The epic battle so memorably described by Tolstoy was also the bloodiest single day of combat in nineteenth-century Europe. By now Napoleon could only field some 120–135,000 troops out of the hordes he had brought with him and Kutuzov was able to put up the same. The Russians entrenched themselves behind field fortifications and let the French attack, with such resultant slaughter that some 40–50,000 men fell as casualties on each side – about 100,000 killed and wounded in one day. The French managed to capture some of the Russian fortifications and then returned to their camp. Kutuzov, whose main goal was to keep his army able to fight, decided to withdraw entirely and marched his men east toward Moscow. Napoleon, as usual, portrayed the battle as a great French victory, though in fact it ended his chances of success. He had too few troops left to control Russia if the Russians continued to resist.
Kutuzov had no intention of surrender, and neither did the population. The Muscovites began to leave the city in the tens of thousands. Napoleon waited in vain on the Sparrow Hills (where Moscow University stands today) for a Russian delegation to offer him the surrender of the city. He entered a ghost town, with no resistance but also no people to greet him or supply his army. Kutuzov in the meanwhile had marched his army through the city and turned southeast along the main road. Then, contrary to everyone’s expectations, he crossed the Moscow River and moved west. He made his camp southwest of Moscow, sitting on Napoleon’s lines of communication and blocking the way to the rich agricultural provinces to the south and the Russian center of arms manufacturing at Tula. The conqueror of Europe was trapped like a rat.
From that point on Napoleon had lost the initiative and could only stave off the inevitable. Fires started and Moscow burned to the ground while the French troops looted the empty palaces of the nobility. Henri Beyle, to be later known to world literature as Stendhal, stole books from the library of the Golitsyn mansion. The French emperor waited several weeks, hoping Alexander would surrender and trying to collect food from the countryside around Moscow. There was no surrender. Cossacks patrolled the countryside and the peasants massacred French soldiers sent to forage. Finally he did the only thing left to him, retreat. He tried to go farther south, realizing that the direct road to the west had been stripped of all provisions and nothing could come from France. Kutuzov stood in his way, blocking the road south, and Napoleon was canny enough to realize that he could not risk a major battle. Instead he turned directly west, with winter coming on, hoping to get away fast enough before his troops starved to death. He failed. The Russian army and bands of enraged local peasants followed the French all the way, picking off stragglers and further complicating the already catastrophic supply system. The winter came early and hard, and eventually the emperor of the French abandoned his army to its fate and escaped to Paris to try to start over. Only a few thousand men of his great army managed to get to the Polish border.
The defeat of Napoleon in Russia transformed European politics in a few months. His unwilling allies began to desert, Prussia first of all and then Austria, joining Russia and Britain against France. The Russian army moved west into Poland and Prussia, providing the largest allied contingent at the giant battle of Leipzig (October 1813) and the subsequent campaign in France. By 1814 Napoleon’s empire had come to an end. The hopeless attempt at its restoration the next year only ended in disaster at Waterloo.
Alexander, along with Britain, insisted that the restored French state have a constitution with some sort of legislature, rather than a return to absolute monarchy, and the two allies prevailed. Relations with Britain were not so smooth in other areas, as the Congress of Vienna showed. There were long battles about post-war boundaries for Prussia and Poland, primarily the result of British and Austrian fears that Russia was now too powerful. In the end, Russia’s ally Prussia retained large parts of Poland and received important new territories in the Rhineland. Alexander’s attitude to Poland was complicated: he wanted some sort of Polish political unit with the name Poland (no “Duchy of Warsaw”), but he wanted it under Russian influence. The result was the Kingdom of Poland, with the Russian tsar as its king – it was now part of the Russian Empire but with a constitution and its own government, similar to Finland.
The Polish settlement suggested that Alexander would continue along his previous liberal path. He soon emancipated the Estonian and Latvian serfs in the Baltic provinces, albeit without land. In 1818 he even toyed with granting Russia a constitution, considering a text written by his old friend Novosil’tsev. At the same time his private views were becoming increasingly conservative. The explanation for his new found conservatism lay not only in disillusionment with liberalism or the rightward drift of European politics but also in his religious views. Alexander fell more and more under the influence of Baroness Julie von Krüdener, a Baltic German aristocrat who had evolved a mystical pietism all her own. Krüdener had believed Napoleon to be the Antichrist and Alexander the savior of the world, and she told him so. Alexander spent more and more time reading mystical tracts and talking to Krüdener and other seers. His mystical interests had a decidedly Protestant strain to them, and the tsar even sponsored the translation and circulation of the Bible, relying largely on the English Bible Society to set up a network in Russia. He merged the ministries of education, the Orthodox synod, and the administration of non-Orthodox denominations into a single ministry under Prince Alexander Golitsyn, thus concentrating wide power over religion and culture in the hands of an imperial favorite. Golitsyn required Russian universities to teach explicitly conservative doctrines, to expunge ideas of natural law from the curriculum, and to substitute the notion that law was the expression of divine will. Similarly the scientists were to teach only ideas in accord with the Bible and revelation. The professors could do little to oppose Golitsyn, but fortunately his policies also antagonized the Orthodox Church. To the church the religion that was to be taught was a mixture of Protestant evangelicalism and mysticism, not correct Orthodoxy. It was the church and secular conservatives who eventually managed to discredit Golitsyn by 1824, but not before his and Alexander’s notions put an indelible stamp on the Russian culture of those years.
Even more powerful than Golitsyn was General A. A. Arakcheev, originally a favorite of Alexander’s father Tsar Paul. Alexander had recalled him from exile in 1803 to head Russia’s artillery, and in 1809–10 he was Minister of War. Politically very conservative, Arakcheev was an extremely competent military administrator, but with a narrow education and a powerful streak of arrogance and cruelty. In 1814 Alexander made him the head of his personal chancellery, which meant that all the ministers, generals, and courtiers had to approach the tsar through Arakcheev. He was also largely responsible for hare-brained schemes like the military-agricultural settlements. The idea was to turn some of the villages of state peasants into military units with the aim of reducing costs and encouraging discipline and better agricultural practices among the peasantry. Instead the result was discontent and rebellion among the peasants that resulted in a series of revolts, which Arakcheev suppressed with savage cruelty. There were other measures. In 1817 Alexander turned the Gendarmes, originally a military police force designed to deal only with soldiers, into a militarized police force charged with the preservation of internal order, the first such police force in Russian history. The Special Department of the Ministry of the Interior also began to look for internal dissent.