Part I

The success of the Russians in the 1812 campaign had many factors. Napoleon's overall strategic plan for victory was faulty as it entailed pinning the Russian forces at the border and dealing a crushing blow, a task for which the massive Grande Armee was too unwieldy to accomplish. The chase through the interior further sapped away at the invaders, overburdening the logistical system and making Napoleon impatient for a battle. The climax of the campaign at Borodino turned into one of the slugging matches that characterized late-Napoleonic warfare in no small measure because Napoleon did not feel confident that a more dramatic turning maneuver championed by Davout was practical. But Napoleon's failure was not just due to Napoleon himself, the Russians certainly played a major role and during 1812 the Russian army showed a number of its virtues.

One of the strengths of the Russian army was that it was not just a military, but a major social institution within the Romanov state. Conscription, at first for life under Peter I and then for 25 years under Catherine II, meant that the peasant recruit left one social world for another one completely different. This was part of the reason that underlay the oft-misunderstood tradition of a recruit holding a funeral before he left. In the stratified Russian social order, being a soldier meant entering into a different social estate. Retired soldiers became raznochintsy (men of various ranks) which meant they could move into towns and ply a trade. Conscription itself was often delegated to the patriarchs of the mir (peasant commune) who often selected troublemakers, men with little prospects, family rivals, or younger sons that would have trouble being married off. Thus the serf-recruit typically left one social world and entered another with little chance of returning.

This social milieu imparted to the Russian army an esprit de corps that was relatively unique among its European contemporaries. The expansive Russian empire meant that there ususally was some kind of war for the Russian army to fight, whether against the Ottomans, the Swedes, or the French, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In some cases, NCOs and the the rank and file Russian troops racked up an extraordinary amount of service and experience. At Borodino, for example, the Russian NCOs were typically veterans of 6 to 8 battles. The officer corps, which drew both from the Baltic German nobility as well as various other noble ranks, was quite different in character than other nobles in the empire. Most officers did not own any serfs or other property and the officer class as a whole was largely a service nobility dependent upon the state for wealth and titles. As with the NCOs, this meant some officers had accrued a fair amount of experience and encouraged the type of rough and hard-talking officer as exemplified by Suvorov. Discipline and corporal punishment within the army was often quite severe, but not terribly out of line with other European contemporaries. Rations were often arranged along an artel' system in which small groups of soldiers would pool their pay for their provisions. The artel' system was prone to abuse, but it also allowed some soldiers to buy luxuries and acted as a social safety net of sorts for both men who mustered out or otherwise befell certain other misfortunes like gambling debts or injuries. They system was not perfect, but then again, there were very few smooth-running provisioning systems in the Napoleonic era and Napoleonic memoirs often describe starvation or bad food as one of the perennial hazards of a soldier's life. But the artel' system helped encourage a bond of solidarity among small units that long-term service also helped foster.

This is not to say that the Russian system did not have deficiencies. Poor performance both in the Revolutionary wars and the Austerlitz campaign showed deficiencies in tactics and equipment. The massive standing army and Russia's own relative economic underdevelopment meant that the army had to rely upon state-run arsenals for the bulk of its equipment. This allowed for massive economies of scale, but also made it much harder to change production or new innovations. For the Revolutionary and early half of the Napoleonic Wars, the muskets produced at these factories were often substandard compared to their contemporaries and slightly heavier. In 1805, the British observer Reginald Heber noted that while the Tula works could produce a large number of muskets, they suffered from poor quality control and were prone to bursting. After Austerlitz and the Polish campaigns exposed some of the shortcomings of Russian muskets, Emperor Alexander I directed that the state factories come up with an improved model. The resulting Model 1808 pattern was based both of the Brown Bess and the French Model 1777 Charleville. The Model 1808 became one of the bedrocks for Russian musketry in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars. There were similiar innovations in Russia's artillery park, and as an aphorism popularized during the USSR, "quantity has a quality of its own," and Russian per capita artillery often outnumbered the French, much to Napoleon's chagrin. Russian artillery began the nineteenth century in a fairly sorry state, but reforms in artillery adjusted to new, workmanlike designs and the state arsenals could turn out prodigious numbers of artillery pieces. Paul I's Minister of War, General Aleksei Arakcheev, was a former artillery man an inspector general of the artillery, and not only completed earlier modernizing efforts, but also militarized the drivers and artillery trains so that by 1812 Russian artillery was among Europe's most efficient in terms of getting tubes onto the battlefield and keeping them supplied with shot.

The turn of the century failures also forced the state to reform the human elements of the army. Emperor Paul I began a process of cleaning out the Katrine deadwood from upper echelons of the army, a process that was never fully completed by the 1807 campaigns, but opened up the upper ranks to new ideas and lessons. A. I. Khatov's 1807 handbook on infantry tactics had begun to filter into junior officers' minds by 1812 and there was the start of a military intellectual culture within the officer corps with various journals discussing the innovations and arguments of the day.

The problem for the Russian army in wider historical memory was two-fold. Firstly, although in many respects Russian developments in raising, equipping, and training its massive army paralleled similar developments in Europe, the army became entrenched as one of the main tools of autocracy. This locked out Russian developments from wider narratives of evolving civil-military relations within Europe. The Russian serf-recruit did not become a citizen through service, but remained a servant of the state, albeit in a different estate. This lent an alien quality to the institution as a whole, especially when viewed by outsiders unfamiliar with how the Romanov state and society functioned.