The third book on my bedside table has been Dominic Lieven’s truly masterful Russia against Napoleon. It was on my visit to Moscow last December that I realised there was such a yawning gap in my knowledge about European history. Lieven’s study is plugging the gap. His opening argument is that histories that concentrate on 1812 forget about the equally significant campaigns of 1805-7 and 1813-14. But this is not just a revisionist, ‘from-the-Russian-point-of-view’ study (though that would be an interesting counter-balance to the traditional French-sided accounts). He refers back frequently to domestic developments and domestic politics and through all of this the reader comes to understand that the Russia of that period was not a ramshackle eastern despotism but, in many ways, a vibrant and quite modernistic organism with an enlightened attitude to senior appointments (there is a picture gallery of them in the book). By the end of this period, as the Amazon review puts it, Russia had begun ‘its strange central role in Europe’s existence as both threat and protector, a role that continues, in all its complexity, into our own lifetimes.’ There is much food for thought in Russia’s scorched earth policy and it is truly extraordinary how, within a space of just two years, Napoleon stood in the Kremlin and Russian troops marched through Paris. A bit like a game of Go, actually…
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