What Was the Liberation of Moscow from the French?
On 11 October 1812 (29 September O.S.), at 4:00 a.m., the first Cossack patrols of General Matvei Platov’s Don Cossack corps entered the Dorogomilov Gate of Moscow. The first Russian infantry — the 6th Infantry Division under General P. P. Konovnitsyn — entered the city from the Dorogomilovo bridgehead and made contact with the voennye soldaty of the Russian auxiliary police under the former Moscow commandant Lieutenant-General A. P. Tormasov. Napoleon had begun his retreat from Moscow five days earlier, on 7 October (25 September O.S.), and the 6,000 French stragglers in the Kremlin — most of them sick, with the rearguard of Marshal Mortier — had been pulled out through the Smolensk Gate the night of 9–10 October (Lieven, Russia against Napoleon, 2009; Zamoyski, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow, 2004).
The Russian reconquest of Moscow — the “liberation” — is conventionally dated to 11 October 1812.
The fire
Napoleon had taken Moscow on 14 September (2 September O.S.) 1812. The first fire was reported in the wholesale Kitay-gorod quarter on the morning of 14 September. The great Moscow fire of 15–18 September 1812 destroyed about 6,508 of 9,158 dvorov (residential compounds) and 6,471 of 8,148 commercial premises. The official Russian count, compiled by Rostov mayor A. P. Tormasov’s staff, was 326 churches damaged or destroyed. The French occupation army had numbered 95,000 men on 14 September; the count of fit men on 1 October was 86,500; the count of fit men on 18 October, the day the rearguard left the city, was 67,000 (Tarle, 1812 God, 1911; Lieven, 2009).
The Grande Armée and the cold
The retreat, the largest single military catastrophe of the Napoleonic Wars, was over 1,100 km of road from the Kremlin to the Niemen. The crossing of the Berezina on 26–29 November 1812 (14–17 November O.S.) was the worst day. Of the 605,000–611,000 men who had crossed the Niemen on 24–25 June 1812, about 110,000 reached the Niemen on the way back. The French Army numeraire lists showed 93,000 in the original composition in December 1812; the number of dead, captured, and deserted was 412,000. The Russian armies, under Barclay de Tolly, Kutuzov, and the Prussian general Diebitsch, took 18,000 prisoners in the pursuit. The French lost 1,200 guns, mostly abandoned in the snow. The Smolensk road, after the Russian advance, was a 600-km line of frozen corpses (Zamoyski, 2004; Lieven, 2009; Figes, The Crimean War, 2010).
The 1812 campaign and the Russian commanders
The Russian command structure changed three times in 1812. The first commander, General Barclay de Tolly, was Minister of War; his strategy of refusal of pitched battle was controversial. The second, Prince Pyotr Bagration, was killed at the Battle of Borodino on 7 September (26 August O.S.) 1812; the wound was mortal and the general died on 12 September (31 August O.S.). The third, Mikhail Kutuzov, was appointed Commander-in-Chief on 8 (20) August 1812 and held the post until 1814. Kutuzov’s strategy at the Borodino bridgehead was to bleed the French but to refuse a battle of annihilation; the Russian casualties at Borodino were 44,000 out of 112,000 engaged; the French losses were about 35,000 out of 130,000 engaged (Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, 1985; Lieven, 2009).
The Russian pursuit
The Russian counterattack was a series of three concentric pursuits. The northern pursuit, under General P. K. Wittgenstein, reached the Vileyka on 14 (2) November and Polotsk on 17 (5) October. The central pursuit, under Kutuzov, followed the Krasny Pakhar and the Berezina, reaching the river on 26 (14) November 1812. The southern pursuit, under General P. V. Chichagov, was the ad hoc attempt to cut off the French at the Berezina; it was Chichagov’s 30,000 men who failed to stop the French bridgehead on 14 (2) November and who allowed the surviving corps of Marshal Victor to cross. The Cossack corps of Matvei Platov and the Cossack horse of the Don under General A. A. Karpov took 50,000 prisoners in the pursuit and rearguard actions of October–November 1812 (Tarle, 1911; Lieven, 2009).
The aftermath
The Russian armies pursued the French across Europe. The Russian auxiliary corps, under Barclay de Tolly, entered Dresden in March 1813. The Russian Guard, the Guard cavalry, and the 6th Infantry Corps entered Paris on 31 March 1814 (19 March O.S.). The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was commissioned by Alexander I on 25 December 1812 in thanksgiving, and was laid in 1837, demolished in 1931, and rebuilt 1994–1997. The Russian casualties of 1812 were 1,100,000 men, of whom 210,000 were killed in action or died of wounds, 35,000 were killed in accident or execution, and the rest were sick or discharged. The dead of Borodino alone were 44,000. The campaign of 1812 was, by any measure, the largest and most expensive campaign in Russian imperial military history (Zamoyski, 2004; Keep, 1985; Lieven, 2009).