II. Insert the prepositions where it is necessary:

1. Practically all of continental Europe was ____ Napoleon’s control.

2. Napoleon wanted Alexander I ____ submit ____ the terms of a treaty that had been imposed ____ him four years earlier.

3. Napoleon entered Russia ____ the head of the largest army ever seen, and it was hard to hope to defeat him ____ a direct confrontation.

4. The Tsar insisted ____ an engagement, and ____ September 7, when the French army was only 110 km ____ the city, the two armies met ____ Borodino Field.

5. When Napoleon’s army arrived ____ September 14, they found a city bereft ____ supplies, a meager comfort ____ the face ____ the oncoming winter.

6. To make matters much, fires broke ____ in the city ____ that night, and ____ the next day the French were lacking shelter as well.

7. After waiting ____ vain for Alexander to offer ____ negotiate, Napoleon began the march home.

8. The route south was blocked ____ Kutuzov's forces, and the French were ____ no shape ____ a battle.

III. Discuss the following questions:

1. Why did Napoleon want to invade Russia? What were his plans? What were Napoleon’s army’s forces and who were they composed of?

2. Why did the French force begin to decline by September?

3. What did Napoleon’s army find when it entered Moscow on September 14? Was this discovery pleasant and beneficial for Napoleon?

4. Why did Napoleon have to follow the same route of the invasion on his way back from Moscow?

5. What role did the weather play in napoleon’s defeat?

IV. Find and present information about the foreign policy in Russia in the first half of the XIX century. Text 4 the reforms in russia after 1814

I. Read the text, explain the words in bold, make up 10 sentences with these words.

Part I

The external events of 1812-1815 displaced the internal-political problems of Russia to the 2^nd plan. After the end of the war, the question of reforms of the state structure and serf relations appeared at the center of attention of the people and emperor.

The emperor, who wrote the project of the constitution to the Kingdom of Poland himself in November 1815, announced that he hoped to expand “free-law establishments” all over the countries that were faithful to him.

For the first time since the beginning of the reign of Alexander I, the social support of the transformations came out: whole generation, educated under reforms ideas, grew. The campaigns of the Russian army out of the country had a great value in changing the political moods in the society; and those soldiers, after coming back home, needed changes for a better life.

In April 1818, Alexander I established an autonomous government in Bessarabia. The supreme legislative and executive authority was transferred to the Supreme council, which decisions were final. Finland, after having joined Russia in 1808, had a constitution and its own four-class Seym. Finland existed as an autonomous state in the Russian empire and lived by its internal laws. In 1818, Alexander I charged Novosiltsev to prepare the project of the Russian Constitution.

The prepared and approved by the emperor document “The state official document of the Russian empire” provided the establishment in Russia of constitutional monarchy. The legislature divided between the emperor and the State Seym, which consisted of two chambers: the higher (the Senate) and lower (ambassadorial chamber). No law could be accepted without discussion in the Seym, which had the right of veto. The legislative initiative was kept only for the emperor, being at the head of the executive power.

As a whole, the project had a more conservative character, than the Polish Constitution of 1815. The sovereignty of the emperor (instead of people) was the main source of any authority in the country. Nobility’s privileges were kept, and the serfdom was not mentioned at all.

Meanwhile the insolubility of the peasants question after the war was an alarm for the ruling circles. From 1815 to 1820, the emperor received 11 projects about conditions of liberation of the peasants, conditions made by authors both under his order or by its own initiative. The common principle to all projects was the principle of gradual cancellation of the serfdom. One of the elaborators was earl A.A.Arakcheev. He proposed to carry out the liberation of the peasants under the direction of the government, which should buy up manor houses on means of the state budget. Peasants should receive at their liberation a lot at the rate of two dessiatinas per person. But this project was impracticable because of the limited budgetary funds, but the tsar approved it.

Changes in the situation of the peasants during Alexander’s I reign took place only in Baltic. In May 1816, the emperor signed “The situation of East-Land peasants”, through which they received a personal freedom, but the land remained the property of the landowners. Peasants could rent the land, and finally buy it.

However Alexander’s I reformatory intentions both in constitutional and in country question were replaced by frankly reactionary rate. Alexander I considered that peasantal Russia was not capable to understand and accept the constitutional system of government. Distempers in military settlements, the revolt of the Semenovsky regiment and the wave of the European revolutions of 1820-1821 finally convinced him of the inopportuneness of any reform. During the last years of his reign, Alexander I was little engaged in internal affairs, paying the basic attention to the problems of the Sacred union.