Charles Esdaile
The Bear Against The Cockrel
Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814
Dominic Lieven (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 617pp £30)
Readers familiar with Tolstoy’s War and Peace will possibly remember a dramatic incident that occurs in the wake of the French invasion of Russia. Alone at her estate of Bleak Hills following the death of her father, Princess Marya finds herself in the direct path of the oncoming French army. Desperate to escape, she orders the peasants who farm the estate to provide transport for her so she can pack up her belongings and flee to Moscow, and tries to persuade them to evacuate their villages and follow her example. However, her pleas have no effect – on the contrary, the peasants turn rebellious – and the princess is only rescued by the fortuitous arrival of the dashing young cavalry officer Nikolai Rostov. Given that one of the chief themes of War and Peace is the heroism of the Russian people in the face of Napoleon, the vignette is a troubling one that positively demands discussion, and yet, until the publication of this book, subjecting such contradictions to the spotlight of academic discussion has proved almost impossible for any author without a knowledge of Russian and access to the Russian archives.
Despite the fact that the so-called ‘new military history’ is now fifty or more years old, no Russian specialist in Britain or the United States (or, for that matter, France or Germany) has ever seen fit to embark on a detailed monograph-length study of the Russian war effort in 1812, let alone the struggles of 1805-7 and 1813-14. Equally, while campaign histories exist by the score, in the main they rely almost entirely on French sources, the ‘other side of the hill’ being accessed, at best, via the accounts of a few foreigners who were present in Russia in 1812, together with such Russian sources as are available in translation. And, last but not least, there is the issue of coverage: military accounts of Russia’s wars tend to concentrate either on the years of French victory or the tragedy of 1812, with the exploits of Russia’s soldiers in the campaigns of 1813-14 tending to be discussed in the context of those of a broader coalition whose cutting edge is generally assumed to be the newly reformed Prussian army. Yet the gap is an extraordinary one: to cite just a few aspects of the situation, from 1805 onwards Russia was a key player – indeed, in some respects the key player – in the international relations of Napoleonic Europe; the campaign of 1812 was not just an episode of positively epic dimensions, but also a moment of seminal importance in the history of modern Russia, the echoes of which continued to reverberate throughout the life of the USSR, if not beyond; and finally in the bloody battles of 1813-14 it was Russian troops who made up the largest part of the Allied armies and, arguably at least, Russian leadership that ensured the overthrow of Napoleon.
Fortunately for all students of the Napoleonic era, this massive gap in the historiography has now been filled by a massive book. Crafted by Dominic Lieven, perhaps one of the most distinguished specialists in nineteenth-century Russia of his generation, Russia Against Napoleon truly reaches the parts that other works do not. Beginning with the failed alliance of Tilsit between Russia and France, which Lieven presents as an arrangement that was based on a cool and realistic appreciation of Russian interests, the author charts Alexander I’s steadily deteriorating relationship with Napoleon and explains how by 1810 the tsar had been forced into a position of open enmity with the French empire, in part because of the latter’s relentless aggression, but also because of growing internal pressure (throughout the book, indeed, great stress is placed on the importance of domestic Russian politics). Hostility to France, however, did not necessarily mean war and, as Lieven shows, in 1811 Alexander eschewed the idea of attacking Napoleon: rather, he would wait to be attacked and, initially at least, adopt a purely defensive strategy. When war came in 1812 it was therefore very much the responsibility of the French ruler, and in arguing thus Lieven places himself in the camp of those who argue that the struggles of 1803-15 were in the most literal sense Napoleonic wars.