The Burning of Moscow Read online

  Around 8pm, after returning to Moscow, Rostopchin received a brief letter from Kutuzov, finally admitting what the governor had long suspected. ‘[Difficult circumstances] compel me, in great grief, to abandon Moscow,’ Kutuzov stated, requesting Rostopchin to dispatch ‘as many police officers as possible who could guide the army by different byroads [through Moscow] to the Ryazan road’.120 Even though Rostopchin should have realized by then that Moscow was doomed, he was incensed (or at least pretended to be) by Kutuzov’s letter. ‘Was not [Kutuzov] swearing just yesterday that Moscow would not be surrendered without a fight?,’ he angrily asked the courier, who calmly responded, ‘The war is filled with unexpected and unpleasant necessities to which we all must yield.’121 Furthermore, coming in the form of a short note just hours before the army moved through the city, the letter was rather humiliating for the governor, who had visited, on his way back, Archbishop Augustine to convey Kutuzov’s request that he come out the next day with Moscow’s miracle-working icons to bless the army before the battle.122 ‘My blood boils in my veins,’ he wrote to his wife that night. ‘I think I shall die of grief.’123

  Late that night Eugène of Württemberg and August of Oldenburg visited Rostopchin, urging him to come with them in a last-ditch attempt to compel Kutuzov to reverse his decision and fight at the gates of Moscow. Rostopchin declined, knowing that the die was already cast.124 Rostopchin never forgave Kutuzov for keeping him in ignorance for so long and his immediate response was to dash off a letter to Emperor Alexander: ‘Your Majesty! [Kutuzov’s] resolution decides the fate of Your Empire which will foam with rage when it learns that the city which contains the grandeur of Russia and in which rest the ashes of your ancestors is to be handed over to the enemy.’125 Writing to his wife, the governor frankly stated that ‘Kutuzov deceived me when he promised he would fight.’126 A month later he was still seething with frustration and anger, writing ‘Prince Kutuzov not only lied to me but also deceived the entire Fatherland and the emperor himself, abandoning the capital to the villains.’127

  The Day of Mourning: 14 September

  In his letter to Alexander, Rostopchin mentioned in passing that he had ‘put away in safety everything that was in the city, and all that is left for me to do is to weep over my country’s lot’. The governor was clearly being disingenuous. Although by 14 September he had evacuated more than thirty-five state institutions,128 including the Moscow Treasury129 and some 300 transports laden with church treasures, numerous resources still remained in the city. Three miracle-working icons – the Vladimirskaya and Iverskaya Madonnas, as well as the Black Madonna of Smolensk – were still in the city and had to be evacuated at once. Many government institutions had not even started packing their holdings. The Votchina Department, which managed land ownership, maintained a massive archive of ‘documents bound into enormous ledger books that totalled 42,160’ and would have required up to a thousand horses to be evacuated.130 Similar challenges faced officials of the Mining Department, who had to leave their vast archives with ‘ledger books, journals and protocols’ under the protection of just three soldiers.131 Aside from archives, provisions and supplies, there were enormous amounts of weapons and ammunition, estimated to have required some 8,000 transports to be fully evacuated. Napoleon later acknowledged finding 150 cannon, 60,000 new muskets, 1.6 million cartridges, 400 tonnes of gunpowder and 300 tonnes of saltpetre;132 at the Moscow Arsenal alone the Russians left 66,418 weapons and, even though most were in disrepair, there were still 27,595 functioning arms.133 Even more weapons were available at depots at the Nikolskie Gate, Sukharev’s Tower, Krasnenskii (Red) Pond, Simonov’s Monastery and in the Prechistenskaya and Basmanskaya districts, where thousands of small arms, cold steel weapons and thousands of pounds of gunpowder and lead still remained, forcing Rostopchin to order it all to be dumped into the Moscow river and nearby ponds.

  The night and morning of 14 September proved to be rather hectic for Rostopchin, who was besieged by a horde of last-minute supplicants as he feverishly supervised the evacuation process and organized the army’s passage through the city.134 He wrote two letters to Emperor Alexander, and arranged for all the municipal officials and garrison units to depart on the Ryazan road, while the firefighting brigade was sent to Vladimir. The remaining municipal officials and policemen were instructed to destroy those barges laden with state and private property that could no longer be evacuated. The governor then ordered the commandant of the Moscow garrison to evacuate his troops and relevant equipment from the city, and made arrangements for the evacuation of holy relics, as well as the secret workshop where Leppich had been building his ‘flying machine’. He went through his copious stacks of correspondence, official papers and other documents, selecting important ones and discarding others. All the while, he was holding meetings with various officials and petitioners. Sometime after 8am, as Rostopchin was getting ready to leave the town – his coach and horses awaited him outside – a large crowd, returning from the Three Hills, gathered near his residence. ‘The furious populace rushed towards the governor’s palace, shouting that they had been deceived,’ an eyewitness tells us. The mob scorned the governor for his abandonment of Moscow and demanded that he lead them to the Three Hills, where they wanted to fight the enemy and save the city. It was then that Rostopchin, seeking to deflect the disparagement aimed at him and place the responsibility for all that happened on someone else’s shoulders, committed the heinous crime of sacrificing an innocent life. He ordered two prisoners to be brought before him: Mikhail Vereshchagin, the son of a well-to-do merchant, and a certain Mouton, ‘a French deserter from the previous war’,135 who had been arrested for disseminating dangerous ideas. They stood accused of the particularly ‘grave’ crime of circulating translations of two apocryphal proclamations by Napoleon that had appeared in the foreign press. With an angry mob seething in front of him, Rostopchin delivered Vereshchagin – ‘this traitor and state criminal’ as he later described him – to the people, declaring that here was ‘the only man in the whole population of Moscow to want to betray his Fatherland’. He ordered his military escorts to sabre him in front of the crowd; perhaps reluctant to kill in cold blood, they struck the poor young man a few feeble blows. This, however, did not assuage the crowd, which rushed on him and tore him to pieces. The body was fastened to the tail of a horse and dragged through the streets, while Rostopchin escaped by the back door and fled the city.136

  By now Moscow was all bustle and commotion. ‘Some were preparing to fight, others sought to escape,’ observed Professor I. Snegirev.137 But getting out of the city was a challenge in itself.138 Even those who wanted to escape in many cases could not do so because of financial or logistical problems. Grigorii Kolchugin, a rather successful merchant, noted that evacuating his goods would have required him to spend up to 20,000 rubles, which he simply could not afford.139 Others could not leave because of sick or old relatives (usually parents) or official responsibilities. Thus the conscientious Bestuzhev-Riumin, who worked at the Votchina Department and had a seven-week-old baby at home, chose to stay in the city to protect his department’s vast archive of documents related to land ownership in and around Moscow. Even those who could leave the city found their departure complicated by the presence of the Russian army, still moving slowly through the city. ‘Junctions, narrow streets, large wagon trains (which had been moved closer in anticipation of a battle) trailing the army, reserve artillery and parks, and the fleeing residents of Moscow – all these factors so complicated our movement that the army was unable to leave the city before noon.’140 Thousands of men wounded at Borodino were brought in by the Dorogomilovskaya barrier and taken to various parts of Moscow, and thousands of carts conveyed the inhabitants and their possessions out of the city; prices for transports and horses rocketed and the streets were jammed with numerous wagons, carriages and other transports. ‘The scenes on the outskirts of Moscow could have inspired an artist to paint the Exodus from Egypt,’ wrote Maria Volkova
in a letter. ‘Every day thousands of coaches depart through all the gates, some travelling to Ryazan, others to Nizhni Novgorod and Yaroslavl.’141

  ‘How different this great and imposing capital city already was from what it had been earlier!’ lamented Prince Nikolai Golitsyn, upon returning to Moscow on 12 September. The people in the streets looked more like ‘souls in torment who appeared to have a presentiment of some great catastrophe’. One had only to appear in military uniform to be accosted on all sides, questioned about events, the battle of Borodino or the likelihood of a battle at the gates of Moscow.142 Desperate state officials begged their superiors to let them leave the city and save their families. Bestuzhev-Riumin recalled that one of his colleagues at the Votchina Department ‘appeared to be approaching an untimely death’ as he begged for a furlough to leave Moscow. ‘He was deadly pale and spoke with such a weak and trembling voice that it was impossible to understand what he was saying.’143 ‘At every step we encountered poignant scenes,’ reminisced another Russian officer. ‘Women, elders and children crying and wailing, and not knowing where to go. Pale and frantic people ran by houses, bustling about without understanding what they should do. Everything they knew was about to be destroyed and it seemed the Antichrist himself was approaching and the Doomsday was about to start …’144 In some churches priests called their parishioners to mass: ‘My Christian brethren, pray fervently and recant for Judgement Day has come.’145

  By the evening of 13 September ‘the popular tumult in the city reached such intensity that I cannot even describe it,’ commented one contemporary.146 The last two days before the city’s abandonment were ‘genuinely horrifying’, recalled Fedor Lubyanovskii, who even years after the event could not speak of them without ‘horror and trepidation’.147 Similarly, Snegirev found it ‘difficult to find words to describe the confusion and apprehension that reigned in Moscow … Everyone was in commotion, fussing about, burying property in the ground or hiding their precious belongings in water wells; others were preparing to leave Moscow but still did not know to where it would be safe to flee, or were preoccupied with the search for horses and coachmen. A few intended to stay in town and were arming themselves with weapons from the arsenal or simply prayed, hoping for the Lord’s intercession.’148

  Nikolai Muravyev found the city in a woeful state, with weeping and clamour everywhere. ‘Almost all the nobility had left. Carriages appearing on the streets were now stoned by the populace.’149 In fact, there are many eyewitness accounts testifying to the hostility that the lower classes demonstrated towards the affluent and noble. Many blamed Rostopchin’s jingoistic broadsheets for contributing to this popular anger. By repeatedly claiming that Moscow would be defended and the enemy would be soon vanquished, these broadsheets instilled confidence in the lower classes, and they were naturally infuriated by what they perceived as the cowardly exodus of the nobility and merchants on the eve of so decisive a moment in Moscow’s history. Once the chaotic rush to evacuate began, the wealthy, who had horses, carriages and other means to move their households out of the city, were resented by poorer people, whose only options were to leave on foot with whatever they could or stay behind. Thus, while the rich escaped, ‘the poor were forced to stay and breathe the same air with the [French] fiends’.150 Sergei Glinka noted that the long line of ‘coaches, carriages, carts, wagons and other transports’ leaving the city ‘extremely annoyed and angered the common people’.151 The people naturally believed that ‘the nobles were saving their own skins while surrendering the people and the metropolis itself to Napoleon’.152 Thus, while taking his mother out of Moscow, Dmitri Mertvago was startled to see the common people ‘impudently grumbling against the nobles who were departing from the city’.153 Decades after the war Dmitri Sverbeyev still remembered the ‘fear and anger’ that he experienced as his family’s carriage was harassed by the rabble. These commoners ‘looked at us askance while a young lad glanced sternly at our carriages and bluntly called us cowardly runaways. Others quickly joined him and we had to travel for a long distance amidst threats and shouts that branded us as traitors and truants … My father just sat in the carriage, without uttering a word and with his head lowered.’154 One Muscovite townsman wrote that the fleeing noblemen were cowards and, to reinforce his point, he claimed that some of them escaped by dressing up as women or bandaged their sideburns to simulate illness.155 Bestuzhev-Riumin observed that

  the greatest danger to [the affluent Muscovites] came from peasants residing in villages near Moscow. These peasants called them cowards, traitors and audaciously shouted in their wake, ‘Boyars, why are you running away with your servants? Has hardship come upon you by chance as well? Or the threatened Moscow is no longer to your liking?’ Those who were forced out of necessity to stop at these villages had to pay thrice the price for oats and hay; instead of the usual rate of five kopecks per person, they now had to pay one ruble or more, and had to do it unquestioningly if they did not want to become victims of the rage that these infuriated people felt at the sight of the fleeing [rich Muscovites]. Many of those who had fled in carriages from Moscow [soon] returned back on foot, having lost horses, carriages and property … and told, with tears in their eyes, stories of their woeful experiences.156

  A similar story is recounted by one Lebedev, grandson of a Moscow priest, who in his memoirs cited family stories of peasants coming at his [grandfather’s family] with bear-spears and threatening to slaughter them all for having ‘frittered Moscow away’. The family had to buy its way to safety with money.157

  By noon more than two-thirds of the inhabitants of Moscow had already gone or were in the process of leaving. The precise number of people who had stayed in the city remains unknown. Participants on both sides agree that Moscow was virtually empty, and its formerly bustling streets were eerily deserted in the afternoon of 14 September. Rostopchin claimed that as few as 10,000 people – clergymen, foreigners, civil servants, servants and the poor – remained in the city by the end of that day, and at least one Russian historian argues that as few as 6,300 people had ultimately stayed behind. However, some contemporaries believed that about 20–25,000 people (and a few, less creditably, as many as 50,000) had remained in Moscow.158

  The exodus of so many people in such a short period meant that the streets closest to the city barriers were jammed with ‘carriages, droshkis, carts, horse-drawn vehicles of all kinds, and people on foot carrying their loads’.159 Just in front of one of the city barriers a Russian officer saw ‘a wide street jammed with several rows of carts. Carriages and wagons moved with artillery along both sides of the street. One could observe a bizarre mixture of people of all ranks and transports of all types. Wagons were filled with trunks, bundles and feather pillows on which servants sat while footmen walked behind them, leading horses and hounds.’160 Ysarn was surprised to see ‘poor women of the people crushed with the weight of burdens far beyond their strengths, carrying off even the smallest pieces of furniture in their homes, and followed by their crying children who wailed in despair’.161 It was probably among one of these crowds that Lieutenant M. Evreinov of the Demidovskii Regiment saw the city’s entire firefighting squad of some 2,100 men leaving with their equipment.162

  At about the same time Philipp Vigel’s brother also decided to leave the city, and ‘his heart filled with horror’ at the sights of abandoned houses and empty streets. Yet as he approached the Pokrovskaya barrier the scene changed dramatically:

  [He could] barely move because of the dense crowds of fleeing residents. The utter disorder, in which these remaining residents of Moscow now rushed from the city, presented a most singularly horrifying and yet somewhat caricatural sight. One could see a priest who had put on all of his vestments, one atop another, and holding a bundle with church ornaments, vessels and other items. A heavy four-seat carriage was slowly dragged by two horses, while nearby smaller two-seat carriages had five and six horses harnessed. One could see a wagon with a commoner or merchant’s wife, dr
essed in brocade dress and wearing pearls and numerous items of jewellery that she did not have time to pack. Men on horses and on foot thronged all around, herding cows and sheep. A remarkable multitude of dogs followed this great exodus and their miserable howling mixed with mooing, bleating, neighing and other animal sounds.163

  By late afternoon, recalled Glinka, ‘the passage of the soldiers, the crowded masses of the populace, and the serried carriages and carts had caused the dust to rise in pillars and hide the dying rays of the setting sun over Moscow’.164

  Despite efforts to maintain strict discipline, the army’s passage through the city was accompanied by numerous incidents of unruliness and plundering. As early as 12 September the Cossacks, anticipating the fall of the city, busied themselves with ransacking stockyards where they ‘took away incalculable amounts of oats and hay’.165 On 14 September, as the army passed through the city, many ‘officers began to gather in groups to discuss what would happen next since none of us knew what to expect. Meanwhile, the rank-and-file, under the pretext of fetching some water, often slipped into nearby shops, houses and cellars that were left open as if to treat the passersby – and while there they bid good-bye [in their own manner] to Mother Moscow …’166 The clergymen of the Novodevichii Monastery soon saw the results of such leave-taking as they encountered a ‘drunken Cossack with bags full of alcohol hanging on both sides of his saddle’.167 Indeed, despite Rostopchin’s orders prohibiting the sale of wine,168 the much-reduced police force was unable to ‘prevent the invasion of the wounded rank-and-file’169 into wine cellars and taverns; all were ransacked. Andrei Karfachevskii saw ‘wounded soldiers who had been in the fighting at Borodino walking about, smashing up taverns and shops in the market’,170 while General Bennigsen described ‘the doors of the cellars, especially those of taverns, had been left open or were broken into by soldiers, servants, carters, hauliers and by the lowest classes of the population’.171 To prevent the rabble and soldiers from getting drunk, the police were ordered to start smashing barrels of wine and beer but for a variety of reasons such instructions were not carried out everywhere. In some districts ‘no orders prohibiting the sale of alcohol had been received and the police therefore took no action’, reported one of the constables two years later.172