Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [139]
During the 1812 campaign the field armies spent extremely little on food. Total expenditure by the Russian field armies was only 19 million rubles in 1812, most of which was the troops’ pay. In the initial stage of the campaign the army was partly fed from the magazines established in the western borderlands in the two previous years. Food and fodder sufficient to feed an army of 200,000 men and their horses for six months had been stored. These preparations were only partly successful, however, since there were too few small magazines (etapy) at intervals along the roads down which the army retreated. In any case, the stores had often been positioned to support a Russian advance into the Duchy of Warsaw. One Soviet source suggests that 40 per cent of the food stored in magazines was lost to the French or, much more often, burned, though the intendant-general, Georg Kankrin, had always denied this.18
From the start of the campaign food was requisitioned by the army’s intendancy or even just taken from the civilian population by the regiments in return for receipts. This made good sense. Any food not taken by the Russians would be seized by the French. The system of handing out receipts was supposed to ensure that requisition was conducted in orderly fashion and did not become mere plunder. It was also designed so that the government could compensate the population later for the food supplied. The Russian government did actually do this, after the war setting up special commissions to collect the receipts and offset them against future taxes. In a way, therefore, when it worked properly the system of requisitioning and providing receipts was a sort of forced loan, which allowed the state to defer wartime expenditure until its finances returned to peacetime order.19
How Russian troops were supposed to feed themselves when on campaign was set out in great detail in the new law on field armies issued early in 1812. The basic principle was that the army must requisition all the food it needed from the local population. The catch was that the new law was designed to cover Russian armies operating abroad. Two months later, however, in late March 1812 the scope of this law was extended to campaigns in the Russian interior as well. Provinces declared to be in a state of war would come under the authority of the army’s commander-in-chief and of his intendant-general, to whom all civil officials were subordinated. As one might expect of a law designed for the administration of conquered territory, the powers given to the military authorities were sweeping. The supplementary law only envisaged border regions coming within its scope but by September 1812 a swath of provinces reaching as far as Kaluga to the south of Moscow had been declared to be in a state of war. In these provinces much of the business of feeding the army, caring for its sick, and even levying winter clothing for the coming campaign was dumped on the shoulders of the provincial governors.20
Between them the army’s intendants, the provincial governors and the nobility ensured that Russian troops seldom went hungry in the first half of the 1812 campaign. This was not too difficult in the prosperous Russian heartland of the empire during and just after the harvest