Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [2]
I owe a big debt to the friends who took me to battlefields. Viktor Bezotosnyi showed me the field at Maloiaroslavets, and was also a constant source of advice, information and friendship. Paul Simmons and Vasili Kashirin spent a memorable day at Borodino with me. Dominic Herbestreit and Christin Pilz took me around the battlefields of Leipzig and also drove me to Kulm, now in the Czech Republic. Even more heroic was my sister, Professor Elena Lieven, who drove me deep into rural Poland to the battlefield of the Katzbach. Our expedition was helped hugely by Alexandra Porada, who helped us negotiate the area.
My agent, Natasha Fairweather, has been a key ally and so have my publishers, Simon Winder and Wendy Wolf, as well as Alice Dawson and Richard Duguid of Penguin. Elizabeth Stratford was an exceptionally efficient copy-editor. I have wanted to write this book since childhood but they encouraged me to do so. I think that the initial spur to write the book in time for the bicentenary in 2012 came, however, from my colleague, Professor James Hughes.
Among others at LSE who helped me enormously, Sue Starkey stands out. She coped with my frequent hysteria when confronted by computers, photocopiers and other technological challenges. Her colleagues in the Government Department’s General Office (Jill Stuart, Cerys Jones, Madeleine Bothe, Hiszah Tariq) also helped me and calmed me down. My colleague, Professor Janet Hartley, very kindly read the text for me and suggested changes. So too did our students, Conor Riffle and Megan Tulac. In my first twenty-four years at LSE I kept as far from the School’s management as possible. While working on this book, however, I was initially head of department and subsequently a member of LSE’s governing council. That gave me some insight into the intelligent, efficient and good-humoured manner in which the School was run by (Sir) Howard Davies, its director. Tony (Lord) Grabiner, chairman of the Board of Governors, showed not just wisdom but great unselfishness, devoting an immense amount of his time to unpaid service to the School to a degree that few members of the academic community realize.
I must also thank Professor Patrick O’Brien for his advice on war, finance and economic issues, and Alexis de Tiesenhausen for his help and advice as regards illustrations.
For the first eighteen months of my research I lived mostly off the excellent holdings of the British Library and owed much to the help of its staff. After joining the London Library halfway through my research, I discovered just how splendid a resource it is for scholars in general and historians of imperial Russia in particular.
I published an article outlining the theme and purpose of this book in Kritika in spring 2006 and would like to thank the editors of the journal and readers of the piece for their useful criticism and advice.
My family – Mikiko, Aleka, Max and Tolly – suffered during my research and writing of the book but helped to keep me going.
A Note on the Text
In the era covered by this book Russia ran on the Julian calendar, which in the nineteenth century was twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar used in most of the rest of Europe. The events covered by this book occurred partly in Russia and partly abroad. To avoid confusion, I have used the Gregorian – i.e. European – calendar throughout the text. Documents are cited in the notes in their original form and when they have dates from the Julian calendar the letters OS (i.e. Old Style) appear after them in brackets.
I have used a modified version of the Library of Congress system for transliterating words from Russian. To avoid bewildering anglophone readers I have not included Russian hard and soft signs, accents or stress signs in names of people and places in the text. A point to note is that the Russian e is usually pronounced ye. Sometimes,