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By Root 3806 0

was a great increase in British power. For a century after Waterloo Britain enjoyed global pre-eminence at a historically small price in blood and treasure. Russian pride and interests sometimes suffered from this, most obviously in the Crimean War. In the long run, too, British power meant the global hegemony of liberal-democratic principles fatal to any version of Russian empire. But this is to look way into the future: in 1815 Wellington and Castlereagh disliked democracy at least as much as Alexander I did. Under no circumstances could Russian policy in the Napoleonic era have stopped Britain’s Industrial Revolution, or its effects on British power. Moreover, in the century after 1815 Russia grew greatly in wealth and population, benefiting hugely from integration into the global capitalist economy whose main bulwark was Britain. In the nineteenth as in the twentieth century Russia had much less to fear from Britain than from land-powers intent on dominating the European continent.

There is no great puzzle as to why Russia fought Napoleon. How it fought him and why it won are much bigger and more interesting questions. To answer these questions requires one to demolish well-established myths. It is not surprising that these myths dominate Western thinking about Russia’s role in Napoleon’s defeat. No Western scholar or soldier has ever studied these years from a Russian perspective on the basis of the Russian evidence. Interpreting any country’s war effort through the eyes of its enemies and coalition partners is bound to be problematic, still more so in an era when European nationalism was just beginning its march.

Much more interesting and difficult is the task of challenging Russian national myths. Naturally, by no means are all these myths untrue. The Russian army and people showed great heroism and suffered hugely in 1812. The truly bizarre and unique element in Russian mythology about the defeat of Napoleon is, however, that it radically underestimates the Russian achievement. The most basic reason for this is that the Russia which defeated Napoleon was an aristocratic, dynastic and multi-ethnic empire. Mining the events of the Napoleonic era just for Russian ethno-national myths and doing so in naive fashion inevitably leaves out much about the war effort.

At one level it is absurd to call Leo Tolstoy the main villain in this misunderstanding. A novelist is not a historian. Tolstoy writes about individuals’ mentalities, values and experiences during and before 1812. But War and Peace has had more influence on popular perceptions of Napoleon’s defeat by Russia than all the history books ever written. By denying any rational direction of events in 1812 by human actors and implying that military professionalism was a German disease Tolstoy feeds rather easily into Western interpretations of 1812 which blame the snow or chance for French defeat. By ending his novel in Vilna in December 1812 he also contributes greatly to the fact that both Russians and foreigners largely forget the huge Russian achievement in 1813–14 even in getting their army across Europe to Paris, let alone defeating Napoleon en route. One problem with this is that marginalizing or misunderstanding as crucial an actor as Russia results in serious errors in interpreting why and how Napoleon’s empire fell. But it is also the case that to understand what happened in 1812 it is crucial to realize that Alexander and Barclay de Tolly always planned for a long war, which they expected to begin with a campaign on Russian soil that would exhaust Napoleon but that would end in a Russian advance into Europe and the mobilization of a new coalition of anti-Napoleonic forces.

One key reason why Russia defeated Napoleon was that its leaders out-thought him. In 1812 Napoleon failed to understand Russian society and politics, or to exploit Russia’s internal weaknesses. In the end he ruined his cause by delaying in Moscow in the naive hope that salvation would come from Alexander, the Russian elites or even a Cossack revolt. By contrast, Alexander well understood