History of Russia Lectures for technical students. Part 1. Учебное пособие

the future of Russia a continent away a bold declared himself Emperor of France with plans to remake all of Europe was Napoleon Bonaparte. You could not find two more different men than Napoleon and Alexander. Napoleon was completely filled with self-confidence, he felt called upon to be the master of the Universe, never doubting his genius and never doubting his flair, never doubting of strategy. Alexander had been confused and not knowing exactly what direction he wanted to take and so he went off in all these various directions. In 1807 Napoleon would force Alexander to sign a treaty of friendship, but the tsar of Russia and the self-made Emperor of France were fated to wind up bitter enemies in a struggle for the fate of Europe. As the French destroy the two great intermediary powers Prussia, Austria, Russia was faced with a big dilemma. Obviously if Napoleon dominated the whole of Europe from the Atlantic to the Russian border he controlled such immense resources that he's basically going to be able to get make Russia to do whatever he wanted.

In 1811 Alexander finally took a stand, defying Napoleon's grand ambitions, he declared alliance with England and prepared for all-out war with France. Napoleon answered in force. In the face of overwhelming forces, the tsar’s commanders turned to the strategy that had served Russia for centuries. For over a decade Napoleon Bonaparte had seemed invincible as he marched across Europe. Tsar Alexander and Russian armies were the last obstacle to continental dominance. Napoleon had to destroy the Russian army to win in the war of 1812, because otherwise they would just go on retreating in front of him and at the end his own line of supply would become so immense that his army would disintegrate.

On 24 July 1812 at Kovno Napoleon watched the leading regiments of the Great Army cross the River Niemen, where 5 years before on a tented raft he had first embraced Alexander. For 8 days his troops, breaking step, marched across 3 pontoon bridges. There were Italians, many Poles, 2 Portuguese regiments and so on. Altogether there were 20 na-

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tions, 530,000 men. Frenchmen composed one-third of the whole. Napoleon could see each regiment preceded by the standard he had given it. Beneath a bronze eagle with spread wings floated a square flag on the white satin. Napoleon’s Imperial Guard formed a self-contained elite of 45,000 men divided into the Old Guard, who were veterans and The Young Guard, who were the cream of the conscripts. Each division was followed by six-mile column of food supplies. The morale of this huge force was extremely high. Napoleon travelled in a green 4 wheeled covered carriage drawn by 6 Limousine horses. As he neared the Russians, Napoleon travelled with the Guard, astride his black horse Marengo.

The main Russian army, some 120,000 men with 600 guns, was commanded by a slow-moving general of Scots descent, Barclay de Tolly. Napoleon hoped to fight Barclay at Vilna, 50 miles inside the Russian border. But Barclay abandoned Vilna, he was acting on orders from the Tsar who had decided to avoid a direct engagement. Napoleon pursued Barclay to Vitebsk, but Barclay slipped away and joined Prince

Bagration’s Second Army on the Dnieper. Marching down the Dnieper valley, Napoleon hoped to attack the 2 Russian armies separately at Smolensk. That was on 17 August.

For 7 weeks Napoleon had been on the march and all he conquered was empty space. The father he penetrated into Russia, the more aware he and his men became of empty space and silence: when they reached what on the map was a village, they found it burned, and its food buried, the inhabitants had all fled, nothing remained but space, even the Russian sky was empty of birds. Confronted by the emptiness, Napoleon in mid-August had a choice: he could strike, as he put it at the head, at the feet, or at the heart. The head was St. Petersburg, where the Tsar ruled. The feet were Kiev, the great city of the south. The heart was Moscow, the old capital, the largest city and strategically the best situated. Moscow was a long way off, 12 marches from Smolensk, 1,600 miles in a straight line from Paris. For a week Napoleon waited, assessing the situ-

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ation, trying to read Alexander’s mind. Then he gave an order to march on Moscow.

Alexander, meanwhile, had been forced by Ministers and opinion at court to stop the retreat. At all costs, they said, he must fight to save Moscow. So the tsar replaced Barclay by General Kutuzov, a nobleman of 68, who had lost his right eye in a Turkish war, was extremely fat, unable to ride a horse. He drew up Russian army south of the village of Borodino.

Napoleon marched deeper and deeper into Russia. He looked for a decisive battle and found only an empty and an unwelcoming land. On the morning of September 6, 1812 one day's ride from Moscow Napoleon finally found what he was looking – 120,000 Russian soldiers. Alexander's imperial army was ready to fight to the death on the fields of Borodino. Napoleon was feeling unwell, he took up a position in front of the Guard on high ground a mile from the southern Russian redoubts. From here he could see the central third of the battlefield, immediately in front of him were the main French batteries.

At 5:30 a.m. Napoleon ordered to open fire, so the Battle of Borodino was started. At Borodino the losses from both sides were enormous: Russian losses indeed and the wounded were 44,000, French losses were 33,000. Both sides would claim victory, still the death convinced the Russian generals to leave the field and the city of Moscow to Napoleon. The road to Moscow lay open. It was very clear to the French soldiers and generals that the Russian army could fight by no means exhausted. It was, Napoleon considered, the most terrible battle he had ever fought. Napoleon usually visited the battlefield immediately in order to see that all wounded were brought in. But after Borodino, exhausted physically by his feverish cold and mentally by the strength of Russian resistance, he threw himself on his camp-bed. At dawn of the next day, Napoleon rode across the battlefield in silence.

Napoleon continued to advance. He found no resistance. Napoleon entered Moscow on 15 September 1812. He was disappointed that no Rus-

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sian bowed forward, offering the city keys on a velvet cushion, no crowds lined the streets to cheer him. It soon became plain that most Muscovites had been ordered by the governor, Rastopchin, to leave. Out of 250,000 only 15,000 remained, chiefly foreigners, criminals released from the city prisons. In Moscow too there was space and silence. Napoleon took up lodgings in an Italian style palace in the Kremlin, its elaborate white marble staircase on the outside. He hang the portrait of his infant son and settled down to work – preparing to open peace talks with Alexander, he felt sure that the Tsar would make peace after his defeat at Borodino, just as he had done after Austerlitz and Friedland.

At night of 16 September sporadic fires broke out in Moscow. The French could find no horses or pumps and had to fight them with buckets of water. More than half of Moscow was burned to the ground. After this the city was a depressing sight, blackened, and charred, but the fifth remaining part provided shelter for his troops and plenty of food was found in the cellars, so Napoleon tried to open peace talks and wrote a letter to the Tsar. The Tsar was in St. Petersburg, so his reply arrived in 2 weeks. For weeks Napoleon waited for Alexander to concede defeat and the Russians set fire to his prize. For Napoleon it was a disaster.

The main impression was horror that having marched all this way and saw Moscow he was actually no closer to achieving his goal, because sitting in Moscow through the winter even if the city hadn't been destroyed was impossible. He didn’t know what to do and began to read Voltaire’s “History of Charles XII”, in which the Swedish king cut off from Poland and surrounded by the enemies, resolved to ignore the severe Russian winter. Napoleon's order to retreat came too late. Russian winter came early and hard. The French were 15000 miles from home with little to eat and no shelter from the storm.

The Emperor Alexander gave promise his people not to make peace while a single enemy soldier remained on Russian soil, he would rather let his beard grow and eat potatoes with the serfs. So Alexander called

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on the Russian people to annihilate the enemy. Russians of every class rose in fury and fell on the invaders.

Napoleon’s first idea was to march to St. Petersburg but at last he proposed a retreat to the west: “We shall repeat Charles XII’s mistake, while the weather is still temperate, we shall return via Smolensk to winter in Lithuania and Poland”. All the discussion centered on what route should be taken: Napoleon wanted to follow the milder, southern road through Kiev, but learning that the Dnieper in October sometimes flooded, he changed his plan. Napoleon consulted Russian almanacs for the past 25 years and found that severe frosts came to the latitude of Moscow usually at the end of November. On 15 October 3 inches of snow fell on the black ruins of Moscow. At 2 in the afternoon of 19 October the first units of the Grand Army began to leave Moscow. Altogether there were 90,000 infantry, 15,000 cavalry, 569 cannon and 10,000 wagons containing food for 20 days. On the 6th day out of Moscow there was an engagement with Cossacks and found Kutuzov barring the route he had planned to take, that’s why near Borodino he rejoined the road by which he had marched to Moscow, the road where most villages had been burned and all food removed.

On 29 October snow fell, and it was cold: on 6 of November – 22°C at night. Napoleon reached Smolensk on 9 November and left it on 14 November. Two fresh armies were waiting for Great Army: Wittgenstein’s from the north, Admiral Tchitchagov’s from the south; they were like the two jaws of a bear-trap, poised to crush Napoleon before he could get across the next major obstacle, the Beresina river. The crossing of the Beresina is one of the most remarkable feats in the history of warfare. At 10 in the evening of 5 December Napoleon left Russia by sleigh, it was -25°C.

The losses were immense huge and in some ways the losses of the horses were even more important than the losses of the man, because even after losing half a million men in Russia which was simply unprecedented in European history what he couldn't do was make up for the

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loss of trained cavalry and trained artillery and in that sense the retreat was vastly important because the French cavalry was virtually wiped out. Napoleon had entered Russia with the largest army in European history by the time they reach the Polish border is ground are may have been reduced to barely 25,000.

Once in Paris he said that he had an enemy in the “colossus of Russia”, trying to justify himself he had maid two mistakes – the first in July, when he had “though to obtain in 1 year what could only be gained by two campaigns”; second mistake – was that, having gone to Moscow, he remained too long. It’s interesting that Napoleon accused himself only of having failed to act quickly enough.

For Alexander the burning of Moscow had sparked a mystical religious conversion. The born-again Orthodox tsar was embarking on a holy crusade to eliminate Bonaparte and return the capitals of Europe to their rightful monarchs. Armies from Prussia and Austria joined the crusade. In 1814 with the tsar Alexander himself at command allied forces swept across Europe to the gates of Paris. Alexander entered Paris in unopposed triumph. For the entire 18th century, Russia had been drawing itself closer and closer to Europe trying to prove that it was actual an equal partner in the family of Europe and there were the Russians who were leading allied troops from all of Europe to unseat the evil usurper.

There in the land of the Enlightenment and the revolution Russian Guardsmen experienced the reality of liberal politics for the first time, ideas of a constitutional monarchy not absolutist monarchy. The idea about civil and political rights was something that all people should enjoy. The idea of such quality before the law should be and indeed a regime based on rule by law should be the foundation for any modern state. Many young officers who had ridden by Alexander into Paris returned home with passionate ideas of liberty and reform. They met in secret and plotted the unthinkable – a constitution for absolutist Russia. Revolution societies sprang up in military units across the country. They

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had no confidence that the Tsar would lead liberal reforms and introduce Constitution. Alexander withdrew into prayer and meditation.

On the 19th of November 1825 the emperor died. He died childless, leaving the throne to his younger brother Nicholas.

TASKS

1.Answer the following questions:

1.What kind of sovereign was Paul I?

2.How can you describe the relations of Alexander and his father? Was Alexander a good son?

3.What was the aim of Alexander’s policy?

4.What kind of person was Alexander I? Was he a self-confident per-

son?

5.What was the result of Alexander’s reforms?

6.Why the War of 1812 was called The great by contemporaries?

2.Watch video “History of Russian Empire” (Matteo Zilli, part

14-15 of 20) and summarize new information.

3.Topics for writing essay.

1.Russia as Napoleon's golden dream.

2.Alexander I – “Northern sphinx”.

3.Alexander I and Napoleon: common and different features.

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might never have a better chance. A group of young army officers, later known as Decembrists in Russian history, tried to change political system. The 14th of December 1825, this was the day when the army was to take the oath of allegiance to new Russian Emperor Nicolas I. Rebel officers, gathered in Senate Square in St. Petersburg. They began demanding a new form of government with a constitution. By the afternoon 700 rebels and troops loyal to Nicolas attacked each other in the square.

On December 14th , 1825 Tsar Nicholas I turned his gun against revolutionaries in the army and crushed it by fire of cannons. The Decemberists had threatened to absolute power by demanding a constitution for Russia. Nicholas treated the incident of the rebellion according to a taste of Tsar’s rule. He crushed what was frighten him and to persuade him for the rest of his life that there was a real risk of revolution in Russia. Nicholas sent most of them (about 121) to the exile to Siberia, five leaders of the Decemberists were sent to the gallow.

So the start of Nicolas’s reign was bloody and dramatic. Under Nicholas the absolute rule became Russian official Creed. He declared democracy or a constitution out of the question. He had never thought that any system could be better than that by which kings was delegated by Providence to govern. The masses in the Russian Empire politics were illegal. There were no legal political parties. One could not write what one believed, one couldn’t discuss ideas, politics legally or one was driven underground into secret small cells. Russian elite still wanted their share of power: aristocrats, intellectuals and entrepreneurs all dreamed of changing society. They were humiliated by Russian backwardness. They didn't have the same political rights that upper class people had in England or France, even to discuss rebellion was a crime. The secret police forced the Emperor's will with exile and execution.

Nicolas was deeply religious person who was hard working and preferred simple life. The Emperor Nicolas hated revolutionary ideas.

That’s why special secret police was established for seeking rebellions

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and democratic ideas in Russia. Many people were under the control of this police such as A. Pushkin, M. Lermontov and others. New Ustav of censorship was established and it was very strict and called “cast-iron”. After this many liberal newspapers and magazines and books were considered as revolutionary and prohibited for publishing.

Only one man dared to publicly to express the universal longing for dignity and freedom – Russian great poet Alexander Pushkin: “the heavy chains will fall ... and freedom will greet you at the gate and brothers will give you back the sword in a land where self-expression could be a crime”. Alexander Pushkin was a national hero but on

January 27, 1837 he had a fatal appointment after that the poet had challenged an officer of the guard to a duel. The guardsmen had flirted with Pushkin’s wife, his honor and reputation were at stake and in

Tsarist Russia a man's honor was more precious to life. The great poet’s death was a national tragedy. It was only a drop of blood compared to the tragedies to come while political change was suppressed in Russia.

Outside the Empire revolutions were already shaking the Ancient Order in Western Europe. The Industrial Revolution was booming nationalism, socialism and democracy followed in its wake, in 1848 popular rebellions overthrew aristocratic rule in cities from Paris to Prague when the tide of rebellion top of the Austrian Emperor on the very doorstep of Russia. Russian troops marched to the Habsburg Empire to stifle Hungarian uprising. Royalists regrouped crushing revolts all across the continent. Tsar Nicholas was proclaimed “the arm of Europe, the gendarme” who kept Europe safe for monarchy, the idea of a powerful and overwhelming mighty was to act as a bulwark against Anarchy. It was very much in the center of Nicholas’ mentality and his conception of his role in Russian faith, in Russian power.

Revolutionary ideas and dissent were suppressed very cruelty inside and outside of Russia. At the beginning of the 1830s Nicolas suppressed a Polish rebellion and Poland lost its independent and Constitution and became an ordinary Russian province after it. The

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