Read Russia Against Napoleon Online
Authors: Dominic Lieven
Artillery of Langeron’s Army Corps:
2nd, 15th, 18th, 32nd, 34th and 39th Heavy batteries; 3rd, 19th, 28th, 29th, 32nd, 33rd and 34th Light batteries; 8th Horse Artillery Battery and 2nd Don Cossack Horse Artillery Battery; 3 pioneer and 3 pontoon companies
Army of the North:
Army Corps
of Lieutenant-General Baron F. von Winzengerode: 29 battalions, 48 squadrons, 20 irregular cavalry regiments, 96 guns = 29, 639 men
Detachment
of Lieutenant-General Count M. S. Vorontsov21st Infantry Division:
Major-General V. D. LaptevBrigade: Petrovsk, Podolia and Lithuania Infantry regiments
Brigade: Neva Infantry Regiment: 44th Jaeger Regiment
31st Heavy and 42nd Light Artillery batteries
24th Infantry Division:
Major-General N. V. VuichBrigade: Shirvan and Ufa Infantry regiments
Brigade: Butyrki and Tomsk Infantry regiments
Brigade: 19th and 40th Jaeger regiments
46th Light Artillery Battery
Cavalry:
Major-General Count Gothard von ManteuffelSt Petersburg Dragoon Regiment; Elizavetgrad Hussar Regiment; Iakhontov Volunteer Cavalry Regiment
5 Don Cossack, 1 Bug and 1 Ural Cossack regiment
Detachment
of Major-General HarpeNavagin, Tula, Sevsk infantry regiments
2nd, 13th, 14th Jaeger regiments
3 Combined Grenadier battalions
Cavalry detachment
of Major-General Count Joseph O’RourkeNezhin Mounted Jaeger, Pavlograd Hussar, Polish Lancer and Volhynia Lancer regiments
6 Don Cossack, 1 Siberian Cossack and 1 Bashkir regiment
Cavalry detachment
of Major-General A. I. ChernyshevFinland Dragoon Regiment; Riga Dragoon Regiment; Izium Hussar Regiment
5 Don Cossack regiments; 4 guns of 8th Horse Artillery Battery
Army Corps artillery
31st Heavy, 42nd and 46th Light Artillery batteries; 8 guns of 8th Horse Artillery Battery
Army of Poland:
Commander:
General Levin von Bennigsen: 43 battalions of army and 27 battalions of militia infantry: 40 squadrons of army regular cavalry, 10 regiments of irregular cavalry, 7 squadrons of militia cavalry: 198 guns = 59,033 men
Advance Guard:
Lieutenant-General E. I. Markov16th Infantry Division:
Major-General M. L. BulatovNeishlot Infantry Regiment; 27th and 43rd Jaeger regiments
13th Infantry Division:
2nd Brigade: Major General IvanovSaratov Infantry Regiment: Penza Infantry Regiment
Cavalry:
Major-General S. V. Diatkov and Major-General N. V. DekhterevOrenburg and Vladimir Lancer regiments; 1st Combined Hussar Regiment; 1st Combined Lancer Regiment
4 Don Cossack regiments, 1 Ural Cossack regiment, 4 Bashkir regiments
1 regiment Siberian Cossack militia and 1 regiment Penza militia cavalry
Artillery:
16th Heavy, 56th Light and 30th and 10th Horse Artillery batteries
Right Flank Army Corps:
General D. S. Dokhturov12th Infantry Division:
Major-General Prince N. N. KhovanskyBrigade: Smolensk Infantry Regiment; Narva Infantry Regiment
Brigade: Aleksopol Infantry Regiment; Novoingermanland Infantry Regiment
Brigade: 6th and 41st Jaeger regiments
26th Infantry Division:
Major-General I. F. PaskevichBrigade: Ladoga Infantry Regiment; Poltava Infantry Regiment
Brigade: Nizhnii Novgorod Infantry Regiment; Orel Infantry Regiment
Brigade: 5th and 42nd Jaeger regiments
13th Infantry Division:
Brigade of Major-General Axel LindforsVelikie Luki Infantry Regiment: Galits Infantry Regiment
Cavalry detachment:
Lieutenant-General E. I. ChaplitzCombined Dragoon Regiment: 1st and 2nd Combined Mounted Jaeger regiments; 2nd Combined Lancer Regiment; Taganrog, Siberia and Zhitomir Lancer regiments
Artillery:
26th and 45th Heavy, 1st and 47th Light, 2nd Horse Artillery batteries1 company miners
Army Corps reserve artillery:
22nd Heavy, 18th, 48th, 53rd Light, and 9th Horse Artillery batteries
Left Flank Army Corps:
Lieutenant-General Count P. A. Tolstoy
Militia Corps
of Major-General N. S. Muromtsev4 regiments of Nizhnii Novgorod militia infantry; 1 regiment of Nizhnii Novgorod and 1 regiment of Kostroma militia cavalry; 1 Ural Cossack regiment
52nd Heavy and 22nd Horse Artillery batteries
Militia Corps
of Major-General Titov3 regiments of Penza militia infantry; 1 regiment of Riazan militia infantry and 1 regiment of Riazan militia jaegers; 1 regiment of Riazan militia cavalry; 2 squadrons of Kazan militia cavalry
64th Light Artillery Battery
Abbreviations
AGM | Arkhiv grafov Mordvinovykh |
BL | British Library |
Correspondance de l’Empereur Alexandre | Correspondance de l’Empereur Alexandre Ier avec sa sœur la Grande Duchesse Cathérine |
Entsiklopediia | V. Bezotosnyi |
Eugen, | Memoiren des Herzogs Eugen von Württemberg |
IV | Istoricheskii vestnik |
Kutuzov | L. G. Beskrovnyi (ed.), |
MVUA | Materialy voenno-uchenago arkhiva |
PSZ | Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii |
RA | Russkii arkhiv |
RD | Relations diplomatiques |
RGVIA | Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv |
RS | Russkaia Starina |
SIM | Sbornik istoricheskikh materialov izvlechennykh iz arkhiva S.E.I.V. kantseliarii |
SIRIO | Sbornik imperatorskago russkago istoricheskago obshchestva |
SPB | St Petersburg |
SVM | Stoletie voennago ministerstva |
TGIM | Trudy gosudarstvennogo istoricheskogo muzeia |
VIS | Voenno-istoricheskii sbornik |
VPR | Vneshniaia politika Rossii |
VS | Voennyi sbornik |
Chapter 1: Introduction
1 Much of this introduction is drawn from my article, ‘Russia and the Defeat of Napoleon’,
Kritika
, 7/2, 2006, pp. 283–308. That article includes comprehensive footnotes, and interested readers should consult it as regards references to most of the secondary literature. This introductory chapter also skims across many topics covered in more detail later in the book, at which point I will make the necessary citations to literature in the notes.
2 For the key works in English on and around this subject, see Additional Reading.
3 The one exception is Christopher Duffy: see his
Austerlitz
, London, 1999, and
Borodino and the War of
1812, London, 1999: both of these are reprints by Cassell of books published some years previously. Both books are brief and were written when Russian archives were shut to foreigners. Duffy’s main works on Russia cover an earlier period.
4 Of course by this I mean the primary sources: there is much splendid French secondary literature on the Napoleonic era. See my article in
Kritika
, n. 14.
5
Memoiren des Herzogs Eugen von Württemberg
, 3 vols., Frankfurt an der Oder, 1862.
6 For example, the memoirs of Friedrich von Schubert, the chief of staff of Baron Korff’s cavalry corps:
Unter dem Doppeladler
, Stuttgart, 1962.
7 Carl von Clausewitz,
The Campaign of
1812
in Russia
, London, 1992.
8 Clausewitz’s judgements on the later stages of the campaign are more mellow: conceivably it helped that by then he was serving under Peter Wittgenstein, at whose headquarters all the key officers were German.
9 The first three volumes of Rudolph von Friederich (
Die Befreiungskriege
1813–1815) cover the spring and autumn campaigns of 1813 and the campaign of 1814:
Der Frühjahrsfeldzug
1813, Berlin, 1911;
Der Herbstfeldzug
1813, Berlin, 1912;
Der Feldzug
1814, Berlin, 1913.
10 See the five volumes of
Geschichte der Kämpfe Österreichs: Kriege unter der Regierung des Kaisers Franz. Befreiungskrieg
1813
und
1814, Vienna, 1913.
11 This is most true as regards Henry Kissinger,
A World Restored
, London, 1957.
12 See e.g. Anthony D. Smith, ‘War and Ethnicity: The Role of Warfare in the Formation, Self-Images, and Cohesion of Ethnic Communities’,
Ethnic and Racial Studies
, 4/4, 1981, pp. 375–97.
13 Above all thanks to Peter Hofschroer’s two volumes:
1815: The Waterloo Campaign
, London, 1998 and 1999.
14 The tart comment by F. Zatler in 1860 that logistics is the big weakness of military history still largely remains true:
Zapiski o prodovol’stvii voisk v voennoe vremia
, SPB, 1860, p. 95. The best published source on Russian logistics in 1812–14 remains the report submitted to Alexander I by Georg Kankrin and Mikhail Barclay de Tolly:
Upravlenie General-Intendanta Kankrina: General’nyi sokrashchennyi otchet po armiiam…za pokhody protiv Frantsuzov, 1812, 1813 i 1814 godov
, Warsaw, 1815. There is a useful candidate’s dissertation by Serge Gavrilov,
Organizatsiia i snabzheniia russkoi armii nakanune i v khode otechestvennoi voiny
1812
g. i zagranichnykh pokhodov
1813–1815
gg.: Istoricheskie aspekty
, SPB, 2003. On Napoleonic logistics, see Martin van Creveld,
Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton
, Cambridge, 1977, ch. 2.
15 There is an interesting recent work on the horse in war by Louis DiMarco,
War Horse: A History of the Military Horse and Rider
, Yardley, 2008.
16 On Wellington and the history of Waterloo, see Malcolm Balen,
A Model Victory: Waterloo and the Battle for History
, London, 1999, and Peter Hofschroer,
Wellington’s Smallest Victory: The Duke, the Model-Maker and the Secret of Waterloo
, London, 2004. Buturlin’s work was originally published in French in 1824:
Histoire militaire de la campagne de Russie en
1812. Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky’s first published campaign history was on the 1814 campaign:
Opisanie pokhoda vo Frantsii v
1814
godu
, 2 vols., SPB, 1836. His history of 1812 was published in Petersburg in 1839 in four volumes:
Opisanie otechestvennoi voiny
1812
goda
. The next year his two-volume history of the 1813 campaign was published:
Opisanie voiny
1813
g
.
17 On Russian historiography of the Napoleonic Wars, see I. A. Shtein,
Voina
1812
goda v otechestvennoi istoriografii
, Moscow, 2002, and the article by V. P. Totfalushin in
Entsiklopediia
, pp. 309–13.
18 B. F. Frolov,
‘Da byli liudi v nashe vremia’: Otechestvennaia voina
1812
goda i zagranichnye pokhody russkoi armii
, Moscow, 2005.
19 See the discussion and bibliography in D. Lieven,
Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals
, London, 2001.
20 There are some parallels in Chinese and Turkish historiography concerning the Manchu and Ottoman empires.
21 Anyone touching this theme owes much to John Keegan,
The Face of Battle
, London, 1978, pp. 117–206. There were great similarities and relatively few differences between the values of the British officers he discusses and their Russian counterparts.
22 Pamfil Nazarov and Ivan Men’shii.
23 J. P. Riley,
Napoleon and the World War of
1813, London, 2000, is an interesting and original study of world war in 1813 by a senior British officer. It is true that the Anglo-American war of 1812–14 was directly linked to the Napoleonic Wars though not part of them: see Jon Latimer,
1812: War with America
, Cambridge, Mass., 2007.
Chapter 2: Russia as a Great Power
1 See the chapters by Paul Bushkovitch and Hugh Ragsdale in D. Lieven (ed.),
The Cambridge History of Russia
, Cambridge, 2006, vol. 2, pp. 489–529, for surveys of Russian foreign policy in the eighteenth century.
2 On Catherine and her reign, the bible is Isabel de Madariaga,
Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great
, London, 1981. On the ‘Greek project’, see Simon Sebag Montefiore’s splendid
Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin
, London, 2000, pp. 219–21, 241–3.
3 The fullest recent survey of eighteenth-century Ottoman developments is Suraiya Faroqhi (ed.),
Turkey
, vol. 3:
The Later Ottoman Empire
1603–1839, Cambridge, 2003. On the Ottoman army, see Virginia Aksan,
Ottoman Wars 1700–1870: An Empire Besieged
, Harlow, 2007. I attempted Russo-Ottoman comparisons in D. Lieven,
Empire: TheRussian Empire and its Rivals
, London, 2001, ch. 4, pp. 128 ff.
4 There is a vast literature on the European Old Regime. For the long view of state formation in Europe, see Charles Tilly,
Coercion, Capital and European States: A.D.
990–1992, Oxford, 1990. Equally thought-provoking are Perry Anderson,
Lineages of the AbsolutistState
, London, 1974, and Brian Downing,
The Military Revolution and Political Change
, Princeton, 1992.
5 The best recent survey of the Russian peasantry is by David Moon,
The Russian Peasantry,
1600–1930, London, 1999. On comparative European landholding by elites, see D. Lieven,
Aristocracy in Europe
1815–1914, Basingstoke, 1992, chs. 1 and 2, pp. 1–73.
6 The exact figure is 7.3 per cent, and is derived from the nearly 500 generals included in
Entsiklopediia
. On education and Enlightenment in the Baltic provinces, see G. von Pistohlkors,
Deutsche Geschichte in Osten Europas: Baltische Länder
, Berlin, 1994, pp. 266–94.
7 The best source is the official history of Russian military engineering: I. G. Fabritsius,
Glavnoe inzhenernoe upravlenie
, SVM, 7, SPB, 1902. On doctors see: A. A. Baranov, ‘Meditsinskoe obespechenie armii v 1812 godu’, in
Epokha
1812
goda: Issledovaniia, istochniki, istoriografiia
, TGIM, vol. 1, Moscow, 2002, pp. 105–24.
8 D. G. Tselerungo,
Ofitsery russkoi armii, uchastniki Borodinskogo srazheniia
, Moscow, 2002, p. 81. The best source on the origins of the general staff is N. Glinoetskii, ‘Russkii general’nyi shtab v tsarstvovanie Imperatora Aleksandra I’,
VS
, 17/10, 1874, pp. 187–250. See also: P. A. Geisman,
Vozniknovenie i razvitie v Rossii general’nago shtaba
, SVM, 4/1/2/1, especially pp. 169 ff: ‘Svita Ego Imperatorskago Velichestva po kvartirmeisterskoi chasti’.
9 This is to borrow the term used by John Brewer in the context of eighteenth-century Britain.
10 The Russian statistics are inexact because the government only counted the number of subjects who owed compulsory military service. This did not include women, nobles, priests, merchants or all non-Russian minorities. For the basic statistics on European populations, see R. Bonney (ed.),
Economic Systems and Finance
, Oxford, 1995, pp. 315–19 and 360–76. For a more detailed breakdown of the European population in 1812, see the statistics compiled by Major Josef Paldus which are contained in the appendix to
Geschichte der Kämpfe Österreichs: Kriege unter der Regierung des Kaisers Franz. Befreiungskrieg
1813
und
1814, vol. 1: O. Criste,
Österreichs Beitritt zur Koalition
, Vienna, 1913. All these statistics have to be watched carefully. For example Paldus’s figure for the Russian population is much too low, though it may well be that he is using estimates for ethnic Russians rather than for all subjects of the emperor. Bonney cites P. G. M. Dickson for the Habsburg figure (
Finance and Government under Maria Theresa
1740– 1780, 2 vols., Oxford, 1987, vol. 1, p. 36), but Dickson does not include the population of the Habsburg Netherlands or Italy.