On the evening of the 1st of September Count Rostopchin had come away from his meeting with Kutuzov feeling humiliated and offended that he had not been invited to the council of war, and that Kutuzov had completely ignored his offer to play a role in the defence of the city, and also amazed at the new way of thinking he had picked up at the camp whereby the tranquillity of the capital and its patriotic fervour were being treated as secondary considerations, if not altogether irrelevant and trivial. Thus humiliated, offended and amazed, Count Rostopchin had returned to Moscow. After supper he lay down on a sofa without getting undressed, and just before two in the morning he was woken up by a courier with a letter from Kutuzov. The letter said that since the troops were retreating to the Ryazan road on the other side of Moscow would the count kindly send some police officials to escort the troops through the town? There was nothing new in this. He had known Moscow was going to be surrendered not just since yesterday’s meeting with Kutuzov on the Poklonny hill, but ever since the battle of Borodino, and the time when all the generals arriving back in Moscow had declared unanimously that another battle was impossible, and he himself had approved the evacuation of government property by night, and half the inhabitants had dribbled away. Nevertheless this communication, in the form of a simple note containing instructions from Kutuzov, received at night when he had just got to sleep, took the governor by surprise and annoyed him.
In days to come Count Rostopchin would explain his actions during this period by writing more than once in his memoirs that his main aim at the time was twofold: to maintain the peace in Moscow and to get the citizens out. If this double purpose is admitted, everything Rostopchin did seems beyond reproach. You ask why the holy relics, arms, ammunition, gunpowder and grain supplies were not taken away; why thousands of citizens were cheated into believing that Moscow was not going to be abandoned – and thus ruined? ‘To keep the peace in Moscow,’ comes the explanation from Count Rostopchin. Why were piles of useless papers from government offices, Leppich’s balloon and things like that evacuated? ‘To leave the town empty,’ comes the explanation from Count Rostopchin. The mere mention of a threat to public order is enough to justify any action.
All the horrors of the Reign of Terror in France were based on nothing more than a need to keep the peace.
What foundation was there for Count Rostopchin’s dread of popular disturbance in Moscow in 1812? Was there any reason for presupposing a tendency towards revolution in the city? The inhabitants were leaving; Moscow was filling up with retreating troops. Why would the people be likely to rebel in these circumstances?
As the enemy approached nothing resembling a rebellion took place anywhere, neither in Moscow nor anywhere else in Russia. On the 1st and 2nd of September more than ten thousand people were left behind in Moscow, and apart from a crowd that gathered in the commander-in-chief’s courtyard, at his instigation, nothing happened. It is clear there would have been even less reason to expect popular disturbances if after the battle of Borodino, when the surrender of Moscow had become a certainty, or at least a strong probability, Rostopchin had taken steps for the evacuation of all the holy relics, gunpowder, ammunition and money, and told the people to their faces that the town was being abandoned, instead of working them into a frenzy by putting up posters and issuing weapons.
