7 - Russia and the legacy of 1812

Summary

Russia stood at a historical crossroads when it experienced the trauma of the 1812 Napoleonic invasion. Like Germany’s 1813 Befreiungskrieg and Spain’s 1808–14 Guerra de independencia, Russia’s Otechestvennaia voina – War for the Fatherland – became the stuff of ambiguous patriotic legend.

Speaking for many who saw 1812 as a unique opportunity to transcend Russia’s bitter internal divisions, Leo Tolstoy argued in War and Peace that the heroes of the war had been the Russians of all social classes whose deep roots in Russian culture and spirituality made them selflessly patriotic and intolerant of social injustice, but also generous towards their nation’s defeated enemies. Tolstoy’s villains, by contrast, were ‘Westernised’ aristocrats, cynical cowards whose shrill wartime xenophobia reflected the same spiritual rootlessness and disdain for their own people that had also conditioned their pre-war Francophilia. According to this vision, the ‘War for the Fatherland’ had proved the Russian people’s civic maturity and ought to have been followed by Russia’s transformation into a liberal nation-state. Tolstoy’s original idea for the novel had actually centred on the liberal Decembrist uprising of 1825 against the autocracy, a blow for freedom that he and many others regarded as a natural outgrowth of 1812. Of course, that coup had failed, and Russia remained a dynastic, autocratic, serf-based empire; as collective memories, however, the war and the Decembrist revolt raised Russians’ national consciousness and created an impetus to expand the realm of human freedom and dignity that was often suppressed but never snuffed out.