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LSE: Public lectures and events
The Tsar Liberates Europe? Russia against Napoleon, 1807-1814
01:16:46
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- [00:00]
A
Good evening, everyone. My name is Arno Westard. I'm one of the two directors of LSE Ideas, the LSE's new center for international affairs, diplomacy and strategy, together with Professor Michael Cox. And it's a great pleasure and a great honor for me today to introduce our new Senior Fellow in Ideas, Professor Dominic Levin. There are two occasions really, for us meeting up here tonight. The first one by far, of course, the most important one is the launch of Professor Levin's book, Russia Against Napoleon. But I also would like to underline his affiliation with ideas. It is wonderful to have him on board there. It strengthens the Russia side of what we do tremendously. And it will be, I think, something that we will develop a very strong, very exciting program on over time. Professor Levin is, of course, one of LSE's leading international historians. His teaching is renowned. His range of knowledge on Russian international history, spanning several centuries, is deeply impressive. He's also a very brave man. Not only has he named his dog after Alexander I's Minister of War, but. But he, Professor Levenat, is not. The dog has just taken over as head of LSE's international history department. And that calls for a great deal of courage, indeed. I know the book that we will be discussing today builds on the earlier work that Professor Levin has done on Russian and international history. The span of this, if you really want to get into the range of the issues that this touches upon, I think turning to the volume of the Cambridge History of Russia, which he edited, volume two on Imperial Russia came out three years ago. Now, 2006 is a very good starting point. You also get a sense of the span of his interest in a comparative sense, by looking at his book from 2000 Empire, the Russian Empire and Its Rivals, which tries to take stock of the whole development span of the Russian Empire, what it aimed to do, what its raison d' etre was, and compare that with its rivals in a European imperial context, it's a great book, strongly recommended. He also has a number of other earlier books. From his first book in 1983 on Russia and origins of the First World War. He's written on Nicholas II. He's written on aristocracy in Europe during the 19th century, and he has written a. I guess we could call it a prosopography of Russia's rulers under the old regime, a kind of collective biography of people who came to province during the. During the 19th century especially. But the book that we're celebrating the launch of today, I think, will remain as one of his key works, Russia Against Napoleon. And it's a book that's entitled in its English version, Russia against the battle for Europe, 1807-1814. In its American version, I just discovered it's entitled Russia against the True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace. And of course, the Americans have to. You know, there has to be a little bit more excitement, Tolstoyan excitement, I guess, withdrawing people into this on the American side. So those who read Tolstoy already or pretend to have read War and Peace, they will then turn to Professor Leven's book to get the real story, what it's really about. This is great narrative history with very significant interpretative advances built into it, exactly the kind of international history that I like, and I'd like just before handing over to Professor Leven just to read you the conclusion to the book, the very last part of the book, in terms of getting a sense of the wider implications of this topic, where Professor Levin writes, the basic point, presumably the basic point about the book was that Alexander was convinced that Russian and European security depended on each other. That is still true today. But perhaps there is some inspiration to be drawn from a story in which the Russian army advancing across Europe in 1813, 14, was in most places seen as an army of liberation whose victories meant escape from Napoleon's exactions, an end to an era of constant war and the restoration of European trade and prosperity. And looking at Russian foreign relations in the big historical sweep in that perspective is something I think that all of us can benefit from. It's a great pleasure to introduce you here today, Chuck. Looking forward to your lecture.
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B
Thank you very much. Well, thank you all for coming. I hope you'll forgive me for sitting down. There's always a risk if I stand up, that my deep ear problem will kick in and I'll fall on my nose, which would be a very sad end to the lecture. All right. I have very many thank yous to say this evening, but I will say them later to my editor, Simon, to my agent Natasha, to many, many people. Perhaps the only person I might mention right now is my wife. It is loyalty beyond the call of duty that brings someone back all the way from Tokyo for a lecture. And that really is quite some effort, and I'm very grateful. The other people who I definitely must mention, though, of course, are ideas, to which, as Arna said, I have just become affiliated, indeed, incorporated, you could say. I do actually think that ideas is one of the most exciting developments in.
- [06:10]
A
The school in the last few years.
- [06:12]
B
And I'm enormously happy to be part of it. And I'm very grateful to them for putting on this lecture. So my thanks to Anna here and to Mick Cox, to Sveta, to Emilia and to Wes, and to all the other saints of ideas whom I've forgotten. Thank you.
- [06:29]
A
All right.
- [06:31]
B
This book, this lecture is really about the most traditional type of history in many ways. It is about, at its core, grand strategy, diplomacy, military operations, the sinews of state power. Beyond that, it is about these very traditional elements of the historians art, high politics in the old term, under a European old regime. And if there is a single individual who is a hero of the book, it is the Emperor Alexander the first. So this is quite literally a story of kings and battles at one level, as one terribly well meaning American put it, 1812 and all that with the obvious connotations of 1066. It is of course also precisely 1812, one of the most famous and often told stories European history. So you might ask, what is there new to say about this most traditional area of the historian's art in one of the most told stories of European history? And I think the answer, and the rather surprising answer is that there is a vast amount to say, because most of what is understood both in Russia and in the west, is almost a caricature of what happened. And it is very interesting to ask why that should be the case. There are many reasons, but I think the most basic is the domination of the historiography of this era by various nationalist historical traditions. It is, in other words, nationalist mythology which has distorted many of the realities of what went on and has very much conditioned the way that we understand the events which I covered. Now that in itself is not particularly strange. War is always, has always been the most fertile source of nationalist mythology. The war hero is the absolute centre of most tales which nations tell themselves about their glory. And of course the Napoleonic wars occurred just as modern European nationalism and the ideas it embodied came over the horizon. And the Napoleonic wars happened just before the great socio cultural changes in Europe which created, if you like, the environment in which modern European nationalism could most easily take root. In other words, increasingly urban and literate society, increasingly, as you might say, open to myths about the nation. So it's not particularly surprising that if you read Western historians about Russia, you should find, or about these years and Russia's part in the Napoleonic wars, you should find the story very considerably distorted by British, French, German nationalist perspectives. And it's not of course, just the Russians who suffer in this way. Waterloo is absolutely part of British patriotic mythology. I was completely like most boys of my era, brought up on the belief that the British had won the Battle of Waterloo virtually unaided. And it was a sort of shock to me at about the age of 15 to discover that a quarter the troops on the Allied side at Waterloo were British, the other three quarters being Germans. Of one description or another. The British stole Waterloo, The Prussians stole 1813 for their proso German nationalist mythology. Etc, Etc, etc. And it's not particularly surprising, therefore, that since there has never been a book on the Russian war effort written by a historian of Russia on the basis of the Russian sources published in a Western language, it is not at all surprising that the Western audience has absorbed various elements of German or French perception of what went on. What is rather more interesting and rather more surprising is that though of course, the Russians mind this era industriously for nationalist myths in just the same way that the French, the Germans, the British and the Spanish did, the mad reality of things is that Russian national myths about this era grossly underestimate their own achievement. Which is, not to put things at its politest, what happens when you read the French or the Germans or the British or the Spanish? So that is a puzzle. There's no question who, in a way, the main villain is. It's Leo Tolstoy. If you read Tolstoy's novel in the first place, of course, it is part of his philosophy of history that no one ever controls anything, and least of all governments. So, you know, you wouldn't expect him to say that the government really knew what was going on at the time or contributed greatly to Russia's victory. Second point is that for Tolstoy, military professionalism is a form of German disease, as becomes very clear in his novel, which takes on an extremely sharp tone every time any staff officer comes over the horizon. And that staff officer is always speaking in a German accent, which is actually fair enough in a way, since more than half the staff officers in the Russian army in 1812 were not even Slavs, and of course, the great majority of that 57% were German in origin. Anyway, from my perspective, I suppose the most obvious distortion of Tolstoy, though, is that his novel ends in December 1812 with the Russian army in Vilna. The Russian army actually got to Paris. It is rather a long way from Vilna to Paris, particularly when you have to walk the whole way. It seems even longer when you have someone called Napoleon with half a million French and Allied troops in the way. So in a way, by ending in December 1812. Tolstoy doesn't just finish with the story half told, but actually the greatest challenges and the greatest achievements were still to come. And when you say the greatest achievements, you can sum them up in a way quite pithily. Half a million Russian troops were deployed beyond the borders of the Russian Empire in 1813. 14. That is, of course, including the reserve army in the Duchy of Warsaw. And this in a Europe in which there are only two cities of over half a million people. How do you actually feed, supply, equip, move half a million Russian troops in the Europe of that day without half of them dropping down dead of starvation? There is another point, which is that the traditional Russian obsession in their historiography with military operations only in 1812 does no favors to the Russian army whatsoever, since in professional military terms the army certainly fought much more professionally, successfully, efficiently, in 1813. 14. Which is, after all, roughly what you would expect armies learn from war. However good peacetime training it can never replicate the realities of war. The army in 1813 has learnt from what it did and did not achieve in 1812. It is a far more formidable instrument, whether you're talking, for instance, about the activities of the Russian staffs, the coordination of the various branches of the service on the battlefield, low level tactics in terms of the use of light infantry and horse artillery, whole range of ways in which, beyond any question, the army in professional terms is much more successful. Which makes it even more bizarre that a Russian patriotic tradition which glories in the army closes its eyes to that army's greatest achievement before 1945, which is its performance in 1813-14. That is a very strange nationalist tradition. As I say, it is in part Tolstoy's in inverted commas. For of course, it is not the business of a novelist to express historical truth in this way. Tolstoy is interested in other things. But it nevertheless is an interesting puzzle both why he wrote that way and why the message which he got across is overwhelmingly the dominant one in Russian professional historiography and in the consciousness of the Russian people. The last attempt, for instance, to write a serious book on the whole period, 1812-14, spends 450 pages on 1812 and 50 on 1813-14, though 1813-14 is a longer and more complicated set of military operations. I think it's probably fair to say that for every thousand books on 1812 or articles written in Russian, there is one on 1813. 14. That is a puzzle. There are a number of reasons which go some way to explaining this puzzle. But I think the most fundamental is relatively simple. In the Russian perception, as In Tolstoy's perception, 1812 is a national war. 1813, 14 is the victory of the dynasty and of the empire. Now there are problems about this.
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A
Many.
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B
Problems, some of which I will not be able to come across today. One of though is extremely simple. You can't understand how Russia fought the 1812 campaign without understanding 1813 14, because the Russian government from the very beginning planned for at least a two and probably longer war which would begin on Russian soil, but would conclude with the Russian army pursuing Napoleon westwards and raising a European insurrection against him. All the Russian planning, whether you're talking about the mobilization of reserves or industry, everything is based on this premise. So if you leave out everything that came after December 1812, in a sense you get an entirely distorted idea of what the government was doing. And you also, by definition don't pay attention to the home front or the mobilization of the home front, because that really only matters in a long war. And for the campaigns of 1813, the Russian reserves inevitably don't come into action until 1813. The other obvious point, I suppose, is that the Tolstoyan interpretation, which became the dominant Russian conception, of course fitted marvelously into Western interpretations of events. Napoleon was deeply grateful to be told that no one had controlled events and that everything was down to the weather and snow and fate. That did rather absolve him from number of rather spectacular miscalculations. German nationalist historiography was very happy to discover that the Russians had played only a small role in 1813. It is actually interesting that Charles Stewart, the British minister to the Prussian court at this time, said that the Prussian relationship to Russia was like the Portuguese relationship to Britain. That was an exaggeration. But there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever in 181340 that the Russians were by far the senior partner in that alliance in terms of both the numbers and quality of troops put in the field. The Prussian artillery largely operated with Russian guns apart from anything else. So, you know, it's a rather strange setup in which Russian nationalist historiography feeds directly into an interpretation of events, which is glorified by French and German interpretations because it feeds into their myths. Very interesting. Of course, the main goal of my book was not to look at myths, it was not to look at the historiography. But unless you do understand those myths and you do understand the roots of historiographical misconception, you find it very difficult indeed to get back to some idea of what was actually happening. Alright, that is the first and smaller section of the this talk, the longer section, is to try to provide some sense of what actually was the true story. As is often the case in history, you can explain what happened on a number of very different levels. At one level, the highest level, what I call God's eye, you stand way above events and you look at the big long term structural factors underlying what happens. You put the struggle in the context of global ideological, economic and commercial trends. You look at the geopolitics of Europe. If you do look at the geopolitics of Europe, then the story is in some ways a familiar one. Fundamentally, in the early 19th century, as in the first half of the 20th, it was difficult but possible to conquer what you might describe as the Carolingian core of Europe. Europe, France, Germany, the Low Countries, northern Italy. The basic problem when you had done that was that you then faced two extremely powerful peripheral centers, Britain across the Channel and Russia beyond the Polish and Belarusian swamp. It was extremely difficult to mobilize power sufficient to defeat both those enemies simultaneously, and you would undoubtedly have to do so, since they would certainly gang up against anybody who did control the Carolingian corps and threatened to be the universal monarch of Europe. Things were not made easier, but you needed to mobilise simultaneously two rather different forms of power. A maritime power to get you across the Channel against the Royal Navy, and a military logistical power to establish yourself and keep yourself in the heartlands of Russian power south and east of Moscow. One interesting point about Russia is to think of it as a peripheral power and to think of it in comparison to Britain, Europe's other great peripheral power. There are actually a lot of parallels with between Russian and British grand strategy and between the ways in which British and Russian elites thought about grand strategy. There is a familiar story from 18th century England about national versus dynastic grand strategy, court versus country, court being at least, so it is said, Britain's Hanoverian dynasty and its obsession with Europe, the continent, the European balance of power, which in the eyes of its enemies, the country faction, the national faction, is betraying truly national British interests to alien dynastic concern for the electorate of Hanover, the King's own patrimony, and indeed for what are seen to be arcane and unnecessary interventions in European affairs. The truly national strategy being the commercial maritime strategy, building up colonies, dominating the oceans, contributing to British wealth through increasingly hegemonic control of international trade. The Russian version of this is that the national strategy is expansion southwards across the steppe against the Ottomans, bringing huge and potentially very rich grasslands into the Russian Empire, allying yourselves with what are seen to be Russia's ethnic allies, or maybe religious allies, the Orthodox and Slavs of the Balkans. And that is contrasted to the policy of the dynasty, with its obsession with Germanic affairs, the European balance of power. Again, you have to remember that after the male line of the Romanovs dies out in 1730, the Crown passes through the female line to the house of Holstein, Altenburg. There is a lovely moment in 1809 when the commander of the Russian army of the Danube, Field Marshal Prince Prozerovsky, writes to the commander of the Russian army of Galicia, General Prince Galitzy, both of them from ancient Russian princely families. This is at a time when Russia is seen by then to be kowtowing to Napoleon and to be in general messing up its foreign policy. And Prozorowski writes to Galitsyn, my dear Prince, if policy continues to go on in its present way, the Prozorowskis and the Galitsyns will no doubt preserve our estates, but the house of Holstein Oldenburg will cease to reign in Russia. You know what you could say in a polite letter in Russia? You could shout from the rooftops in Britain. But it is the same basic theme. Dynastic court, European great power, obsessions versus national strategy. And in the Russian case, this is strengthened by the fact that the national strategy, the expansion southwards against the Ottomans, had proved dramatically successful in Catherine's era, and it had proved dramatically successful under Russian generals, Alexander Suvorov, Pyotr Rumyantsev, Grigori Pachomkin. Whereas if you look at the people who commanded the Russian armies in the European theater, they are, for the most part Barclay, Tolle Bennigsen, Vincent Garoda, Wittgenstein, a whole succession of Baltic Germans and other strange foreigners, the most important and interesting embodiment of the national tradition, the national grand strategy in the era 1807-1812 is the foreign Minister, Nikolai Rumyantsev, a remarkable character. Nikolai Rumyantsev, apart from anything else, is the man who collected or made most of the great early Slavic and Russian literary icons. You name all the great collections, or many of them, which are now the absolute center, the greatest libraries in Russia. He was a great. He was a great man, highly intelligent man, passionate patriot, immensely rich. He was, for a foreign minister and a diplomat, a man with a rather extraordinary background. Quite apart from being from the heart of the aristocracy, which of course was not new, he was also Minister of Trade and therefore had a very clear conception of what was going on in terms of global commercial and financial development, which persuaded him that the British were taking over the world. He had also for a time been in charge of the water communications of the Empire Canal technology. He was extremely au fait with technological developments in Western Europe and above all in Britain, which again persuaded him that the deep underlying reality of this era is not Napoleon, who he sees as a flash in the pan, not the French Empire, which he sees as a purely temporary phenomenon, but on the contrary, the increasing domination of the United Kingdom of the world's trade and commerce and potentially industrial production. His great ally, one of his great allies at the time, is John Quincy Adams, the American minister in Petersburg, because for Rumyantsev, the great point about the United States is that it can be built up as a rival to British commercial and even in the long run, financial and industrial hegemony. And Quincy Adams, John Quincy Adams diaries are actually a very fascinating source on this period. Now, you could say that why bother with Rumyantsev? Because in the end, his policy of support for Napoleon as a means of undermining potential British global hegemony failed. It is, for a start, overruled by Alexander, who puts Europe first and comes to see Napoleon as the great challenge to Russian security. Above all, it is overruled by Napoleon himself, who after all, invades Russia. And even before Napoleon invades Russia, Rumyantsev has come to the reluctant conclusion that although the real long term threat is Britain, Russia first has to defeat France, because France is so powerful in Europe that it represents a threat to the empire security which cannot be ignored, above all to the empire's possession of Poland, to which Rumyantsev, Russian patriot as he is, is totally committed. Nevertheless, it is still very much worthwhile taking on board Rumyantsev's point of view, partly because it does help to explain the underlying realities of this era, at least from the Russian perspective, but above all because it has an impact on military operations themselves. In a way which may seem surprising to you, the basic point is that Mikhail Kutuzov, the Commander in Chief in 1812, fundamentally shares Rumyantsev's point of view, as he says to the British military representative, who berates him for not doing all he can to bag Napoleon. Why should I bother? Says Kutuzov. I am not at all convinced that the complete defeat of France is in the interests of Russia. France, after all, is the traditional enemy of Britain, not of Russia. As Kutuzov tells the British envoy, the complete defeat of France will not redound to the advantage of any continental power. It will merely complete the total hegemony of the United Kingdom in the overseas world as regards commerce, as regards finance, etc. Etc. And will create a world which will not at all be to Russia's interests. Therefore, the survival of Napoleon and of French power, albeit diluted and diminished, is a Russian interest. Okay, so I've spoken too long, but it gives you some sense of this God's eye view. Right at the other end of the scale is what I call the worm's eye view. The worm's eye view has all sorts of elements to it. It has to do, for instance, with the thickness of Russian paper, which makes it very difficult to have tightly engineered muskets, which helps to explain why Russian musketry is probably the most inaccurate in Europe at the time. And it has to do with all sorts of other little details, but it has to do perhaps above all with that most unfashionable of all academic subjects or non academic subjects nowadays, military operations. If you want to make yourself unappointable in any British, German, let alone American university, just tell people that you want to study kings and battles with particular stress on military operations. And I wouldn't bother to stay for the interview. But military operations are crucial. You can study structures and ideology and God only knows what till you're blue in the face, but it can all be blown away in the course of an afternoon. And that is the nature of blitzkrieg. It's the nature of Napoleon's way of fighting war. It's the way of Hitler's way of fighting war and other people's as well. It's the nature of war at its most skillful. It's Clausewitz, if you like as well. I can't obviously give you a running description of military operations in this entire period, though part of the book is very much to do with that. But I'll just give you one little example, which is what happened on 21 May 1813 at a place called Bautzen on the second day of a battle between Napoleon and the Allies, meaning the Russians and the Prussians. Do not for one minute think Napoleon was a dead duck. December 1812, he put 450,000 troops in the field again. Within four to five months, the French Empire and the areas it controlled had a population of 68 million people, as against perhaps 40 million Russians and 5 million Prussians. And of course the areas the French controlled were more developed, etc. Etc. Etc. It is also obviously the case that Napoleon found it far easier to get his reserves onto the battlefields in central Germany than was the case with the Russians. The Russian main area for trading reserves is east of Moscow, 1,800 km from the Russo Polish border. Even when they got to the Russian Polish border, they were still of course, forced to cover across Poland and part of Germany. Actually, half of all the Russian reserves which departed from Russia in the winter of 1812-13 died or fell out before they reached Germany. That's what happens if you're trying to get conscripts to move over 3,000 sometimes kilometers in a Russian winter through areas devastated by typhus. So Napoleon was bound to win the battle to get his reserves on the battlefield first. In 1813, the big question was what use he could make or that advantage. At the Battle of Bautzen, he outnumbered the allies roughly 2 to 1, slightly more than that in terms of infantry, which is what really mattered. And it was within his power to end the 1813 campaign that day. And in fact, his plan used that advantage and victory, decisive victory, which would have pushed the Prussians and Russians back over the Austrian border and probably ended the campaign within a day or two, was a very sensible and successful one. Now, I'm terribly proud of myself because, you know, I'm not a military historian. I've learned all this really complicated sort of verbiage, so you probably won't understand a word I'm going to say in the next minute or two in good academic fashion. I mean, the basic point is damn simple. The man who commanded Napoleon's troops marching into the Russo Prussian rear was Michel Ney. As tended to happen in moments of excitement in the middle of the battle, they turned right, not left. And that ditched Napoleon's plan. I mean, one can get complicated, but this is really the essence of it. And you know, that afternoon, that afternoon, very much the fate of Europe hung in the balance. So you cannot ignore that most unfashionable of all subjects, military operations between the levels of God and the worm. There are really endless areas which you have to touch on and which I tried to touch on in this book. Even what might seem to you very obscure subjects actually have a considerable salience. You can run some way, even with gender studies, which is not what you would expect. I mean, if you're looking at the values which keep officers on the battlefield, and if you're looking at the mentalities which carry the Russian officer corps across Europe in 1813, 14, when the straight patriotic motivation is not there, looking at the uniforms and reading some of their letters about seducing Women across the whole of Europe. And gambling does tell you something about the whole attitude to risk, honour, glory, all sorts of things. And this is actually directly important, if in operational terms, the basic point in 1812 is a very simple one. In every way, Russian military doctrine stresses the offensive because of these fundamental male noble values, but also because of the experience of the Russian army in the 18th century, which is an experience of advancing into enemy territory, defeating the Ottomans, the Prussians and anyone else in the neighborhood abroad, trying to persuade this army that the key to victory is to retreat a thousand kilometers into the Russian heartland. Opening up the Russian heartland to devastation by the enemy is just extremely difficult. It runs against every element of Russian, if you want to call it that, instinct and doctrine. And the great hero there, in many ways, is Michael Bartlett, after whom, as Anna quite rightly said, the dog is named. It was his moral courage and resolution, more than anything else, which kept the army together and imposed on deeply unwilling senior Russian generals. That strategy, as I say, I could. You know, there are never ending numbers of things I could talk about in this context of Between God and the Worm. Obviously part of this revolves around the army itself, its command structure, its training, its tactics, its weaponry, etc, etc, etc. Perhaps, though, you know, the most interesting, even the most puzzling element is a question of motivation and morale of the ordinary soldiers. Here you have a problem. Roughly one and a half million Russians served in the army and militia as ordinary soldiers. Two of them wrote memoirs. Well, as you might imagine, that is not a very good sample. The best memoirs are written by a soldier, ordinary peasant, who taught himself to read and write when he was in the army and ended his career after 25 years service as a monk rented to a monastery. Not the typical fate of a private soldier of the Imperial army. Inevitably, the Russian historiography stresses patriotism, and that is not entirely wrong. It is important that the overwhelming majority of these soldiers were Orthodox East Slav peasants. And within the context of their value system, Orthodoxy mattered far more than any modern conception of nationality. And the monarch as the protector of the Orthodox community is undoubtedly a very powerful force for loyalty within the ranks of the army. But above all, what matters, as most military historians stress in all cases, is small unit loyalty, which is possibly stronger in the Russian army than almost any other one could imagine. You have to remember who these men were. They were, in the overwhelming majority of cases, peasants conscripted for 25 years into the ranks of the Imperial Army. The great majority of them would die in the ranks of the Army 25 years was a long term. Even in peacetime, these soldiers are, with few exceptions, illiterate. They cannot write home, they never see their families again. Even the overwhelming majority of literate non commissioned officers never go home on leave. Very large numbers of peasants die through sheer shock at being ripped out of their villages and dumped in this pretty ferocious, brutal environment. But when they do get to their regiments, if they survive, the regiment becomes the home, the family and the fatherland. The regiment is what you die for. The regiment and the regimental mess. If a soldier dies in the army, his possessions are shared with his messmate. Any earnings he makes, and they make a great many earnings on the side, go mostly to the regimental mess. These little groups of men, you know, if you do as I have done and read through the very lovingly preserved personnel records of the army, what you get is a picture of Russian regiments dominated by men who have served in them for 10, 15, 15, 20, sometimes 25 years. As in any army, it is the NCOs and the senior rankers who really matter. You know, regiment after regiment, you will get men who have been in the army and in most cases in that regiment, in virtually all cases in that company, in that mess, you know, for 20 years, it creates an enormous sense of solidarity and of commitment and it goes a long way towards. EXPLOSION why? You know that old proverb, you didn't just have to kill Russian soldiers, you had to knock them over too. They had a staying power and a discipline which was beyond that of any other army in Europe. I don't think any other European army could have retreated from the border to Moscow without disintegrating. The British disintegrate twice in the peninsula. The French disintegrate both after Moscow in 1812 and after Leipzig. The Prussian army disintegrates in 186. The Russian army does not, despite having been put under the kind of pressures which have an enormous impact on morale and discipline. So I think that is an interesting point. What you have to remember, to put it in a nutshell, is that the army of the Emperor is not the Russian nation at arms. It is an army built around regimental pride and a veteran cadre that is both its strength and its fragility. Napoleon is quite right to believe that if he destroys that cadre, he's won the war. You'll never be able to resurrect it in wartime. Kutuzov is deeply scared by November 1812 that the losses are reaching such a level that the core NCO and veteran cadre, the regimental cadre, is being destroyed and will have to be reconstituted from scratch. At which point the Russian army will be worse than a militia because it doesn't have a kind of citizenry, a concept of citizenry to sustain it. All right, in terms of, you know, all those other factors between God and the worm, I should just talk briefly about two one of which is the horse and the other of which is espionage. You have to remember that in this era, the horse is the equivalent of the modern tank, aeroplane, lorry, armored personnel carrier, mobile artillery, the lot. It is, in other words, the weapon of reconnaissance, shock, exploitation, transport. You name it. You name isn't the men he loses in Russia in 1812 which do for Napoleon, it's the horses. He can replace the men and does so, he can't replace the horses. Partly because France in January 1813 is reckoned to have less than 30,000 horses of any description which you could use for cavalry service. Partly because it takes at least three or four times as long to train a cavalry unit as it does an infantry one. You've got to train the man, you've got to train the horse, you've got to train the man and the horse. Not easy. The Russians defeat Napoleon probably more than for any other reason, through horsepower. Russia, of course, has Europe's richest treasure trove of horses. What they do in 181213 is sometimes substitute horses for men in the conscription system. Two Russian provinces alone, out of 50, produced 10,000 horses in December 1812, January 1803, 13 for the army. In all, something like 1890,000 horses are mobilized in 1812 and 1813 just for the cavalry. That doesn't include, of course, the huge mobilization of resources for the artillery and the supply trains. One of the unsung heroes of this whole war effort is a man called Andrei Kalagriv, general of the cavalry. He is the man who organizes and trains the cavalry reserves. And it's not just a question of getting all these horses, it's also a question of creating the depots where you train cavalrymen. It's a question of creating the horse hospitals, the various little workshops, not little big workshops for horse furnishings, etc, etc, etc, etc. Watching the way in which Russia mobilizes its horsepower, turns horsepower into effective cavalry, uses its existing cavalry cadre intelligently to train cavalry reserves, is actually extremely fascinating. It is in one sense the equivalent of the Second World War at looking at the Soviet tank formations, how they were trained, how the tanks were made, except it is the absolute core of power at that time. Kolegriev, just in 1813 sends 200 squadrons of reserve cavalry, 45,000 men, to the front. And by universal consent, these are the best reserve cavalry in Europe. It isn't a coincidence that, after all, the war ends in 1814, when the Russian cavalry intercepts Napoleon's correspondence with his wife, telling the Allies that he is not going to defend Paris, he's going to raid their rear in the hope of drawing them away. The Russian cavalry presents that to their high command. The high command moves on Paris because it knows exactly what Napoleon's up to. And this is in a sense, a fitting culmination of after two years of war, in which the Russian light cavalry in particular is superior to the French from the start and is totally dominant after the retreat from Moscow. So the horse is crucial. It is, of course, not much heralded in the history books because nationalist history is interested in human heroes, not horses. The second point is espionage, that interesting area, intelligence, to put it politely, between the fields of foreign policy and military history, what is very seldom understood is that the Russian espionage system and intelligence systems ripped apart the Napoleonic, both civil and military structures of power. They totally penetrated right into Napoleon's own family, right into the Ministry of War, right into the Foreign Ministry. There was simply no secret in France which was not on Alexander's desk within a month or so of being on Napoleon's. That is perhaps a slight exaggeration, but not a very great one. The two heroes of Russian espionage are Alexander Chernyshov on the military side, and Carl von Nessel, rather on the diplomatic side. Both men in their 20s. They head the Russian military opera espionage operation in Paris in the five years before 1812, and it is actually a mark. They are an example of one reason why the Russians do defeat Napoleon. They promote a number of extremely able men, when they are still very young, to top positions on the strength of their success in 1807-14. Nesselroda is foreign minister for four decades and Chernyshev war minister for two. I can't begin to give you a sense of the range of what they did. I suppose Chernyshov had a row of spies. His probably most effective one was his spy at the center of the War Ministry. Every month the French War Ministry produced a large book, essentially, of course, for internal circulation. Five copies detailing the numbers, deployment needs, movements, every single unit in the French army down to regimental size. Every month a copy was delivered to the Russian military attache in Paris, Chernyshow, to be copied and returned on Friday evening to be copied and returned to the Ministry on Sunday evening, the Russians could trace absolutely the movement of every French unit in Europe. Of course, they didn't believe a word of what Napoleon said. They knew very well that no one is going to move half a million troops across Europe and not stop. It's rather expensive. Apart from anything else, Nesselrud, among other things, buys up the French intelligence operation in Russia. One reason, it seems, why Napoleon partly ruins his army racing for Vilna, convinced that Alexander will defend it, is that the Russians have turned the chief French agent in Lithuania and have fed misinformation back to Napoleon that they will fight for Vilna. So Napoleon presses ahead, ruining half his horses in the process. That's what the Russians say. I mean, you know, we wait for corroboration. Probably the single most spectacular document that Nestle rather lifts is a secret report by the French foreign Minister to Napoleon, at Napoleon's request in March 1810, which is the key moment when the Russo French alliance is collapsing, in which the French foreign Minister says, basically, we have two alternatives. One is to smash the Russians, destroy Prussia and restore a small Poland. And the other is to completely smash the Russians, restore a big Poland, but push Russia back to where it was before Peter the Great. This is total dynamite. Of course, it arrives on Alexander's desk four weeks after it arrives on Napoleon, bought for 4,000 French francs. The point about Nessel, Rauder and Chernyshov, however, is that they don't just buy documents. These are exceptionally intelligent men who move in the highest circles in France. Chernyshov was accepted right into the heart of Napoleon's father. It was rumoured he was the lover of Napoleon's sister. I think it's not true, but he knew literally everything in terms of having access. And there were also, of course, within the French elite, very many senior people who loathe Napoleon and provided a great deal of advice and information to the Russians for free. This advice and information goes straight via Nesselrode, avoiding Rumyantsev. To Alexander, it is best summed up in the memorandum of the head of Russian military intelligence, Trikovich in April 1812, which essentially sums up what Nesselroda and Chernyshev have been saying. And what Shrikiewicz says is, look, not just Napoleon's military system, but his entire political system rests on the logic of rapid victory, blitzkrieg, to put it in modern terms, those are the kinds of wars he has to win and wants to win, because those are the kind of wars that his army is geared to win and that his political system can sustain. So what we must do is face him with the opposite kind of war. A long drawn out war, a people's war, a national war mobilizing the religious fanaticism, as Twykevit puts it, of the Russian people. The idea that the Russian government is unaware of what is going on or that what happens in 1812-13 is some kind of Tolstoyan movement of, you know, impersonal forces is totally contrary to the evidence as portrayed in the archive. The most basic reason why Russia defeated Napoleon was that the Russian government out thought him. You know, when Napoleon gets to Moscow in 1812, he faffs around for six weeks expecting Alexander to make peace, the Russian elites to revolt against him, even a Cossack revolt. In other words, basically he hasn't got a clue. Despite the fact that actually he had been given very intelligent political analysis by his former ambassador in in Petersburg, Cahlencourt. When the Russian army, the allied armies get to Paris in March 1840, the same could have happened. Paris was not a military objective, it was a political objective. The allied capture of Paris was only meaningful if they could exploit it for political reasons. Within a week of the allied armies reaching Paris, not just Napoleon but the Bonapartist dynasty had been overthrown throne essentially by a coup from within the French elite. That coup headed by Talleyrand who after all had been. He was probably the person who was shipping these most secret diplomatic documents out and had certainly at times been in the pay of the Russians. I thought of how, because you know, I belong to ideas, I thought of knowing Arne's interests, how to put all this in some kind of Cold War perspective. And I suppose the closest equivalent would be if Harry Truman, President Truman had been overthrown and the Cold War brought to a spectacular end in about 1946 by a coup d' etat led by Dwight Eisenhower, subsequently discovered to have been in Soviet pay for the last 10 years. And that tells you something of what is going on but I think is probably beyond the imagination of even Joe McCarthy at which point I'll stop.
- [52:20]
A
Thank you very much Joy, for that wonderful, wonderful presentation. It might not be War and Peace but. But there are some elements in this that does remind me a little bit of the stories in the way Tolstoy are telling them, although with a very different perspective and probably with very different conclusions as well. I'm sure there's a love story or two in there if you explore the footnotes. I think I discovered a couple of those. So maybe there may be more to it than just the just historical interpretation. I want to start out with a question that really goes back to what you said initially about the multinational aspects of these efforts. It really struck me when I was reading the end of the book covering the 1812, 1814 period, the discussions that you describe going on among the top leaders on the Russian side about, you know, moving into Europe. But what then to do with Europe? I mean, what are their plans? Where are they going to end up after Napoleon has been defeated, or at least defeated on the battlefield as it were. And I wonder in connection with that, what an impact on those discussions you think it had that the leadership not only of the Russian army but of the Russian state were such a multi multinational crew. I mean, not just Germans from the Baltic states, of which your own ancestors of course were a very significant and influential family, but also people from all over. I mean, in terms of their ancestry, in terms of who they communicated with, who they had grown up with before the war started.
- [54:06]
B
How much of an impact do you.
- [54:07]
A
Think that had on those discussions? I mean, what was Russia after? What did Russia see for itself at the end of this cataclysmic set of battles?
- [54:16]
B
Well, in one sense, of course, if you're talking about top level decisions, Russia is Alexander. It is the Emperor who decides. He may listen to X, he may listen to Y, but he decides. And this is not a theory. Alexander is in every sense Russia's leader as essentially, you know, as much as Stalin was, not by the same methods of terror, but unequivocally the man who makes the final decisions in terms of grand strategy, diplomacy and to some extent even military operations. Alexander chooses to listen to a group of advisors, very many of whom are not even his subjects, actually the majority of whom are not ethnic Russians. And that has got to do with personally his own personality. He tends to trust foreigners more than certainly on military terms, Russian generals. But it is also to do with his fundamental commitment to Europe and his conviction that Russian security is indissolubly linked to European security. I mean, if it had been. Look, in terms of contingency, Alexander pranced around on the battlefield and on one or two occasions was very nearly killed. Had he been the Russian armed war. Had he been killed in 1812, that was not likely. I mean, he was not on the battlefield. Had he been, the Russian army would probably have not pursued Napoleon over the Dienen. Had he been killed in 1813, as he very nearly was, there is no question of the Russian army going across into France. It wouldn't have done a large section of the Russian leadership. Kutuzov of course being the most obvious, having got Napoleon out of Russia, basically said enough's enough, it's now for the Europeans to rescue themselves. Alexander decided otherwise and I think he was right. I mean the basic thinking is that so long as the French control Germany, Russian security is deeply at risk and indeed is in defence of it. Not least because the French will control such resources that Russia will not be able to sustain the kind of military build up to hold them at bay. You know, again, you have to remember Russian revenues are a quarter of Britain's revenues in 1804. Russian real revenue declines by 25% between 1804 and 1810. It is one of the big issues. I spent a lot of time on this in the book, looking at how it is that at this supreme moment of crisis the Russian state manages an effective war effort at a time of such deep fiscal and financial crisis. Well, Alexander is well aware of the fact that if he makes peace with Napoleon, while the French still do dominate Germany in the medium to longer run, he simply can't sustain the financial burden involved. So it makes sense to take the Russian army across into Germany, make in a sense the Germans pay for the war but also mobilize the Prussians and Austrians while Napoleon is still weak. It's a very close run thing. It took guts and he did it. His basic perception is, as I say, that you've got to get the French back, back over the Rhine. Once you've got them over the Rhine, he goes all the way to Paris and is sometimes accused of having done so for petty reasons. I think again though, he was right. His basic conception was that the nature of Napoleon and of the Bonapartist regime was that you were never going to have peace and stability in Europe so long as he sat on the throne. And I think Napoleon III proved that. I think it was just in the nature of Bonapartism. I mean my, you know, I had this. Well, Simon's here, but I myself publisher, but this, I said to him my basic idea for the COVID you see, it's deeply unprejudiced. This was at a time when our house was invaded by rats and I wanted me and my dog on the COVID dressed as Russian generals, both standing on stools with pitchforks with a lot of French soldiers dressed as rats. I mean, no, there were French rats dressed as French soldiers with a very fat Napoleon rat in their head. But this is roughly my conception and I think, although it's, as you might say, a touch Crude and unacademic. I mean, it does have a basic sense to it until you put the whole thing in the global context and then you realize that in some sense, what's Napoleon to do? British sea power locks French imperialism into Europe. Unless the French create an empire in Europe, they've lost their Hundred year war with Britain. The whole point, I've always suspected partly that the British respect for rules is that as long as you play by the rules, the British always win. I mean, that was certainly the situation in the early 19th century. As long as you locked French power, you know, as long as British sea power locks French imperialism into Europe, it automatically mobilizes the European balance of power on Britain's side. The Russians, the Prussians and the Austrians resent the fact that, you know, their countries get fought over and the British seem to get richer and richer. But if they've got to choose, they'd rather have the British dominating India than Napoleon dominating Germany. It's as simple as that. So it's a complicated one. And I mean, looking at things from the Russian perspective in a curious kind of way, I think does give you a more sympathetic view of Napoleon than the normal Anglo view.
- [59:16]
A
No? I thought that was very striking.
- [59:17]
B
It was a huge answer.
- [59:22]
A
It's very useful to think about these things in a broader perspective, particularly if you want to take this up through the 19th century not mentioned into this one yet, which we won't do here tonight.
- [59:30]
B
Of course we will.
- [59:32]
A
We will indeed stay with the story, the great story of Russia against Napoleon. Questions from the audience, please. Up there, if you could start.
- [59:41]
B
That you, Bob? That's you up there?
- [59:43]
A
Higher over there.
- [59:46]
B
In a minute. Yes. Hi, Bob.
- [59:49]
A
Yeah, couldn't see you there, Bob.
- [59:52]
C
Soas, I really do think you have to be congratulated for putting geopolitics at the center of what's usually taken to be a national story. And I think that there are far too many great episodes of modern Russian history where geopolitics tend to be forgotten. The Russian Revolution itself being a case in point, really does want a book writing with geopolitics being at the heart of things. I have a question though, which is to do with the importance of the Battle of Bautzen that you mentioned could have gone the other way and that then Russian power would have been destroyed in an afternoon.
- [60:47]
B
How does that.
- [60:50]
C
Gel with your broader point, which seemed to imply sympathy with Kutuzov, that ultimately the big enemy was Britain and that the French hegemony over Europe was bound to be only a temporary phenomenon?
- [61:10]
B
It Depends on your time scale, Bob. It depends on your time scale. I mean, if Napoleon had won at Bautzen, he could have imposed a peace on the Prussians and Russians, which would have restored his domination of Germany and probably retained an independent Duchy of Warsaw under his, you know, indirect rule. That would have meant that French hegemony in Europe lasts for another. Well, question mark. We don't know. We don't know. I mean, when you're trying to build empires, really, it comes in three stages. The first is military victory, geopolitics, defeating enemies. The second is creating the institutions which will outlast the initial creator of empire. And the third is creating loyalty towards the empire, at least in the various elites. It's if not lower down in the population. If he'd won at bouts and Napoleon would, I think, for a generation, have succeeded as regards phase one, whether he would ever have got far, we wouldn't have got too far on phase three. Phase two is more indeterminate. But on the other hand, of course, whatever had happened, whether the French empire would have survived his demise or not, a Europe which emerged, let us say, in the 1840s and 50s out of a collapsing French empire would have been a very different Europe to the one which emerged after 1815. So all sorts of imponderables come up. And it was not just true at Bowtzen. I mean, again, things were very nip and tuck in September. Even at Leipzig. It could have gone the other way. So I mean, it's. And then that adds to the fascination and the drama of the story. And I think that's roughly how I'd sum it up. Other questions?
- [63:05]
A
Yes, please. Just across? Yeah, please.
- [63:10]
D
Hi, Mark Sloboda, Masters. LSE you if I could draw you into an LSE Ideas question related to the book.
- [63:19]
A
It's good that you're doing that.
- [63:23]
D
You've described to us brilliantly in the book how in the last 200 years Russia has twice liberated Europe from a would be continental dictator for their own pursuits of a balance of power and of a belief that Russia and Europe's security is intertwined. Could you talk about how that relates to a modern context where Europe is united not by a dictator, but by consensus. And just recently, President Medvedev in the last year has proposed a Russian and European new security charter.
- [64:05]
B
You're taking me a long way from poor Mr. Napoleon.
- [64:08]
A
It had to happen.
- [64:13]
B
Look, as always, there are some continuities. Other things are rather different. Ukraine, as always, is the big issue. It's been the case really, from about 1870 to 1945, that the only two countries which really mattered in Europe were the Germans and the Russians. Only they potentially had the power to dominate the whole continent. And the two world wars in one sense were wars above all between Germany and Russia in Europe as to who was to dominate Central Europe and thereby dominate all Europe. Unless you bring the Americans in. In many ways, you know, the closest you got to European hegemony was not even Napoleon or Hitler. It was 1917. Brest Litovsk means German domination of Europe. The great irony of the First World War is that the Germans bring in the Americans literally almost within days of the Russian Revolution, beginning the disintegration of Russian power and opening the way to German domination of Europe. Without the Americans coming in, there's no way that the British and French would have been able to roll back the settlement in Central in Eastern Europe. And as long as the Germans had had the wit to run Europe in Eastern Europe in an intelligently imperialist way, that's of course a big question. They'd won. And that actually brings you back to my period. It's very difficult to defeat Russia in a blitzkrieg. Distance and resources make that, you know, quite a challenge. The way to defeat Russia is to combine military with political strategy because the enormous pressures on the population, sort of material and other, and the nature of the regimes required to impose that pressure in order to sustain empire, in order to sustain Russia's position as a top rank European power, create all sorts of domestic political problems. Russia has been defeated, defeated in these great confrontations in the First World War and in the Cold War, but it was defeated by combinations of military and political pressure. Not by all out blitzkrieg. I mean, the biggest failing of Napoleon is really a political failing. In 1812 it was not going to be easy to defeat Russia by a combined political and military strategy, but it was possible and Napoleon blew the opportunities to do it. So that's how I would most easily fit this into a much bigger context.
- [66:49]
A
Anyone else over on this side? Yes, please, in the blue. Jump over there. I'll get to you as well. Dominic, what was the catalyst for you even to start this book? That's the best question to be asked after you finish the book.
- [67:05]
B
Well, I think, look, Robert, at one level in all, my ancestors were Russian generals in this damn war. So of course there I was prancing around at the age of four, convinced I was defeating Napoleon. You know, I mean, yeah, I mean, I must say, God bless the British. It is a very, very rare fellowship like The Leverhugh, which allows a sort of podgy, middle aged professor in his mid-50s to blunder around on full salary, full research grant, full everything for three years, fulfilling his childhood fantasies. That, I suppose, is the simplest answer. It is all. I mean, it is a fantastic story. It is a fantastic story and it is a story which I am absolutely convinced has been told completely untruthfully, year after year. And I just got fed up. I suppose that's another basic answer. So you've got, you know, two, and I think, you know, to do me justice, that the story does actually say an awful lot. You know, it says an awful. I haven't been able to bring this out, but this is a story of how Russia was mobilized against Napoleon. It tells you an enormous amount, I think, about the nature of Russian society and state at that time. You know, this is not some kind of totalitarian dictatorship. You have to remember that state authority virtually ceases below the provincial capitals in Russia at that time, mobilizing the war effort. The Russian domestic front against Napoleon is above all the state collaborating with the landowning nobility. Without that, it's helpless. And in fact, in 1812-14, the state is able to coercively mobilise the masses into the. The army. That's more or less, it's raison d'. Etre. A much bigger problem is getting enough officers for all sorts of reasons. If you look into that and if you look into the whole way in which Russian strategy is debated before 1812, the way in which Alexander interacts with the Russian elites, the way he manages the administrative system, the governmental system, but also the elites, you learn a tremendous amount. Just as you also learn an awful lot about the basic value system of the Russian elites through looking at how they respond to this challenge. It is, as I tried to say, a much bigger puzzle to work out. You know, the poor sods who are mobilized in the ranks, but the closest, the closest you're going to come to that, I think, is the mentality of the regimental loyalty. And I think that does rather underline that. You know, what defeats Napoleon is not modern nationalism, it's the Russian old regime, which is much more formidable in its way, faced with that kind of challenge. Because in a sense, as with Stalin, you know, of course, Hitler was a disaster for the Russian people. He was in some ways exactly the kind of challenge, challenge that, you know, the Soviet system was best designed to meet. Not least, of course, because everything that Soviet propaganda had said about the west, lunatic kind of propaganda, exaggeration, you name it read in tooth and claw out to drink the people's blood. Well, if anything, it underestimated what Hitler actually tried to do and in that sense played straight into the hands of.
- [70:33]
A
The Soviet regime over there at the end. You have to forgive me if I don't recognize people. I know, but it's important to see anything from down here except hands waving in the air.
- [70:43]
B
Please.
- [70:47]
E
Could you explain the effect the war and the whole campaign had on the subsequent 50 years Russian history? And could that explain why Russian history stopped at 1812 rather than. I mean, give it. I mean, I only watched a few episodes of BBC2's War and Peace, but Pierre, a section of the Russian intelligentsia regarded the French as. As the way some people regarded Tony Blair.
- [71:30]
A
That's the wixagon.
- [71:32]
B
Yes, I'm not quite sure where to go from that. I mean, look, I mean, the most basic point is that any regime which wins on the scale that the Russian regime won in 1812-14 feels and indeed is legitimized. And the Russian regime of that era is a regime of autocracy and serfdom. Therefore, I mean, as you would expect, you know, the victory in the Second World War legitimizes the British setup. Victory always legitimately legitimizes the existing order. And I think, you know, it is the sense of victory and the sense that Russian security is certain that helps to explain why Russian regimes, particularly under Nicholas I, 1825-55, pursues a relatively conservative and in certain ways immobile policy. At the same time, you've got to be careful, careful because of course, Russian history is deeply politicized and an awful lot of it which tends to be faithfully echoed in the west is written from an anti regime liberal or radical standpoint and tends to see Russian backwardness in the 19th century above all through a political lens. It's naive to believe that the Russian regime under Alexander and Nicholas has anything like the power. No regime on earth, no political strategy of any sort is going to change the most fundamental fact, which is that the Industrial Revolution begins in Western Europe and spreads eastwards. You know, and if you look at why it doesn't start in Russia, it's blindingly obvious. You know, you have to look at levels of education, education, you have to look at population density, you have to look at the fact that the Industrial revolution is bringing coal and iron together. And the only way you can do that in Russia is through the railways in Britain. You can do it, of course, by water. So I would be reticent to Attach totally overwhelming importance to what happens in 1812-14, or indeed to anything political, as an explanation for Russia's growing backwardness in the 19th century. It is a factor, but it isn't the main factor, in my view. Someone in the hat over there.
- [73:53]
A
Yes, could please. We have to make that last question, please. Yes.
- [73:59]
F
In 1840 there was a crisis. It wasn't as big in terms of threats to the balance of power as other ones, but nonetheless it was very interesting that France found itself in a minority in supporting Mehmet Ali and his attention car about a little bit of the Ottoman Empire for himself. Austria, Britain, Prussia were all against that. Russia was somewhere in the middle. But how would you characterise that, you know. And France was in a minority of one.
- [74:29]
B
Well, France was in a minority of one basically in the 1820s and 30s, because, as you would you have to remember the cataclysmic impact of the revolutionary Napoleon. 22 years of war devastates Europe. You know, the levels of casualties are enormously high in terms of the populations of that time. It's rather interesting when the Russian army gets to France in 1814, you read the officers letters, they say how poor France is, how much poorer than Russia it is. You know, they don't say that about Silesia or Saxony. No, no, they love Saxony and Silesia. Great, you know, nice, podgy, German, buxom women, you know, even nicer farms, you know, animals, even podgier than the women. Great place. Get to France and say, you know, this place is poor, this place is really poor. It's just fascinating. And so France, you know, is regarded as a universal threat in the 1820s and three, you know, nobody wants the French to get gallivanting around again and, you know, blow me down. The second they get a Bonaparte back after 1848, they're up to their old tricks again, but this time even stupider than ever in the sense that, you know, he undermines the European system to France's even more direct disadvantage than his uncle had done. So I don't find that puzzling in the slightest.
- [75:47]
A
Let me congratulate you again on a book that I think all of us will enjoy reading. I certainly enjoyed it tremendously, as I enjoyed your presentation here today. I particularly enjoyed having you on board as a senior fellow in Ideas. It is something that is not just going to produce a lot of good research in Russia, as you could hear from tonight. It's also going to be great fun and thanks to everyone for coming. There are books for sale outside. Could I please ask you to let the speaker leave first because he has some things that he needs to leave.
- [76:17]
B
Look after, like writing in the books.
- [76:19]
A
Outside, such as writing in the books. Thanks to everyone for coming. Do check the LSE events list and the LSE Ideas website for upcoming events. We have a couple of great events on already next week that you might be interested in. But first and foremost, again, a hearty thank to our speech.
- [76:40]
B
Straight for a bit too long, but it was all right.