Russia Against Napoleon

The peppery, pipe-smoking, impetuous Winzengerode was a loyal friend and patron. His excellent French cook and his penchant for whist were much appreciated by his staff. So too were his decency and fairness. In the autumn of 1812, for example, he was outraged when the steward on one of the estates of Aleksandr Balashev, the minister of police, tried to use his master’s position to evade requisitioning for the army’s needs. Winzengerode promptly slapped a double requisition on Balashev and ignored the complaints of Aleksei Arakcheev, who was up to similar tricks as regards his own estates in Novgorod. The problem, however, was that Winzengerode was a decent man but a poor general. When the French were on the point of evacuating Moscow, Winzengerode bungled an attempt to parley with them and was captured. Napoleon was initially intent on shooting him as a traitor but was dissuaded by his horrified generals. Kutuzov rightly called Winzengerode’s capture an act of barely credible carelessness. Though Alexander was overjoyed by Chernyshev’s rescue of Winzengerode, the Russian war effort would actually have benefited had Winzengerode been sitting quietly in French captivity in 1813–14 rather than commanding Russian armies.¹¹

The most competent of Winzengerode’s subordinates was the 31-year-old Colonel Alexander von Benckendorff. In 1812–14 Benckendorff had a ‘good war’ and this was to be the foundation for a brilliant subsequent career. The young Benckendorff started life with many advantages. His mother was the close friend of the Empress Marie, whom she accompanied to Russia as lady-in-waiting after the young Württemberg princess married the Grand Duke Paul. Juliana Benckendorff died in Marie Feodorovna’s arms in 1797, bequeathing to the empress the care of her young children. Alexander thereby became a core member of Marie’s circle. His sister Dorothea married Christoph Lieven, who was a key protégé of Empress Marie but also close to Alexander I and a source of patronage in his own right.

The Empress Marie sent Alexander von Benckendorff to an excellent school but for a time it seemed that her investment had been in vain. The handsome, charming and pleasure-loving young man proved neither a good scholar nor a particularly virtuous officer. Like Chernyshev and Nesselrode, he served in the Russian mission in Paris in the years after Tilsit. His main achievement in Paris, however, was to fall for a famous French actress and femme fatale, a former mistress of Napoleon, whom he smuggled back to Russia with him after quitting diplomatic life under a cloud. He subsequently redeemed himself by abandoning his actress and volunteering to fight against the Turks, after which Marie paid off his debts. But it was the courage and skill he showed in 1812 which really brought him back into favour.¹²

As one of Alexander I’s aides-de-camp, Benckendorff started the war by carrying out a number of important and dangerous missions to Bagration’s headquarters. Serving under Winzengerode in the autumn of 1812, he was responsible for protecting a key road and its surrounding territory from French incursions and for launching raids against the main enemy line of communications down the highway from Moscow to Smolensk. In his memoirs, Benckendorff recalls that one of his most difficult tasks was to rescue French prisoners from the clutches of the peasants, in which he did not always succeed. Some of the cruelties perpetrated against the wretched prisoners of war made him think he was living ‘in the midst of a desolation which seemed to witness the abandonment of God and the rule on earth of the devil’. He adds, however, both that the peasants had every reason to be enraged by French behaviour and that the people showed great loyalty to their religion, their country and their emperor. In this context the orders he at one point received from a nervous Petersburg to disarm peasants and punish disorder were nonsensical, as he reported to Alexander I. Benckendorff told the emperor that he could hardly disarm men to whom he himself had given weapons. Nor could he allow to be called traitors a people ‘who were sacrificing their lives for the defence of their churches, their independence, and of their wives and their homes. Rather the word traitor fitted those who at such a sacred moment for Russia dared to tell false tales about the country’s purest and most zealous defenders.’¹³