'Russia Against Napoleon': A new book for fans of military history

'Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace'

by Dominic Lieven

Viking, 618 pp., $34.95

Fans of military history will love "Russia Against Napoleon," filled with battlefield dramatics, vivid personalities, Great Power politics, and international espionage. Yet Dominic Lieven's new book is more than a lively retelling of the story of Napoleon's ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812. Rather, it is an ambitious work of historical revisionism that strips away many of the myths that have long distorted this decisive period of European history.

No book has done more to shape popular understanding of the conflict between France and Russia than Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace." In his classic novel, Tolstoy depicted Russia's victory as the result of chance and luck and the unbreakable patriotism of the Russian people. The French added to this "Tolstoyan myth," as Lieven calls it, by asserting Napoleon and his Grande armée were not defeated by the Russian Czar Alexander I or by his army, but by geography and the harsh Russian winter.

Lieven, a distinguished British historian of Russia, will have none of it. Whereas most histories have depicted the Napoleonic Wars from the perspective of the West, Lieven has immersed himself in the Russian sources, including the military archives in Moscow newly opened to scholars, to uncover the real reasons behind the Russian victory. And what he has found is that perhaps the greatest hero of the war was, of all things, the Russian horse. "The horse fulfilled the present-day functions of the tank, the lorry, the aeroplane and motorized artillery," he writes. "It was in other words the weapon of shock, pursuit, reconnaissance, transport, and mobile firepower."

The Russian light cavalry played a crucial role in running Napoleon out of Russia, denying his army food or rest as they retreated, and then thwarting the French in the campaigns of 1813 and 1814. To understand why Russia's cavalry was so superior, Lieven explores Russia's horse industry and how the government mobilized the country's vast resources for war. The book's chapters on logistics — how peasants became soldiers and how armies as large as half a million men far from their homes were fed, clothed, and kept in arms and ammunition — make for fascinating reading and bring a much richer understanding both to the practice of war and to why Russia won.

Victory over Napoleon was no accident, but the result of years of careful preparation and planning for war. Alexander knew Napoleon would not be defeated in a single season, and he was prepared to be patient to achieve his aims. After the horse, it is the czar who Lieven singles out for praise. Alexander, Lieven observes, out-thought Napoleon, and for two bloody years from the invasion of Russia in 1812 until the fall of Paris in 1814, the Russian ruler held together a shaky coalition of allies that ultimately ended Napoleon's dream of European domination. "Russia Against Napoleon" achieves that rare thing of taking a story we thought we knew and recounting it in a new and more convincing light.

Seattle resident Douglas Smith is the author of "The Pearl: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia" (Yale University Press).