This says something fundamental about the Russia of Alexander I. Alexander’s regime was in some ways formidable and devastating in the demands it imposed on the Russian masses, especially in wartime. But this was not the Russia of Peter the Great, let alone of Stalin. It was not possible to control the elites through terror. Nobles could not openly oppose Alexander’s policies but they could drag their feet and subvert the execution of policy: their sabotage of attempts to increase tax revenue from noble estates in the months before the war illustrates this facet of their power. Noble sentiment therefore had to be taken into account and the elites needed to be wooed as well as constrained. Indeed, faced by Hitler’s invasion even Stalin’s regime realized that terror was not enough and that Russian patriotism must be mobilized. Alexander needed no reminding on this score, still less on the need to achieve harmony with the nobility in order to stabilize the home front and ensure commitment to the war. In late August he told one of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting that so long as Russians remained committed to victory and ‘so long as morale doesn’t collapse, all will go well’.15
The diary of Major-General Prince Vasili Viazemsky illustrates why Alexander did need to worry about noble ‘morale’. The Viazemskys were an ancient princely family but only a few of them were still rich and prominent by the reign of Alexander I. Vasili Viazemsky owned fewer than a hundred serfs and was definitely not in this group. His career had been spent far from Petersburg and the Guards, in ordinary jaeger regiments. Though well educated, his concerns and opinions were those of the middling provincial gentry. When the war began, Viazemsky was commanding a brigade of jaegers in Tormasov’s Third Army, guarding the approaches to the Ukraine.
Like almost all his peers, Viazemsky was baffled and dismayed by the retreat of the Russian army in the face of Napoleon’s invasion. By early September, as news arrived that Napoleon was approaching the Russian heartland, bafflement turned to anger.
One’s heart trembles at Russia’s condition. It is no wonder that there are intrigues in the armies. They are full of foreigners and are commanded by parvenus. Who is the emperor’s adviser at court? Count Arakcheev. When did he ever fight in a war? What victory made him famous? What did he ever contribute to his fatherland? And it is he who is close to the emperor at this critical moment. The whole army and the whole people condemn the retreat of our armies from Vilna to Smolensk. Either the whole army and the entire people are idiots or the person who gave orders for this retreat is an idiot.
In Viazemsky’s view his personal prospects and those of his country were intertwined and gloomy. Russia faced defeat and the loss of its glory. It would be reduced in size and population, its long and weak borders thereby becoming even more difficult to defend. A new system of administration would be needed and would be a source of much confusion. ‘Religion has been weakened by enlightenment and what therefore will be left to us as regards the control of our ungovernable, tempestuous and hungry masses?’ With new demands now being imposed on noble estates to support the militia, ‘my own position will be really good. Every tenth man taken as a militia recruit from my estate and I have to feed the people they leave behind: I don’t have a kopek, I have many debts, I have nothing to support my children and no secure future in my career.’16
In the summer of 1812 Alexander worried that the morale of Russia’s elites might collapse and they in turn harboured doubts about his strategy and the strength of his commitment to victory. Nevertheless the alliance between crown and nobility held firm. This was hugely important as regards the army’s supply during the 1812 campaign.
On the eve of the war Alexander appealed to Russian society to help provide food and transport for the army. In response, Moscow’s nobles and merchants donated a million rubles in one day. In far-off Saratov on the banks of the Volga the governor, Aleksei Panchulidzev, received Alexander’s appeal and a ‘request’ from the minister of police that Saratov province contribute 2,000 oxen and 1,000 carts to help with the army’s transport and an additional 1,000 cattle for its food. The nobles and town corporations of the province agreed but added an extra 500 cattle to this list on their own initiative. They reckoned that in Saratov a cart with two oxen would cost 230 rubles, of which the cart itself accounted for only 50. Beef cattle would cost 65 rubles a head. In addition, however, 270 workers would have to be hired for six months to get the carts and animals to the army. Their pay was 30 rubles a month, which came to 48,600 rubles in all. Even before the war had begun, Saratov had therefore committed more than 400,000 rubles to the army’s upkeep.17
