Shall we deceive Napoleon? Facts are facts. He knows that inwardly we detest him, because we fear him; he had occasion to observe our more than questionable enthusiasm in the last Austrian war. This ambivalence of ours was not a new mistake, but an inescapable consequence of the position in which we had been put by the Tilsit peace. Is it easy to keep a promise to assist one’s natural enemy and to increase his power?40
If anything, the analysis of Alexander’s domestic policy was even more critical. Alexander had kept Catherine informed of his discussions with Speransky and some of this she had passed on to Karamzin. The core of his Memoir was a defence of autocracy as the only form of government which could stop the Russian Empire from disintegrating and guarantee ordered progress. For Karamzin, however, autocracy did not mean despotism. The autocrat must rule in harmony with the aristocracy and gentry, as Catherine II had done. State and society must not become divorced, with the former simply dictating to the latter. Karamzin conceded that Paul had indeed acted despotically but after his removal Alexander should have returned to the principles on which Catherine’s rule was founded. Instead he had allowed the introduction of foreign bureaucratic models which, if developed, would turn Russia into a version of Napoleonic bureaucratic despotism. Aristocrats rooted in the Russian social hierarchy were being displaced in government by mediocre bureaucrats with no stake in society. Moreover, if the peasants were emancipated anarchy would ensue, because the bureaucracy was far too weak to administer the countryside.41
Karamzin’s arguments made a lot of sense. Catherine II had ruled in harmony with the ‘political nation’, in other words the elites. In subsequent decades a bureaucratic monarchy was created without strong roots in society, even among the traditional elites. That was a major factor over the much longer term in the isolation and ultimate fall of the imperial regime. On the other hand, to the extent that Karamzin’s criticisms were directed against Speransky, they were mostly unfair. Russia was woefully under-governed. A much larger and more professional bureaucracy had to be developed if Russia was to flourish. Society could not control the growing bureaucratic machine by old-fashioned methods such as aristocrats hopping from positions at court into top posts in government. Only the rule of law and representative institutions could hope to achieve this goal, and Speransky – perhaps unknown to Karamzin – was planning to introduce them.
Even if he had known all Speransky’s plans, however, Karamzin would probably still have opposed them. Given the cultural level of the provincial gentry he might well have considered the introduction of representative assemblies premature. Certainly he would have argued that the eve of a great war with Napoleon was a mad moment at which to throw Russia into chaos by fundamental constitutional reform. Unlike most of Speransky’s opponents, Karamzin was in no way motivated by personal enmity or ambition. Nevertheless he would probably have pointed out to Alexander that most Russian nobles considered Speransky to be a Jacobin, a worshipper of Napoleon and a traitor, and that this was a very dangerous state of affairs on the eve of a war in which national unity was crucial and the war effort would depend enormously on the voluntary commitment of the Russian aristocracy and gentry.
In fact the emperor was far too good a politician not to understand this himself. In March 1812 Speransky was dismissed and sent into exile. In these weeks that preceded the outbreak of war Alexander was overworked and under great pressure. He also hated confrontations like the long private meeting with Speransky which preceded the latter’s removal. The emperor was also outraged by reports of snide comments by Speransky about his indecisiveness, faithfully passed on by the Petersburg grapevine. The result was a hysterical imperial outburst, culminating in a threat to have Speransky shot. Since Alexander sometimes enjoyed histrionics and on this occasion his audience was a rather dimwitted and deeply impressed German professor, we can take all this hysteria as the performance of a brilliant actor letting off steam. Alexander’s actions after Speransky’s fall betray a politician’s cool rationality. Speransky was to some extent replaced by Aleksandr Shishkov, appointed imperial secretary in the following month and largely employed to draft resounding patriotic appeals to the Russian people during the subsequent years of war. In May Fedor Rostopchin was named military governor of Moscow, with the job of administering and maintaining morale in the city which would be not just the army’s major base in the rear but also crucial to sustaining public enthusiasm for the war throughout the empire’s interior.
As regards diplomatic preparation for war, Alexander put little effort into mending fences with Britain. This partly reflected his wish to postpone the outbreak of war for as long as possible and deny Napoleon any legitimate justification for invading Russia. He also knew that the moment war began Britain would automatically become his enthusiastic ally so preparation was not necessary. In any case there was not much direct help that Britain could offer for a war fought on Russian soil, though the 101,000 muskets it provided in the winter of 1812–13 were to be very useful. In terms of indirect help, however, the British in Spain were doing far more than they had ever managed before 1808. The performance of Wellington and his troops had not just transformed perceptions of the British army and its commanders. In 1810 it had also shown how strategic retreat, scorched earth and field fortifications could exhaust and ultimately destroy a numerically superior French army. In 1812 Wellington’s great victory at Salamanca not only boosted the morale of all Napoleon’s enemies but also ensured that scores of thousands of French troops would remain tied down in the Iberian peninsula.
The key issue before 1812, however, was which way Austria and Prussia would go, but here Russian diplomacy faced a very uphill struggle. It is true that Rumiantsev, and probably Alexander, did not help matters by their stubborn determination to hang on to Moldavia and Wallachia. There were influential figures in Vienna who saw Russia as a greater threat than France because Napoleon’s empire might well prove ephemeral whereas Russia was there to stay. Probably, however, Austria would have swung into Napoleon’s camp whatever Russia did.
Francis II was embarrassed to have to own up to the existence of the Franco-Austrian military convention aimed against Russia, and all the more so because the terms of this convention had been discovered by Russian espionage in Paris. But he told the Russian minister, Count Stackelberg, that he had been forced into this convention by the ‘strict necessity’ to preserve the Austrian Empire; the same necessity, added Francis, which had led him to sacrifice his daughter to Napoleon. The basic point was that Austria had made a similar decision in 1810 to the one that Russia had made at Tilsit. Confronting Napoleon was too dangerous. Another defeat would spell the end of the Habsburgs and their empire. By sidling up to Napoleon Austria preserved its existence for better times. If the French Empire survived, so would Austria as its leading satellite. If on the contrary Napoleon’s empire disintegrated then Austria, having regained its strength, would be well placed to pick up many of the pieces. The main difference between Russia in 1809 and Austria in 1812 was that the Habsburgs were in a much weaker and more vulnerable position. For that reason the Habsburg war effort in support of Napoleon in 1812 was far more serious than the Russian campaign against Austria had been in 1809. Nevertheless the two empires did quietly maintain diplomatic relations throughout 1812 and the Austrians stuck to their promise made on the eve of the war never to increase their auxiliary corps above 30,000 men and to move their troops into Russia through the Duchy of Warsaw, keeping the Russo-Austrian border in Galicia neutralized.42