In his book, The Spanish Ulcer: A History of the Peninsular War (1986), author David Gates identified three levels of activity which characterized the Spanish nation in arms. First was the traditional war, conducted by the Spanish regular army and its supporting militia formations. Second was the partisan war, conducted by organized bands of guerrillas numbering from a few dozen to several thousand men. These disrupted enemy communications and supplies, attacked couriers and collaborators, and mounted "hit and run" raids against weak and isolated French detachments. More importantly, they provided critical intelligence to the Allied generals. Finally, there was the people's war, the general resistance to French rule. Led by local soldiers, notables, gentry and clerics, thousands of armed peasants assisted in the defense of larger cities, notably Saragossa. Gates concluded that this Spanish nation in arms probably inflicted considerably more damage on the French forces than all of Wellington's pitched battles combined and seriously weakened the French so that the Anglo-Portuguese field army could eventually triumph. The same cannot be said of the Russian nation in arms in 1812. The Spanish nation in arms experience in the Peninsula was the model for Russian partisan warfare against Napoleon in 1812 and gave birth to the myth of a Russian counterpart. It too was supposed to have consisted of three elements. The first was the Russian army, which performed much more credibly than its Spanish counterpart. There is no doubt that without the Russian army there could have been no Allied victories in 1813 and 1814. The second was the partisan war. Colonel Davidov and a host of other Russian military men of the period openly acknowledge the Spanish roots of the Russian partisan movement. These armed groups performed the same missions as their Spanish counterparts, some with great success. Davidov's detachments, for example, were credited with killing or capturing some 5,000 French and foreign soldiers and for disrupting French lines of communication. There were, however, a number of differences between the partisan movements in Russia and Spain. Unlike in Spain, where large partisan detachments roamed the country for the duration of the war, the Russian movement was smaller in both scope and scale. Russian partisan warfare began in earnest with the French withdrawal from Moscow in October and lasted until December, when the Grande Armee left Russia. Most of the organizers and leaders of Russian partisan units in 1812 were regular Russian army officers. Furthermore, the bulk of these detachments consisted of Cossacks or relied on a core Cossack force. The remainder were manned by Russian soldiers or militia. French sources overwhelmingly identify irregular or partisan warfare with Cossacks, although they do occasionally acknowledge the presence of "armed peasants." This is more than just an attempt to avoid the potentially humiliating issue of an armed peasant rabble destroying the vaunted invading army. Most Russian writers also credit the Cossacks for the success of the partisan warfare in 1812. Russian sources make it clear that Field Marshal Prince Kutuzov, commander of the Russian forces opposing Napoleon, thought little of either armed peasants or partisan warfare and made no provision to include it in his overall strategy for evicting the French from Russia. The key factor is that Tsar Alexander and many of his ministers, including Minister of War Arakcheyev, Minister of Police (and member of the Committee for Militia Affairs) Balashov and Mayor of Moscow Rostopchin were terrified of arming the Russian peasantry. Indeed, the Russian aristocracy was obsessed with the specter of a widespread Russian peasant rebellion, such as that led by Emelian Pugachev in 1773-1774 during the reign of Catherine the Great which engulfed such important cities such as Kazan and posed a threat to Moscow itself. It was defeated only with difficulty. As a result, Tsar Alexander at one point reversed the decision to arm the Russian peasantry, prompting dismay from the minority of Russian army officers, like Davidov, who were advocates of partisan warfare. Unlike the war in Spain, that in Russia lacked a national flavor. It was never really a "people's war" despite the claims of Davidov and later Soviet writers like Eugene Tarle, whose 1942 work Napoleon's Invasion of Russia 1812 helped mobilize Soviet citizens against the German invasion in 1941. The myth lacks credible support despite its passionate proponents. Back to Table of Contents -- Napoleon #16 Back to Napoleon List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by Napoleon LLC. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. The full text and graphics from other military history magazines and gaming magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com Order Napoleon magazine direct