Mikhail Kutuzov

Over a career of more than fifty years, Mikhail Kutuzov fought the Poles, the Ottomans and the French for three Russian rulers, survived two bullet wounds to the head, and served as an ambassador as well as a soldier. He is best known as the commander who, in 1812, wore down Napoleon's invading army by retreat and attrition rather than seeking a decisive victory.

Kutuzov was born in Saint Petersburg in September 1745 into a noble family; his father had spent three decades as an officer of military engineers. At twelve he entered an elite school of military engineering, where he proved a gifted student and later taught mathematics. He learned several languages, including French, German and English. In 1762, as a captain, he joined an infantry regiment commanded by Alexander Suvorov, whose habits of short, clear orders, care for ordinary soldiers and leading from the front he adopted for life. He saw his first fighting in Poland in 1768.

From 1770 Kutuzov served in the war of Catherine the Great against the Ottoman Empire. In 1774, leading an assault near Alushta in the Crimea, he was shot through the left temple, the bullet leaving near his right eye. Against expectations he recovered, and while seeking treatment abroad he met Frederick the Great in Berlin. Back in service, he rose to brigadier and then major general. In 1788 a second bullet struck him in almost the same spot, and again he survived. Under Suvorov he took part in the capture of Ochakov and Izmail and the battle of Rymnik in 1789. He then held a string of senior posts, among them ambassador in Istanbul and in Berlin and governor-general of Saint Petersburg in 1801–1802.

In 1805 Kutuzov led the Russian army sent to help Austria. Before the Battle of Austerlitz on 2 December he argued for waiting for reinforcements, but Tsar Alexander I overruled him and ordered the troops off the high ground of the Pratzen plateau, which Napoleon then seized. The allies suffered more than 27,000 casualties. Kutuzov was later given command against the Ottomans again, and in 1812 he brought that war to a close with the Treaty of Bucharest, which gave Russia Bessarabia.

When Napoleon invaded Russia that summer, the long retreat ordered by Barclay de Tolly angered much of the army, and Kutuzov was named commander-in-chief, joining the troops on 29 August. He chose to fight at Borodino, west of Moscow, on 7 September, in a battle involving close to 250,000 men. The French held the field but lost heavily, and the Russian army survived. A war council at Fili then agreed to give up Moscow without a fight. Kutuzov moved south to Tarutino, rested and rebuilt his forces, and blocked the French from turning south at Maloyaroslavets. Napoleon was forced back along the ruined road he had come by, harried by Kutuzov at Vyazma, Krasnoi and the Berezina, and by Cossacks and peasant bands. By mid-December, by one estimate, only about 110,000 of the roughly 612,000 soldiers who had entered Russia remained. Critics, among them some of his own generals, accused him of being too slow.

For the victory at Krasnoi near Smolensk he was given the title Prince Smolensky. He fell ill early in 1813 and died on 28 April at Bunzlau in Silesia, now Bolesławiec in Poland. He was buried in the Kazan Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. Like other nobles of his rank he owned serfs, more than 3,000 of them. Leo Tolstoy made him a wise, patient figure in War and Peace (1869), and during the Second World War the Soviet Union created an Order of Kutuzov in his name.

Our 1800 and 1815 maps show the Russian Empire he served, before and after the defeat of the French invasion of Russia.