Russia Against Napoleon

In any case, the question whether the sacrifices made in 1812–14 were worthwhile implies that the Russians had a choice. Then as always, ordinary Russians of course had little choice. The whole logic of the political system was designed to deny this. In 1807–14, however, the Russian government in reality also had few options. By the second half of 1810 the brilliantly run Russian intelligence operations in Paris gave Alexander every reason to expect attack. The very extensive military intelligence provided in 1811 confirmed this. No doubt if Alexander had caved in to all Napoleon’s demands war might have been avoided for a time. By 1810, however, it was clear that the price of adhering to Napoleon’s Continental System would be the undermining of the financial base of Russia’s position as a great power. Russia’s growing weakness would make it easy for Napoleon to restore a greater Poland, which was within both his power and his interests. Returning part of its Adriatic coastline to Austria could easily reconcile the Habsburgs to this new European order. Compensating the King of Saxony by destroying Prussia would have satisfied two French interests simultaneously. If full-scale French empire in Europe was impossible, French hegemony was not – at least for a time. No Russian government would have allowed this to happen without fighting. In the barely credible event that a Russian monarch had tried to do this, he would have been overthrown. Perhaps subsequent European history would have been happier had French hegemony lasted. But no one can expect Alexander’s government to have foreseen or accepted this.

As some of Alexander’s advisers had predicted, one result of Napoleon’s destruction 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.