Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [136]
The worst peasant disturbances occurred in and around Vitebsk province, which was the area of operations of Peter Wittgenstein’s First Corps. A number of landowners were murdered or assaulted in the summer and autumn of 1812, sometimes by crowds of 300 peasants or more. On one notorious occasion a troop of forty dragoons was routed by the rioters, two dragoons were killed, twelve taken prisoner and their officer badly beaten up. The civil authorities could not cope with this level of trouble and appealed to Wittgenstein for help. In the short run he refused, saying that he had too few cavalry and only one regiment of Cossacks. These had to concentrate on the autumn counter-offensive to drive the French out of Polotsk. Wittgenstein added that the disturbances had been caused by the French incursion into the region and would quickly cease once the enemy was ejected, which in fact occurred soon after.9
In time, however, Wittgenstein was able, for example, to deploy a squadron of Bashkirs on one particularly troublesome estate. This underlines a general point. In some areas close to the war authority briefly tottered, though it never collapsed in any large area unoccupied by the French. But the Russian Empire was enormous and the government could draw on resources from regions untouched by crisis. On 21 November, for example, Alexander wrote to the war minister, Prince Aleksei Gorchakov, that there were no fewer than twenty-nine irregular cavalry regiments, twenty of them Bashkir, en route from the Urals and western Siberia. These might often be of limited use against the French but they were more than adequate to overawe the peasants of Vitebsk.10
For the government, the loyalty of the peasantry was closely connected to the issue of order in the towns, and especially in Moscow. Only one-third of the city’s population were full-time, deeply rooted urban residents. Nobles and their horde of household serfs migrated to their estates in the late spring and returned as winter approached. In addition, many peasant workmen and artisans worked for part of their lives in the city but retained their links to their villages. The household serfs, concentrated in large numbers and with their ears open to their masters’ gossip, were of particular concern to the authorities. Calm and order in Moscow was the responsibility of Fedor Rostopchin. In the empire as a whole it was the responsibility of the minister of police, Aleksandr Balashev. Rostopchin employed all his wiles to divert and pacify Moscow’s masses, but his letters to Balashev suggest confidence in public order and the masses’ loyalty in the late spring and early summer of 1812. Only at the last, after the authorities had evacuated the city and during the French occupation, did anarchy take hold in Moscow. Servants looted their masters’ homes, respectable women turned to prostitution in order to survive and the general mayhem was increased because gaols emptied and prisoners roamed the streets in search of easy pickings. As in the countryside, however, this was anarchy pure and simple, without any of the leadership or ideology to fuel social revolution.11
The government had no reason to fear for the loyalty of the urban elites. Russian merchants were usually deeply conservative and Orthodox in their mentalities, and contributed generously to the war effort. Moscow showed the lead here. When Alexander visited the city in late July to appeal for support for the militia, the city’s merchants instantly pledged 2.5 million rubles, over and above their other existing contributions to the war effort. Even less need the government fear the Church, which was its main ideological ally in mobilizing mass resistance to the invader. In the war of 1806–7 the Orthodox Church had issued an anathema against Napoleon which caused some embarrassment after Tilsit. Now,