Speranskii and his innovations were not popular with the gentry, who hated him and considered him a plebeian and supporter of “French” political ideas. In fact Speranskii was not nearly as radical as his opponents believed, for he never wished to challenge the power of the tsar, only to continue the process of legalizing the power and regularizing the process of consultation. He was also rather conservative in other ways, a religious mystic who was hardly the rigorous ideologist of the Enlightenment as his critics claimed. The center of the opposition to Speranskii and Alexander’s liberal course was the salon of his younger sister, Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna, where the leading mind was Nikolai Karamzin, now hard at work on his history. In 1811 he presented Alexander with a long memorandum criticizing the reforms as alien to the Russian spirit, which consisted in autocracy and loyalty to tradition. For Alexander it was unacceptable, but such ideas would have a greater following in years to come. For the moment, Karamzin was too intellectual for most of the conservative nobility, who had simpler fears that the French might free the serfs and challenge their privileges. Speranskii’s fall came in the spring of 1812, as Napoleon prepared his attack on Russia and Alexander needed the support of conservatives among the gentry in the moment of supreme crisis. Ironically the more modern institutions that Alexander and Speranskii had taken over from the French example gave the state a solidity that stood up to the French onslaught.
Alexander’s internal reforms took place against the background of the titanic struggle of Napoleon with the rest of Europe. At first the new tsar held back. The assassination of tsar Paul had put an end to the notion of joining France in war against England, and Alexander seized on the opportunity for neutrality – a neutrality that allowed him the space for the first reforms.
Russia’s relationship to the expanding Napoleonic Empire was necessarily complex, as Russia was far away from the center of French expansion. For almost a century Russia’s own imperial ambitions had been directed to the south, toward the Ottoman Empire and Transcaucasia, areas of secondary interest to the French. At the same time Russia was intimately involved in the politics of Europe, and could not simply ignore Napoleon’s conquest and reorganization of Central Europe. Thus in 1805 Russia joined Britain, Austria, and Sweden in challenging Napoleon’s might. The first result was a disaster, for Napoleon quickly moved into the center of the Austrian Empire. Alexander overrode the advice of his commander Mikhail Kutuzov and, with the Austrians, gave battle at Austerlitz in December 1805. It proved one of Napoleon’s greatest victories. Then Prussia joined the alliance, but Napoleon smashed the supposedly great Prussian army at Jena the next year. Prussia, which unlike Russia had not begun to reform itself, collapsed. As the Prussians retreated east, Russia was left facing the French almost alone, but it managed to defeat them at Preussisch Eylau, one of Napoleon’s rare defeats in these years. He recovered and at Friedland in June 1807, inflicted enough damage on the Russian army that Alexander decided to make peace. He met the French emperor on a raft at Tilsit in East Prussia, making peace and even an alliance with France.
The alliance with France meant joining Napoleon’s boycott of English goods in European harbors as well as supporting Napoleon’s diplomacy. One immediate consequence was war with Sweden, since the Swedish king remained loyal to the anti-French cause, and the conquest of Finland. Russia’s larger foreign policy in these years, however, was a return to imperial conquest in the south, and war with the Turks brought the annexation of Bessarabia in 1812. The earlier annexation of Georgia (1803) gave Russia a firm foot on the south side of the Caucasus range, putting her in immediate rivalry with Iran as well as Turkey.
Alexander’s alliance with France was unstable from the start. The tsar paid lip service to the boycott of English goods, but American ships began to flock to St. Petersburg carrying the very English colonial wares that Napoleon was trying to keep out. The French emperor complained mightily about this violation of the agreement as well as other issues, trying to browbeat Alexander into obedience. Alexander, however, was a master at this sort of diplomacy, and answered French complaints with unfailing charm and vague promises of friendship. As the French tone grew increasingly threatening, the tsar reminded the French of the size of his army and the extent of his country. He reminded Napoleon’s envoys of the Scythians, the ancient inhabitants of southern Russia who defeated the mighty Persian Empire by retreating into the steppe. They exhausted and harassed the Persians until the invaders realized that they were short of food and had to run for home. The message could not have been clearer, but Napoleon did not heed it.
Napoleon had good reason to believe that he could conquer Russia in the spring of 1812. While France itself and Russia were about equal in population (about 35–40 million each), France drew on the resources of virtually the whole of Europe: the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy had either been annexed to the French Empire or turned into client states and thus had to provide recruits for its army. Prussia was ordered to join him, and Poland provided an enthusiastic contingent as well, fresh from fighting in Spain. Even with the Spanish war unresolved, Napoleon massed some four hundred thousand men of the French imperial army and more allies on Russia’s western border in June 1812. Russia could muster about the same on paper, but about only half that many in reality. France was also a prosperous country with flourishing military industries, again enhanced by its empire. Russia, as everyone knew, was an industrially backward land dominated by primitive agriculture. Napoleon and most observers were confident of French victory, even those unsympathetic to Napoleonic aggrandizement, like the first American ambassador to Russia, John Quincy Adams.
In reality the odds were not so stacked against Russia. The establishment of the Ministry of War and a General Staff meant that Russia’s army had modern organization, logistics, and planning. The chief of those plans was precisely the Scythian strategy alluded to by Tsar Alexander. The minister of war Michael Barclay de Tolly and the principal generals were all aware that this plan was Russia’s only chance. The most important thing was to avoid a decisive battle near the border, where the French would have predominant force. After some hesitation, Alexander stuck to the plan of retreat and also removed himself from day-to-day command of the army. As the French moved into the interior, they had to leave more and more troops behind to guard their communications back to France. They also learned that Russia, with its low population density and poor roads, did not provide enough food along the route of the march to allow the invaders to live off the land. They were confined to a narrow corridor quickly stripped of all resources. None of this would matter if they could destroy the Russian army, but the Russians moved east ahead of them. As the Russians withdrew, Alexander began to feel the political complications of the retreat, which offended the patriotism of the people and particularly the gentry. He decided to sacrifice Barclay and appointed Kutuzov as supreme commander. Kutuzov, the man whose advice at Austerlitz Alexander had rejected to his cost, was a sixty-seven-year-old veteran of Catherine the Great’s Turkish wars as well as of more recent successes against the Ottomans in Bessarabia. Kutuzov stayed with the original plan of retreat, reluctantly giving battle at Borodino on September 7 (August 26 on the Julian calendar) 1812, only a hundred miles or so west of Moscow.