Mikhail Kutuzov

Anyone asking who was Mikhail Kutuzov usually begins with 1812, but his story starts nearly seven decades earlier. Mikhail Illarionovich Golenishchev-Kutuzov was born in Saint Petersburg in September 1745 (some older sources give 1747), the son of Illarion Matveyevich Golenishchev-Kutuzov, a military engineer who served under Peter the Great and rose to the rank of lieutenant general ^[1]. The family belonged to the old service nobility, and a military career for the boy was never seriously in question.

Kutuzov entered the Artillery and Engineering School in Saint Petersburg at the age of twelve, where his father taught, and he proved a quick student of mathematics, fortification, and languages ^[2]. He eventually spoke French, German, and Polish fluently, and later added some English, Swedish, and Turkish, a linguistic range unusual among Russian officers of his generation ^[1]. He graduated early, served briefly as an instructor, and received his first commission in 1761.

His early postings included staff work under the military governor of Reval and a period in Poland fighting the Bar Confederation in the late 1760s. These campaigns gave the young officer his first experience of irregular warfare and of the plodding logistics that shaped every eighteenth century army, lessons that surfaced again decades later when he faced Napoleon ^[2].

The wars against the Ottoman Empire made Kutuzov's reputation and very nearly ended his life. Serving under Pyotr Rumyantsev and later Alexander Suvorov during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768 to 1774, he distinguished himself in combat in the Danube theater and in Crimea ^[3]. In July 1774, near Alushta on the Crimean coast, a Turkish bullet struck him near the temple and exited by his right eye. Surgeons considered the wound fatal, yet he recovered, though the eye was permanently damaged and troubled him for the rest of his life ^[1].

Catherine the Great took notice of the wounded officer, funded his convalescence abroad, and he used the journey to study military practice in Prussia, Austria, and Britain ^[3]. A second head wound followed in 1788 during the siege of Ochakov in the next Turkish war, and once again doctors marveled that he survived. The Austrian Prince de Ligne reportedly joked that the general kept getting shot in the head and kept refusing to die ^[2].

Kutuzov fought under Suvorov at the storming of Izmail in December 1790, one of the bloodiest assaults of the century, where he commanded a column and was named commandant of the captured fortress ^[3]. Suvorov praised his conduct in dispatches. Promotion followed, along with a run of senior assignments through the 1790s: ambassador to Constantinople, director of the Land Cadet Corps in Saint Petersburg, ambassador to Berlin, and military governor of Saint Petersburg under Emperor Paul ^[1]. The diplomatic posts mattered. They sharpened the tact, patience, and gift for reading opponents that later defined his generalship.

In 1805 Alexander I gave Kutuzov command of the Russian army sent to support Austria against Napoleon. After the Austrian surrender at Ulm left him exposed, Kutuzov conducted a skilful fighting retreat down the Danube valley, slipping away from French attempts to trap him ^[4]. He argued for continued withdrawal until reinforcements arrived, but the young tsar and his Austrian allies insisted on battle. The result was Austerlitz on 2 December 1805, a catastrophic allied defeat that Kutuzov had opposed and for which he nevertheless absorbed much of the blame at court ^[4].

Alexander never fully forgave him, and Kutuzov spent the following years in secondary posts, including the military governorship of Kiev and command against the Turks on the Danube. That Turkish command produced one of the most consequential and least famous of Mikhail Kutuzov achievements: in 1811 and early 1812 he defeated the Ottoman army at Ruse and then negotiated the Treaty of Bucharest in May 1812, ending the war weeks before Napoleon crossed the Niemen and freeing the Army of the Danube for the coming struggle ^[5].

When the French invasion began in June 1812, command initially rested with Barclay de Tolly, whose strategy of retreat preserved the army but enraged public opinion. Under pressure, Alexander appointed the sixty six year old Kutuzov commander in chief in August 1812, a choice greeted with popular enthusiasm because he was Russian, Orthodox, and a pupil of Suvorov ^[6]. Kutuzov, in fact, largely continued the retreat his predecessor had begun.

On 7 September 1812 Kutuzov gave battle at Borodino, roughly 120 kilometers west of Moscow. The single day of fighting was among the bloodiest of the Napoleonic Wars, with combined casualties usually estimated at around 70,000 or more men ^[6]. The Russians held their ground through the day and withdrew in order that night. Napoleon captured the field but not the destruction of the Russian army he needed.

At the council of war at Fili on 13 September, most generals urged another battle before Moscow. Kutuzov overruled them with a judgment that has been quoted in Russian histories ever since: the loss of Moscow would not mean the loss of Russia, but the loss of the army would mean the loss of everything ^[4]. The army marched through the city and swung southeast, and Moscow, largely abandoned, burned within days of the French entry.

What followed vindicated him. Kutuzov camped at Tarutino, screening the fertile southern provinces, rebuilding his forces, and letting hunger, distance, and the approach of winter work on the French. When Napoleon finally left Moscow in October, Kutuzov blocked his southern escape route at Maloyaroslavets, forcing the Grande Armée back onto the devastated Smolensk road it had already stripped bare ^[6]. He then shadowed the retreating French in a parallel march, striking at Vyazma and Krasny while avoiding a full pitched battle, a policy criticized by aggressive subordinates and British observers but defended by Kutuzov as the surest way to destroy the invader at least cost in Russian lives ^[2]. Of the roughly 600,000 soldiers who entered Russia with Napoleon's multinational army, only a small fraction recrossed the border as an organized force ^[6]. In December 1812 the tsar granted Kutuzov the victory title Prince of Smolensk and the Order of Saint George, first class, making him the first man to hold all four classes of Russia's highest military decoration ^[1].

Behind the campaign maps stood a sociable, worldly, and sometimes indolent man. In 1778 Kutuzov married Ekaterina Ilyinichna Bibikova, daughter of a lieutenant general. The couple had six children, five daughters who survived to adulthood and a son who died in infancy ^[1]. The marriage endured despite long separations and Kutuzov's well documented fondness for comfort and female company on campaign.

Contemporaries described a courtier as much as a soldier: charming, cunning, fond of good food and long naps, able to flatter Catherine the Great, survive the erratic Paul, and manage the distrustful Alexander ^[2]. Critics, including some of his own generals, read the same traits as laziness and evasiveness. His habit of dozing through councils of war became legendary, though those who knew him suspected the sleepiness was partly theater, a way of committing to nothing prematurely.

His damaged right eye, the legacy of the Alushta wound, has generated a durable myth. He is often depicted with an eye patch, yet contemporary portraits show no patch, and historians note that he retained partial sight in the eye for years ^[3]. The patch belongs mostly to twentieth century film and popular illustration rather than to the man himself.

The winter campaign of 1812 broke Napoleon's army, and it also finished Kutuzov. As the Russian forces pushed into Poland and Prussia in early 1813, opening the War of the Sixth Coalition, the old field marshal's health collapsed under the strain of the pursuit through snow and mud ^[4]. He had privately questioned whether Russia should spend more blood liberating Europe once the invader was expelled, a caution the tsar did not share.

He fell gravely ill at Bunzlau in Prussian Silesia (now Bolesławiec in Poland) and died there on 28 April 1813, at the age of sixty seven ^[1]. Alexander I concealed the news from the troops for a time to protect morale. Kutuzov's embalmed body was carried back to Saint Petersburg and buried with state honors inside the Kazan Cathedral, before which his statue now stands ^[5].

A memorial was later erected at Bolesławiec, and the town still maintains its connection with the marshal's death. In Russia, mourning was genuine and broad: for a public that had watched Moscow burn, the one eyed old general had become the face of national deliverance ^[6].

Any honest Mikhail Kutuzov biography has to reckon with two competing portraits. In Russian national memory, shaped above all by Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Kutuzov appears as the wise old man who understood that patience, space, and the spirit of the people would defeat Napoleon where clever maneuvers could not ^[7]. Tolstoy made him a philosophical hero, almost passive by design. Western military historians have often been cooler, crediting Barclay de Tolly with the original strategy of retreat and faulting Kutuzov for sluggish pursuit and missed chances at the Berezina crossing ^[2].

Modern scholarship tends to land between the extremes. Studies of the 1812 campaign emphasize that Kutuzov's caution was deliberate policy: he preserved a Russian army at the end of the war, which gave Alexander the power to dictate events in 1813 and 1814, and he achieved the destruction of the invasion force at a cost his country could bear ^[6]. His Turkish victories and the Treaty of Bucharest, which secured Russia's southern flank on the eve of invasion, are increasingly recognized as strategic contributions of the first order ^[5].

The commemorations are everywhere in Russia. The Order of Kutuzov, created by the Soviet government in 1942 during another desperate defensive war, remains a decoration of the Russian Federation today ^[8]. Kutuzovsky Prospekt in Moscow, the Kutuzov statue before Kazan Cathedral in Saint Petersburg, and the Borodino battlefield museum all keep the name current. Among basic Mikhail Kutuzov facts, perhaps the most telling is this: he never won a famous set piece victory over Napoleon in open battle, and yet he presided over the most complete destruction of any army Napoleon ever led ^[6].