Fyodor Rostopchin

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Fyodor Rostopchin left Moscow on the 14th of September 1812 after ordering his own house burned to the ground. He left behind disassembled fire engines, fuses planted throughout the city, and a small detachment of police charged with finishing the job. By the time Napoleon's troops reached the Kremlin that same evening, the streets were deserted and the city was beginning to burn in earnest.

  Rostopchin would spend years after claiming he had nothing to do with it. He had a pamphlet printed in Paris in 1823 proclaiming his innocence. Then he admitted the truth. The man who torched one of the great cities of Europe to deny it to a conqueror was also, by some accounts, a victim of his own indecision. Leo Tolstoy, who immortalized him in War and Peace, painted him as a man overwhelmed by events who believed until the final hour that Moscow would never fall.

  Who was Rostopchin, really? A patriot or an arsonist? A loyal servant of Russia or a man undone by the chaos he set in motion? And how did the Governor-General of Moscow end his days buried in a Moscow cemetery, his daughter known to the world not as a Rostopchina but as one of France's most beloved novelists?

• 2. A Contested Origin

  ›

  The date the 12th of March 1763 is carved on Rostopchin's tombstone, yet Rostopchin himself insisted the year was 1765 and that he was born in Moscow, not in the Kosmodemyanskoe village where the stone was placed. Biographers have never fully resolved the contradiction.

  His family origins were equally contested. Rostopchin claimed his line stretched back to the 15th century, descending from Crimean Tatars who were themselves direct descendants of Genghis Khan. He named as the family's founding figure one Boris Davydovich, nicknamed Rostopcha, a Russian word meaning scatterbrain or blockhead, who came to Moscow to serve Vasili III. In a later official record, that ancestor's first name changed to Boris Fyodorovich, and later encyclopedias renamed him again to Mikhail Davydovich. Modern historians have suggested the entire lineage may be a mystification.

  Rostopchin grew up at his father's estate in Kosmodemyanskoe, the son of a landlord and former army major named Vasily Fyodorovich Rostopchin who lived from 1733 to 1802. His mother died shortly after giving birth to his younger brother Peter. He received a home education that left him fluent in English, German, French, and Italian. Between 1786 and 1788 he traveled to Europe, and the time he spent in Berlin shaped the self-education that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life. He wrote about that journey in his first book, The Trip to Prussia, published between 1792 and 1794, a work later compared to Nikolay Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveller.

• 3. Soldier and Courtier

  ›

  Rostopchin joined the Preobrazhensky Regiment in 1775 and was promoted to Podporuchik in 1785. He fought in both the Russo-Swedish War of 1788-1790 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1788-1791. The Swedish campaign cost him his younger brother Peter, whom he would later memorialize in his patriotic novel Oh, Those French!

  He served under Alexander Suvorov during those wars, and the two became close friends. When Suvorov fell out of favor and was sent into exile, Rostopchin defended him publicly. He was present at Suvorov's death.

  Rostopchin's rise at court came through Paul I of Russia, over whom he held considerable influence. By 1796 he had been appointed adjutant general and grand-marshal of the court. In 1799 he became president of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs and was granted the title of Count. His opposition to the French alliance proved politically costly. After Paul I was murdered in 1801, Rostopchin lost his standing at court entirely and spent ten years in retreat on his family estate, writing comedies and satirical novels that mocked Francophiles. He was restored to favor in 1810 as relations between France and Russia began to deteriorate. At the end of May 1812 he was appointed Governor-General of Moscow.

• 4. The Fire of Moscow

  ›

  Germaine de Stael passed through Moscow on her way to Saint Petersburg and Stockholm and visited Rostopchin before the invasion. Within months he was managing a city on the edge of catastrophe.

  After the Battle of Borodino, the Russian generals concluded their army could not survive another engagement. Rostopchin was invited to the council at Fili but excluded after a few hours. He oversaw the evacuation of what remained of the population, including all city administrators and officials, leaving behind only a few French tutors and foreign shopkeepers. He also ordered the prisons and asylums opened and their inhabitants freed. Napoleon arrived at the city gates on the afternoon of the 14th of September to find no delegation waiting to hand over the keys.

  The first fire broke out that night in the bazaar. Others followed in scattered quarters. The city's fire engines had already been disassembled. Fuses had been laid throughout the streets. Rostopchin had charged a small police detachment with burning his own house and the city along with it. Most of the buildings were wood. Robert Wilson was present when Rostopchin set fire to his estate near Tarutino.

  Tolstoy, in War and Peace, offered a more complicated reading. He wrote that the French blamed the fire on Rostopchin's ferocious patriotism while Russians blamed French barbarity, but that in truth no single person could be held responsible. A wooden city, abandoned by its residents and occupied by soldiers cooking meals and lighting campfires from Senate chairs, was going to burn regardless. The city, Tolstoy wrote, burned as inevitably as a heap of shavings burns when sparks fall on it for several days.

• 5. The Paris Years

  ›

  In 1814 the Rostopchine family left Russia. They moved through the Duchy of Warsaw, then the German Confederation, then Vienna, then the Italian peninsula, arriving finally in France in 1817 under the Bourbon Restoration.

  In Paris, Rostopchin established a salon. His wife and daughter converted to Roman Catholicism. The question of the Moscow fire followed him there. He printed a pamphlet in 1823 denying any role in the arson, had it distributed in Paris, and then subsequently admitted that he had in fact ordered the city's destruction. In his memoirs he explained that he had acted out of two priorities: maintaining tranquility in Moscow and accelerating the departure of its inhabitants. Tolstoy quoted from those memoirs at length, walking through the apparent contradictions in how Rostopchin justified removing useless government papers while leaving behind holy relics, arms, and stores of corn.

  His daughter Sofiya, born Countess Sofiya Fyodorovna Rostopchine, married in 1819 and eventually became a celebrated French novelist writing under the name comtesse de Segur. Rostopchin returned to Imperial Russia in 1825 and died in Moscow from asthma and hemorrhoid complications. He was buried at the Pyatnitskoye Cemetery.

• 6. Tolstoy's Portrait

  ›

  War and Peace, published in 1869, gave Rostopchin a permanent place in the Russian literary imagination, though not a flattering one. Tolstoy presented him unfavorably, depicting a man swept along by forces he could neither predict nor control.

  The novel includes two long passages drawn from Rostopchin's own memoirs. Tolstoy quoted his explanations for each controversial decision during the evacuation, then placed those explanations inside a larger argument that the fire of Moscow was not Rostopchin's doing in any meaningful sense. The city burned because of what it was: a wooden city abandoned to soldiers with pipes and campfires. Tolstoy allowed Rostopchin to speak in his own voice while simultaneously undercutting the idea that any individual could be credited or blamed for what happened.

  The novel also noted that half of Moscow's population had left even before the evacuation order, a detail that Tolstoy attributed to the sheer weight of circumstance rather than to any single command. Rostopchin, according to Tolstoy, believed until the last moment that the city would not be surrendered without a fight. That belief, and the chaos that followed when it proved wrong, shaped every decision he made on the 14th of September 1812, the day he ordered the fires lit and then rode out of the city he had governed for less than four months.