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Nevertheless the border with East Prussia and the Duchy of Warsaw alone remained very long. The Russians had to defend the approaches to Petersburg and Moscow. The latter could be threatened directly via Smolensk in the west or from Kaluga and the south-west. The defence of Kiev and Ukraine was also a top priority. Russian armies would therefore be stretched very thin. Communications through the huge area of the Pripet marshes were extremely poor. The Russian southern army defending Ukraine would be on its own. It would be within Napoleon’s power to block the two main roads across the marshes and turn most of his army against one or other half of the Russian defensive screen.

It was in the nature of a defensive strategy that it gave the enemy the initiative. Added to the geography of the western borderlands, it would give Napoleon every opportunity to drive through the Russian forces, keep them separated and defeat them in detail. Moving through the centre of the Russian armies, he would then have the advantage of being between them and using interior lines. Bagration, Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky and the emperor’s uncle, Duke Alexander of Württemberg, all stressed this danger in the early months of 1812.48 To make the situation worse, in the impoverished western borderlands it was very difficult to keep large armies concentrated and static for weeks on end, except possibly in the weeks immediately after the harvest. Sickness rates also shot up once the army was concentrated. In addition, much the most effective way to eat up the region’s food supplies and deny them to the French was to quarter the Russian army across a large swath of the area and use it to requisition supplies in lieu of tax. A state of war was declared in the border provinces in late April, which helped with requisitioning, but army headquarters was loath to concentrate its forces too early and too narrowly. In any case, once Napoleon left Paris the sources of Russian intelligence partly dried up. Napoleon himself was hoping for a Russian offensive and did not make final plans for an invasion until very late. He then of course did his utmost to hide where he intended to make his main thrust. Not until late May 1812 did the Russians begin to get a clear sense of where the main enemy attack was likely to come.49

In his March 1810 memorandum Barclay had stated that Russia’s western borderlands were very weakly defended by man or nature. Many other officers expanded on this theme in reports written between then and June 1812. Russian military engineers were badly overstretched in these years. In 1807–11 the small corps of engineers was deployed in the Baltic seaport fortresses against possible British attack, in the Caucasus and in attempts to refortify strong-points taken from the Ottomans in the Balkans. From March 1810 it was also lumbered with the immense task of fortifying the western borderlands at breakneck speed. As was pointed out in a number of memorandums, fortresses bypassed by Napoleon would be a big threat to his fragile communications. This would slow down his advance. More importantly, a retreating army with no fortresses in its rear had nowhere secure for its supplies and baggage, and was therefore always obsessed with the need to protect them. In this situation an army tended to retreat quickly since only distance provided security.50

But fortresses, however necessary, could not easily be built from scratch in two years. On their southern flank, the Russians succeeded in preparing Kiev’s defences for a siege and constructed a strong fortress at Bobruisk. On their northern flank, Riga was strengthened though the commander of the corps of engineers, General Oppermann, doubted whether it could hold out for long against a serious siege unless its garrison was very large. Once the new fortress of Dünaburg on the Dvina was completed, Oppermann wanted to move all supplies and stores there from Riga, since he feared that the latter’s fall to the French would