Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [134]
The enemy has crossed our frontiers and is continuing to carry his arms into Russia, seeking to shake the foundations of this great power by his might and his seductions…With slyness in his heart and flattery on his tongue he brings us ever-lasting chains and fetters…We now appeal to all our loyal subjects, to all estates and conditions both spiritual and temporal, to rise up with us in a united and universal stand against the enemy’s schemes and endeavours.
After appealing to the nobility – ‘at all times the saviours of the Fatherland’ – and the clergy, the manifesto turned to the Russian people. ‘Brave descendants of courageous Slavs! You always smashed the teeth of the lions and tigers who sought to attack you. Let everyone unite: with the Cross in your hearts and weapons in your hands no human force will defeat you.’4
In the Soviet era it was an article of faith for Russian historians that the ‘patriotic masses’ were the key to resistance against Napoleon’s invasion. By far the greatest contribution of the ‘masses’ – which in this era really meant the peasantry – to the Russian war effort was their service in the armed forces and the militia. From 1812 to 1814 roughly one million men were drafted, more than two-thirds of them into the regular army. No peasant volunteered for the army. In the first place, it would have taken a saintly degree of patriotism to volunteer for twenty-five years’ service with minimal prospects of promotion to senior NCO, let alone into the officer corps. In any case peasants were not allowed to volunteer. Their bodies belonged to the state and to the landlords, not to themselves.
Nor were peasants allowed to volunteer for the militia. The latter was formed only from privately owned serfs, not from the state peasantry. It was entirely up to the landlord which peasants were assigned to serve. In principle, service in the militia was a less awful prospect than service in the regular army because the emperor had promised that militiamen would be released at the end of the war. The promise had to be renewed on many occasions and the militiamen were allowed to keep their beards and to dress in everyday peasant clothes, in order to underline the point that they were not soldiers. Nevertheless, no one could easily forget that at the end of the 1806–7 war the great majority of militiamen had in fact been transferred to the regular army.
In March 1813 John Quincy Adams was told by his landlord that none of the Petersburg militia would ever return home. Many had already perished. ‘The rest have been, or will be, incorporated in the regiments [i.e. of the regular army]. Not one of them will ever come back.’ In fact this was too pessimistic. Alexander kept his promise and the militia was disbanded and the men sent home at the end of the war. Losses had been immense, however, above all due to disease, exhaustion and the sheer shock of wartime military service for many peasants. Of the more than 13,000 men mobilized into the Tver militia in 1812, for example, only 4,200 returned home in 1814 and this was by no means exceptional.5
In Soviet times great stress was also laid on so-called ‘partisan warfare’ in 1812. The partisans of the Napoleonic era were portrayed as the ancestors of the partisan movement behind German lines in 1941–5 and as key heroes of a ‘people’s war’. The incautious Western reader thereby gets the impression that something akin to the French maquis played a major role in harrying Napoleon’s communications in 1812. In fact this is to misunderstand the meaning of the word ‘partisan’ in the Napoleonic era. The Russian partisan units which struck deep into the French rear in 1812 were commanded by officers of the regular army. The core of these units were usually squadrons of regular light cavalry detached from the main Russian armies. Around them were grouped Cossack