a controlled form of people’s war.
This answer to the problem posed by Napoleon and his incomparable GRANDE ARMÉE was not arrived at ahead of time in military seminars or planning sessions. No, before the invasion of 1812 Russian strategic thought remained mired in conventional approaches to dealing with Bonaparte. After all, it was argued at the time, Russian forces had acquitted themselves bravely, if not outright victoriously, in their fight against the French in 1807 at Eylau. Its sequel, the Battle of Friedland, was a defeat, but one in which the Russian army nevertheless fought hard and avoided destruction. In the immediate aftermath of this losing struggle, the 1807 Franco-Russian Treaty of Tilsit was negotiated—in part on a raft in the middle of the Niemen River where Emperor Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I met.
The peace agreement, a treaty arrived at between near equals, seemed to confirm Russia’s unimpaired strength. While Prussia was for the most part territorially dismantled and occupied by the French, Russia maintained a great freedom of action. In fact Napoleon urged Alexander to invade Finland in return for the tsar’s promise to support the imperial economic blockade against Britain. As the French historian Georges Lefebvre observed, one view was that Alexander had “extricated himself from a nasty situation without loss.” 2 He also retained his large, tough military along with the option to use it at the time and place of his choosing, treating Tilsit as but a truce.
But this big Russian army and its generals had not been shaken sufficiently to change their approach to battle, and they would go into the next fight with the French much as they had the last. The only difference this time was that the war would be fought on Russian soil. Napoleon had no intention of ceding the initiative to Alexander. As tensions rose sharply in the first years after Tilsit, the French emperor resolved to invade Russia.
In June 1812 he massed more than half a million French, Polish, and other allied troops for a march on Moscow. 3 Russian field and reserve forces were divided and dispersed, somewhat smaller, and still saddled with their largely conventional battle doctrine. The only new wrinkle was the idea of retreating into the Russian hinterland, a delaying strategy to wear down the French and wait for the right moment to launch a counterstroke, whenever that might be. In the event, the Russians retreated some four hundred miles before making a brief stand at Smolensk under the command of Barclay de Tolly, a Livonian of Scottish descent who was a principal architect of the plan to trade space for time.
Popular Russian outrage over the loss of Smolensk led the tsar to sack Barclay; but the new commander, the sixty-seven-year-old Mikhail Kutuzov, soon retreated yet another two hundred miles without a fight. Some seventy miles west of Moscow, at Borodino, he finally made a stand early in September. Once again Russian soldiers acquitted themselves very bravely; but they retreated from the field after a tremendously bloody fight that saw each side suffer tens of thousands of casualties. And then Moscow itself was the French target.
At this point it seemed that the only Russian hope lay in the “scorched earth” policy that had been implemented during the French advance in the hope of denying sustenance to the GRANDE ARMÉE . Crops and homes were burned as people in the path of the invasion evacuated; even Moscow was abandoned and put to the torch. This tactic created many difficulties for the French but was not about to defeat them. Clausewitz, who had gone over to the Russians and was with the army in the field at and after Borodino, noted in his account of the campaign that “there prevailed at this time a condition of grief and despondency.” 4 Clearly, the Russians would need something more.
It came in the form of a synthesis of insights from Spanish guerrillas and Prussian strategic thinkers, crafted by a
This answer to the problem posed by Napoleon and his incomparable GRANDE ARMÉE was not arrived at ahead of time in military seminars or planning sessions. No, before the invasion of 1812 Russian strategic thought remained mired in conventional approaches to dealing with Bonaparte. After all, it was argued at the time, Russian forces had acquitted themselves bravely, if not outright victoriously, in their fight against the French in 1807 at Eylau. Its sequel, the Battle of Friedland, was a defeat, but one in which the Russian army nevertheless fought hard and avoided destruction. In the immediate aftermath of this losing struggle, the 1807 Franco-Russian Treaty of Tilsit was negotiated—in part on a raft in the middle of the Niemen River where Emperor Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I met.
The peace agreement, a treaty arrived at between near equals, seemed to confirm Russia’s unimpaired strength. While Prussia was for the most part territorially dismantled and occupied by the French, Russia maintained a great freedom of action. In fact Napoleon urged Alexander to invade Finland in return for the tsar’s promise to support the imperial economic blockade against Britain. As the French historian Georges Lefebvre observed, one view was that Alexander had “extricated himself from a nasty situation without loss.” 2 He also retained his large, tough military along with the option to use it at the time and place of his choosing, treating Tilsit as but a truce.
But this big Russian army and its generals had not been shaken sufficiently to change their approach to battle, and they would go into the next fight with the French much as they had the last. The only difference this time was that the war would be fought on Russian soil. Napoleon had no intention of ceding the initiative to Alexander. As tensions rose sharply in the first years after Tilsit, the French emperor resolved to invade Russia.
In June 1812 he massed more than half a million French, Polish, and other allied troops for a march on Moscow. 3 Russian field and reserve forces were divided and dispersed, somewhat smaller, and still saddled with their largely conventional battle doctrine. The only new wrinkle was the idea of retreating into the Russian hinterland, a delaying strategy to wear down the French and wait for the right moment to launch a counterstroke, whenever that might be. In the event, the Russians retreated some four hundred miles before making a brief stand at Smolensk under the command of Barclay de Tolly, a Livonian of Scottish descent who was a principal architect of the plan to trade space for time.
Popular Russian outrage over the loss of Smolensk led the tsar to sack Barclay; but the new commander, the sixty-seven-year-old Mikhail Kutuzov, soon retreated yet another two hundred miles without a fight. Some seventy miles west of Moscow, at Borodino, he finally made a stand early in September. Once again Russian soldiers acquitted themselves very bravely; but they retreated from the field after a tremendously bloody fight that saw each side suffer tens of thousands of casualties. And then Moscow itself was the French target.
At this point it seemed that the only Russian hope lay in the “scorched earth” policy that had been implemented during the French advance in the hope of denying sustenance to the GRANDE ARMÉE . Crops and homes were burned as people in the path of the invasion evacuated; even Moscow was abandoned and put to the torch. This tactic created many difficulties for the French but was not about to defeat them. Clausewitz, who had gone over to the Russians and was with the army in the field at and after Borodino, noted in his account of the campaign that “there prevailed at this time a condition of grief and despondency.” 4 Clearly, the Russians would need something more.
It came in the form of a synthesis of insights from Spanish guerrillas and Prussian strategic thinkers, crafted by a
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