Napoleon's Invasion of Russia
By OXFORD, $3.50
THE appearance of this study of how Russia defeated Napoleon, by a well-known Soviet historian, is of high interest and importance for several reasons. First of all, it offers some useful clues to Stalin’s psychology in world affairs. For the writing of history in a totalitarian state is very far from being a private individual affair of the historian. About ten years ago Mr. Tarlé, along with Platonov and other noted Russian historical scholars, was arrested and exiled on some unpublished charge of subversive activity. He has now been restored to favor, and individuals who have undergone such an experience are not likely to give offense a second time.
It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that Tarlé’s historical judgments are closely in line with Soviet official foreign policy. One of the most interesting features of his work is a strong ‘ Russia First’ attitude, blended with undisguised distrust of Great Britain. The hero of the history is the old commander-in-chief, Kutuzov, who wanted to defeat Napoleon with the least possible expenditure of Russian blood and was opposed to carrying the war on to European battlefields, once Russia had been freed from the invaders. And the villain of Mr. Tarlé’s narrative, after Napoleon himself, is the British Ambassador to Russia, Sir Robert Wilson. He depicts Sir Robert as wishing to erect his country’s future industrial and commercial hegemony on the bones of Russian soldiers and adds: ‘From England, of course, came not only rifles, but also gold pounds, and they came in generous amounts — the English have always been generous when trying to defeat a strong enemy with the help of a foreign army.’
This judgment on the events of 1812 is certainly not without significance for Stalin’s policy in 1942. The Soviet dictator fights now because Hitler has left him no choice, just as Tsar Alexander I faced the alternatives of fighting or being dethroned and probably murdered. But any belief that Stalin will fight longer or more extensively than his personal and national interests demand is likely to prove a prelude to bitter disillusionment.
Another interesting feature of Tarlé’s work is the virtual scrapping of the ‘class approach’ which disfigured all Soviet historical writing in the first period of the Revolution. Tarlé depicts the Russian victory of 1812 as a national victory. He admits that there were ‘progressive, enlightened nobles,’ which would have been a monstrous heresy ten years ago. All this fits in with Stalin’s newly cultivated nationalism.
W. H. C.