Napoleon's Russian defeat, reexamined
How a well-prepared army -- and not the legendary winter -- turned the tide on the French emperor
Editor: Laura Miller
"Brave descendents of courageous Slavs! You always smashed the teeth of the lions and tigers who sought to attack you. Let everyone unite: with the Cross in your hearts and weapons in your hands no human force will defeat you."
With these words, Tsar Alexander I appealed to the Russian people to join the fight against Napoleon's Grande Armée, which began pouring into Russia at the end of June 1812.
Much has been written about how and why Napoleon came to lose more than a half-million men in the Russian invasion. Hitler and his generals even studied the ill-fated campaign hoping to avoid making similar mistakes. But missing from Western scholarship on the Napoleonic Wars is a full-fledged account of how Russia came to smash Napoleon. With "Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace," Dominic Lieven, one of the preeminent scholars of 19th-century Russia, aims to fill the void, tackling not only the French invasion of 1812, but also the battles of 1813-1814. What sets Lieven's book apart from the handful of other accounts is his prolific use of Russian sources, particularly regimental histories available to Western researchers only since 1991.
After Napoleon destroyed the Russian army at Austerlitz in 1805 and drove the Russians out of Poland, it was only a matter of time before another showdown occurred between the two powers. Russia was unhappy about losing Poland and being compelled to adhere to the Continental System, which circumscribed Russia's ability to trade, to the detriment of its economy. Faced with economic collapse, Tsar Alexander I decided to ignore France's blockade against Britain. Napoleon, who abhorred disloyalty, vowed to make Russia see the error of its ways.
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