Chuikevich’s memorandum did not go into details. It said nothing specific about where Napoleon’s advance might be stopped. Unlike Pfühl, Chuikevich was a practical soldier who understood the uncertainties of warfare. But no one who read the memorandum could be confident that Napoleon’s advance would be halted within the western borderlands. The danger that the war would spread into the Russian heartland was obvious. In reality Barclay and Alexander had always understood this possibility. Any Russian leader knew how Charles XII had marched deep into the empire’s interior and had been destroyed by Peter the Great. The parallels were clear enough. On the very eve of Napoleon’s invasion, Count Rostopchin wrote to Alexander that ‘if unfortunate circumstances forced us to decide on retreat in the face of a victorious enemy, even in that case the Russian emperor will be menacing in Moscow, terrifying in Kazan and invincible in Tobolsk’. While recovering from his wounds in 1807 Barclay himself apparently spoke at length of the need to defeat Napoleon by drawing him into the depths of Russia and inflicting on him a new Poltava. Before 1812 Alexander and his sister Catherine spoke privately about the possibility of Napoleon taking both Moscow and Petersburg in the event of a war. Early in 1812 the emperor made quiet arrangements to evacuate his mistress and child to the Volga if the need arose.54
All this was a long way from concrete plans to lure Napoleon into the Russian interior or prepare for his destruction there. In reality no such plans or preparations existed. This was sensible. Barclay’s brother was a colonel on the general staff: he wrote in 1811 that it was pointless to make plans for military operations beyond the first stages of any war, so great were the uncertainties involved in any campaign. This was doubly the case in 1812 since Russia’s defensive strategy had left the initiative in Napoleon’s hands. If Napoleon crossed the Dvina he might head for Moscow. On the other hand, he could make for Petersburg or even shift the main thrust of the war southwards towards Ukraine, as his Polish advisers were urging. More likely, he could end his campaign with the conquest of Belorussia and devote his energies to restoring the Polish kingdom and organizing a supply base for a campaign into the Russian heartland in 1813. Before the war began Napoleon told Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, that this was what he intended to do and at least one senior Russian general staff officer believed that if Napoleon had stuck to this idea the consequences for Russia would have been disastrous.55
For the Russian leadership, how their own subjects would respond to the French invasion was a matter of immense importance and uncertainty. Above all, this meant the Poles, not least because they dominated the region which Russian strategy intended to surrender to the invaders. There was considerable debate among Russian generals and statesmen before the war began about how the Poles would respond to a French invasion. It was felt that many of the great landowners preferred Russian rule because they disliked the abolition of serfdom in the Duchy of Warsaw and feared further radical measures. As to the region’s peasants, they might indulge in anarchic assaults on property and order but the Russian leadership was confident that they neither understood nor cared about nationalist or Jacobin ideas. The big danger was the mass of the Polish gentry. Most Russian generals agreed that, if Napoleon invaded Russia and proclaimed Poland’s restoration, the great majority of educated Poles in Lithuania and Belorussia would support him, partly out of nationalist enthusiasm and partly because they believed that he would win. Of course this reinforced the generals’ unwillingness to withdraw from the borderlands, not least for fear that Napoleon would turn them into a fruitful base for subsequent operations against the Russian heartland. Alexander and Barclay could not deny this possibility. But they believed that Napoleon’s overwhelming numbers left them no alternative to their strategy. They knew that restoring the Polish kingdom could not be done overnight. They banked on Napoleon’s temperament, as well as on the nature of his regime and military system, making a strategy of sustained patience unlikely.56
