 the total number of men under arms in the land forces would reach 904,000.20
In 1803 Alexander had charged General Arakcheev with modernising the artillery. His reforms did not yield fruit in time for the war of 1805, but by the end of the decade it was probably the most professional in Europe. Arakcheev got rid of small-calibre guns, and equipped it with six- and twelve-pounder field guns, and ten- and twenty-pounder ‘licornes’, a kind of howitzer. He fitted these guns with the most sophisticated and