Mikhail Kutuzov

• 1. Introduction

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  Mikhail Kutuzov was shot in the left temple in 1774 while charging forward with a fallen regimental standard, and the bullet passed clean through his head and exited near his right eye. Doctors expected him to die. He did not. Fourteen years later, he was shot in almost exactly the same spot again. He survived that too, though each wound left his right eye more twisted than before and his head-pains progressively worse. These two near-deaths bookend a question worth sitting with: how does a man who has already been killed twice by a bullet through the brain go on to outwit Napoleon Bonaparte?

  The answer is not a single battle or a single stroke of brilliance. It involves a childhood spent absorbing military philosophy from Alexander Suvorov, years of diplomatic service across three continents, a deep study of how George Washington wore down the British through patience rather than confrontation, and a strategy so deeply unpopular with his own generals that some thought him incompetent. When the decisive moment came in 1812, with Napoleon's army of more than 600,000 men pouring into Russia, Kutuzov's approach was to let Moscow burn, starve the French, and wait. Tsar Alexander I despised him for it. The strategy worked anyway.

• 2. A School for Commanders

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  In 1757, at twelve years old, Kutuzov entered an elite military-engineering school in Saint Petersburg as a cadet private. He came from a family already embedded in the Russian military establishment: his father, a lieutenant-general, had served for thirty years with the Corps of Engineers and had fought the Turks under Peter the Great. Within three years at the school, Kutuzov had been promoted to corporal and then appointed a mathematics instructor.

  The education that shaped Kutuzov most deeply did not come from any classroom, though. In 1762, as a captain attached to the Astrakhan Infantry Regiment, he came under the command of Colonel Alexander Suvorov. Suvorov believed that an effective order should be simple, direct, and concise, and that a commander had a duty to care personally for the health and training of his soldiers. He also held that a commander should lead from the front rather than the rear, to model the bravery he expected from his troops. Suvorov was explicit about the importance of developing close personal relationships with those under your command, and Kutuzov took all of it in.

  Kutuzov also learned languages with the same intensity he brought to tactics. By the time he left the school he could speak French, German and English fluently, and later added Polish, Swedish and Turkish. Later in his career he would serve as ambassador in Istanbul and Berlin, and those linguistic skills carried as much weight as any military credential. Suvorov's assessment of his former student would eventually become one of the most quoted opinions of Kutuzov's character: "He is crafty. And shrewd. No one will fool him."

• 3. Two Bullets, One Eye

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  In 1768, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Empress Catherine the Great, pulling Russia into the first of three Turkish wars that would define Kutuzov's military generation. Two years later, Kutuzov, now a major, joined the forces of Count Pyotr Rumyantsev in the south. He served well but never received a medal: another officer reported to Rumyantsev that Kutuzov had mocked him behind his back. Rumyantsev responded by transferring Kutuzov to a separate army fighting in the Crimea.

  The reassignment carried an unexpected benefit. In the Crimea, Kutuzov learned to work with Cossack light cavalry, a skill he would later use against Napoleon's supply lines in 1812. Then came Alushta. In 1774, ordered to storm a well-defended town on the southern coast of the Crimean peninsula, Kutuzov watched his troops' advance falter. He picked up the fallen regimental standard and ran forward. A bullet entered his left temple and exited near his right eye. He recovered over months, still beset by sharp pains and dizziness, and departed Russia for Western Europe seeking better medical care.

  In Berlin, he spent extended time with King Frederick the Great of Prussia, the two men discussing tactics, weaponry and uniforms at length. Frederick took personal interest in Kutuzov. From Berlin, Kutuzov traveled to Holland and then London, where he first encountered accounts of the American Revolutionary War. He studied how George Washington's attrition campaign against the British succeeded not through decisive battlefield victories but through persistence and patience. Rumyantsev had already planted that seed; Washington's example made it take root. Kutuzov returned to Russian service in 1776 and spent the next six years again under Suvorov, this time in the Crimea. Then in 1788, fighting in the Second Russo-Turkish War, a bullet struck him in the left temple a second time, almost precisely where the first had entered. He recovered again, his eye more twisted, his headaches worse.

• 4. The Diplomat in Uniform

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  By 1791, Kutuzov had been promoted to lieutenant-general, and his career began moving through a series of roles that had little to do with leading troops in battle. He served as ambassador at Istanbul. He commanded Russian forces in Finland. He ran the corps of cadets at Saint Petersburg. He was sent as ambassador to Berlin. By 1801 he was governor-general of Saint Petersburg.

  These postings were not mere administrative detours. In Istanbul, Kutuzov survived a visit to the sultan's harem, which the source notes almost as an aside but which marked him as a man capable of navigating extremely dangerous political situations with composure. In Berlin, his earlier conversations with Frederick the Great had already given him a peer relationship with Prussian military thinking. Kutuzov was a favourite of Tsar Paul I, who reigned from 1796 to 1801. When Paul was murdered, the new emperor Alexander I regarded Kutuzov with less warmth, though Kutuzov remained loyal.

  One detail from these years stands apart from the rest. Kutuzov owned more than 3,000 serfs. He was also a member of two Moscow Freemason lodges, "Sphinx" and "Three Banners." He was, in other words, a man of the Russian nobility in the fullest sense: wealthy, connected, educated across disciplines including theology, philosophy, law and the social sciences, and embedded in the religious and fraternal networks of his class. He went into prayer at a cathedral on the day before he left to assume command in 1812, bending his knees grunting from his rheumatism. The contrast between the decorated diplomat and the rheumatic old soldier kneeling on a cathedral floor stayed with those who witnessed it.

• 5. Austerlitz and Its Lesson

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  On the 2nd of December 1805, Kutuzov was present at the Battle of Austerlitz. He had not wanted to fight that day. On the eve of the battle, he tried to persuade the Allied generals to wait for reinforcements before engaging Napoleon. Alexander I refused, believing that delay would appear cowardly.

  Kutuzov saw what was happening clearly. The Allied plan required abandoning the Pratzen Plateau, and Kutuzov understood that Napoleon would seize that high ground and use it to direct artillery fire down onto the Allied lines. He stalled as long as he could, but Alexander eventually forced him to give the order to move off the ridge. Napoleon occupied the Pratzen Plateau, and from there his artillery broke the Allied lines. More than 27,000 Russian and Austrian soldiers became casualties. When Alexander I asked Kutuzov where he planned to move a unit of troops during the battle, Kutuzov received the reply: "That's none of your business."

  Austerlitz produced a lasting and painful consequence for Kutuzov. Alexander, already disinclined toward him, held him irrationally responsible for the defeat, even though Kutuzov had argued against the battle plan from the start. The critic Jean Colin would later observe that Napoleon's audacity succeeded at Austerlitz only because Kutuzov was ignored. Kutuzov was put to work organising the army's retreat while Alexander was overcome by grief. The defeat at Austerlitz confirmed what Kutuzov had already concluded from Washington's example and from Rumyantsev's early instruction: a general did not need to win battles to win a war. What he needed was to outlast the enemy.

• 6. The Long Patience of 1812

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  When Napoleon crossed into Russia in 1812 with an army that would eventually total more than 600,000 soldiers including reinforcements, the minister of war Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly chose to retreat rather than fight outnumbered at a ratio of two to one. The strategy was sound but deeply unpopular. After the fall of Smolensk, Alexander had to choose a new commander. The choice, as the source puts it, was obvious: Kutuzov. He was Russian by birth in an era when most senior commanders were foreign. He was personally brave. He was trusted by the troops. The nobles and clergy held him in high regard. He was appointed commander-in-chief on the 17th and joined the army on the 29th of August 1812 at Tsaryovo-Zaymishche. Alexander, who found Kutuzov's physique repulsive and still blamed him for Austerlitz, did not celebrate the appointment.

  The day before Kutuzov left for the front he met with Madame de Stael, a fierce opponent of Napoleon. Within a week of taking command, Kutuzov decided to offer Napoleon a major battle on the approaches to Moscow. Nearly a quarter of a million soldiers met near Borodino on the 7th of September 1812, with French and Russian forces at roughly equal numbers. Napoleon's losses amounted to close to a third of his army killed or wounded. Russian losses were nearly fifty percent higher than that, but the Russian army had not been destroyed.

  After Borodino, Alexander signed the document promoting Kutuzov to General Field Marshal, the highest military rank, on the 11th of September. Four days earlier, at a council of war in the village of Fili, the Russian commanders agreed to abandon Moscow without a fight. Kutuzov pulled his forces southeast. On the 19th of September, when the French cavalry under Murat lost track of the Russian army, Kutuzov changed direction toward Podolsk and then Tarutino, where the surrounding hills and the Nara river offered cover. He arrived with his entire staff on the 3rd of October and began rebuilding.

  Kutuzov refused to attack. He was content to let Napoleon sit in Moscow for as long as possible while the French army ran out of food and the Russian forces ate and rested and received reinforcements flowing up from the fertile southern provinces through Kaluga. His chief of staff Bennigsen criticised this. Alexander criticised it. Barclay de Tolly left service for five months and settled in Nizhny Novgorod in protest. On the 5th of October, Napoleon sent his ambassador Jacques Lauriston from Moscow to meet Kutuzov at his headquarters near Tarutino. Kutuzov agreed to meet, against the Tsar's explicit orders.

  On the 24th of October, Napoleon was stopped at Maloyaroslavets on his attempt to march south to Medyn. Forced north two days later, he chose the route through Mozhaisk to Smolensk, the same devastated path his army had already marched on the way in. Kutuzov followed on the southern roads and hit the French at Vyazma, at Krasnoi, and at the Berezina river, with Russian forces outnumbering the French at each engagement. Cossack bands and peasant groups struck isolated French units throughout the retreat. On the 14th of December, the remainder of the French main army crossed out of Russia. Of the more than 600,000 who had entered, roughly 110,000 remained.

• 7. The Man Behind the Legend

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  The personality that emerges from those who knew Kutuzov is a genuinely contradictory one. A French officer named Langeron produced the most extended portrait in the historical record, describing a man of prodigious memory, rare amiability and genuinely engaging conversation, alongside violent rages, fawning behavior toward those he thought powerful, and what Langeron called an overwhelming laziness and an apathy that dominated everything. Napoleon described him as "the sly old fox from the north." Alexander I called him "a hatcher of intrigues and an immoral and thoroughly dangerous character." Clausewitz offered a more measured verdict: "a true Russian, a slightly reduced Suvorov."

  The laziness charge was a common one. Alexander's own sister attributed the army's inaction to it. British observer Robert Wilson called him incompetent. Yet Kutuzov's apparent inaction in the weeks after Borodino was precisely the strategy that exhausted Napoleon's army in Moscow without a fight. When he was told that Napoleon had finally left Moscow, Kutuzov sobbed: "Russia is saved."

  He also made a remark to Wilson that reveals the broader geopolitical calculus behind the campaign. He said he was not at all certain that the total destruction of Napoleon and his army would be a benefit to the world; Napoleon's succession would fall not to Russia or any continental power, but to the nation that already commanded the sea, meaning Britain, "whose domination would then be intolerable." This was not the sentiment of a man simply defending his homeland. It was the reasoning of a diplomat thinking across the European balance of power.

• 8. What Remains

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  Kutuzov fell ill early in 1813 and died on the 28th of April 1813 at Bunzlau in Silesia, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia and now the town of Boleslawiec in Poland. He was buried in Saint Petersburg, in front of the Kazan Cathedral, where Boris Orlovsky's monument to him still stands. He had five daughters with his wife, Princess Catherine Ilytchina Kutuzova, and one son who died of smallpox as an infant. Because he left no male heir, his estates passed through his eldest daughter, Princess Praskovya Kutuzova, to the Tolstoy family.

  Leo Tolstoy, a descendant of that same family by connection, made Kutuzov a central figure in War and Peace in 1869. In the novel, Tolstoy drew on Kutuzov's reputation for warmth toward common soldiers and his contempt for the parade-ground vanities of European commanders. Tolstoy quoted what he saw as Kutuzov's guiding conviction: "... this sentiment elevated Kutuzov to the high pinnacle of humanity from which he, the general-in-chief, employed all his efforts, not to kill and exterminate men, but to save and have pity on them."

  The Soviet government established the Order of Kutuzov during World War II and named a key strategic offensive operation after him, the Orel Strategic Offensive Operation "Kutuzov," which ran from the 12th of July to the 18th of August 1943. At least twenty-four ships across the United Kingdom, the United States, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and Russia were named after Kutuzov between May 1813 and 2020. A Sverdlov-class cruiser bearing his name, commissioned into the Soviet Navy in 1954, survives today as a museum ship in Novorossiysk, preserved in large part through the efforts of Evgeny Primakov.