This year marks the bicentenary of the 1812 war, and the other day three Americans, aged 14, 12 and 10, assured me they knew all about it.
Yet some gentle probing revealed that to them 1812 meant the conflict between the USA and Britain, not Russia’s victory over Napoleon. The youngsters were vague about which event inspired the celebrated Overture, and words like Borodino and Berezina drew blank stares.
This isn’t to imply criticism. At their age I hadn’t even heard about the first war, though I knew quite a bit about the second. My excuse is that I grew up in the wrong country, but then so did they.
The anniversary should remind us how imprecise a science history is. Ideology tends to obscure facts with fiction, and facts fade away. History becomes retrospective politics, with even the issue of who won a battle or a war often a matter of subjective opinion.
Thus Americans regard their 1812 as a moral victory in a second war of liberation. In fact, a tiny fragment of the British army, the bulk of which was otherwise engaged in the Iberian Peninsula, valiantly kept Canada from adding a few more stars to the American flag. Repelling American northward expansion may not have constituted a moral victory, but it certainly was a strategic one.
Today’s American schoolchildren study the war as an essential part of their history. British pupils, with some exceptions, have never even heard of it.
Russian children, by contrast, are inundated with information about their own 1812. Alas, much of it has been systematically falsified. This isn’t surprising for its principal source isn’t historical but literary. In this, 1812 resembles the Trojan War, and indeed Tolstoy’s War And Peace has been compared favourably to Homer’s Iliad, mostly by Count Leo himself.
Considering that the Napoleonic wars are about 22 centuries closer to our time, one would think that Russian history teachers shouldn’t have to rely on fiction. Sure enough, there’s no dearth of scholarly sources on 1812. But fiction is such an integral part of Russian historiography that a frankly jingoistic novelist is seen as a sufficiently reliable source.
Tolstoy describes all German officers fighting the Russian corner as pedantic bunglers and nincompoops. This took much fancy footwork, since that group included such internationally respected warriors as Wittgenstein, Bennigsen, Barclay de Tolly and Stein. But then Tolstoy even tags Napoleon as a military nonentity.
The writer glosses over the fact that three of the four supreme commanders of Russian armies during the Napoleonic wars were German (Barclay de Tolly, Wittgenstein, Bennigsen) and only Kutuzov was a simon-pure Russian. It was actually the German Scot Barclay, not the senile Commander-in-Chief Kutuzov, who was chiefly responsible for saving what was left of the army after the Russians’ defeat in the only major battle of the war.
Yet Tolstoy extols Kutuzov as a military genius, a sort of Antaeus deriving his strength from Russia’s saintly soil. Serious historians beg to differ.
In their eyes, Kutuzov’s do-nothing campaign could easily have ended in disaster. It was because of his passivity that the battle of Austerlitz had been lost, and as hostilities shifted into Russia proper Kutuzov lost at Borodino, surrendering Moscow as a result. Muscovites, probably led by their mayor, then set fire to the capital, leaving the French without supplies and quarters during a particularly inclement winter. That desperate act, unprecedented in modern war history, drove the French out, but this had nothing to do with Kutuzov.
Even then he missed the easiest of chances to finish off the French army in full flight, capture Napoleon and end the war a couple of years earlier. However, Tolstoy argues that even the Borodino battle, in which Russian casualties were 60 percent higher than French, was a victory because Napoleon lost the war in the end. That’s like saying that the French defeated Hitler in 1940 because de Gaulle triumphantly entered Paris in 1944.
Tolstoy lovingly describes how Kutuzov snored through the Military Council at which the momentous decision to surrender Moscow was taken. In some quarters such somnolence could have been regarded as criminal negligence, but Kutuzov could do no wrong according to Tolstoy.
What mattered to him was that, as an ethnic Russian, Kutuzov was in touch with the mysterious forces governing matters martial with no contribution from any human agency. It was irrelevant that at least 40 percent of all senior officers were of foreign origin, and even many of those regarded as native were indeed of Moldavian, Georgian, Lithuanian, Armenian, Tartar or other non-Slavic descent.
It’s Tolstoy’s fiction that has become canonised in history books. Any Russian pupil will tell you that Kutuzov was a giant among military pigmies, and Borodino was a Russian victory. Similarly, most commentators – amazingly even in the West – accept Tolstoy’s idealised portrayal of pitchfork-wielding peasants as real.
It’s true that Russia was saved not only by the fire of Moscow and -40 temperatures, for which Napoleon’s army was ill-prepared, but also by partisan warfare. But this wasn’t quite the spontaneous expression of the folk spirit of Tolstoy’s fancy. The idea for it had come from aristocratic officers, such as Denis Davydov (appearing as Denisov in War And Peace) and Alexander Figner. They were the ones who ran the guerrilla war, using regular cavalry units as the core of partisan forces.
At first Kutuzov fought their proposals tooth and nail, but then reluctantly sanctioned guerrilla action behind enemy lines. Perhaps he was persuaded by the success of such warfare in Spain. Or, more likely, he felt sleepy, as he did most of the time, and couldn’t be bothered to argue any longer.
For all that, the bicentenary of 1812 is eminently worth celebrating, even though Russia conceivably could have benefited more from losing. This may also be a good occasion for history to oust fiction, if such a thing is ever possible in Russia.