was the possibility that Napoleon might free the serfs, as they themselves
urged him to. So fe arful was the Russian elite of the peasantry that it
armed most of the rural militias with useless pikes; near Moscow peasants
who took up arms against French foragers were actually arrested as
mutineers. The fear was well grounded: in December 1812 there were
serious riots among Russian militia regiments raised in the province of
Penza.
It cannot be stressed enough that the Russian peasants did not fight
out of patriotic fervour but for loot, for self-defence and, most of all, for
revenge. Napoleon could not have selected a worse itinerary, for the fu ry
of the peasants on this route was incandescent; this was the third time in
as many months they had been looted and despoiled by marauding
armies. It was noteworthy that when they had a choice, the peasants kept
out of the war and refrained from 'scorched earth' policies - for, after all,
what did that mean but the destruction of their own flocks and produce
without compensation. 'People's war' is a pure myth: the burned crops
and poisoned wells were the work of the Cossacks and the army; when
the French penetrated areas where the Russian army had never been,
everything was intact and supplies were plentiful.
It is quite clear that the dreadful atrocities visited on French prisoners,
stragglers or the wounded were the expression of a terrible displaced
homicidal fu ry towards the Russian nobility: the peasants were doing
with impunity to an invader what, but for fear of death, they would have
done to their own masters. Displaced fury and rage projected on to their
own kind goes far to explain the frightful tradition of cruelty in Russian
peasant life. The peasants thought nothing of stripping adulterous wives
naked and beating them half to death or tying them to the end of a wagon
and dragging them naked though a village, or castrating horse thieves,
branding housebreakers with hot irons or hacking other petty criminals to
death with sickles. Gogol later spoke of the exceptional cruelty of the
Russian people, and the peasantry in particular. Partly it was a function
of a culture in which life was held cheap, partly a reflex action to a harsh
environment, but mostly it was an internalization of the brutality to
which the peasants had been subjected by their 'betters'.
But if the Russian nobility had sowed the wind, it was the luckless
French Army in r812 that reaped the whirlwind. The fortunate ones
taken by the partisans would suffer a quick if agonizing death, being
impaled on stakes or thrown alive into vats of boiling wat er. For the less
fortunate more hideous ends lay in store. The peasants would offer large
sums to the Cossacks to be able to take over their prisoners. Then they
would subject them to stomach-turning tortures: eyes were pulled out,
marcin
(Marcin)
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