*Doesn't post it*
MUWHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!
Okay, okay...
OOC: As promised. I hope to take it as far as I can, until I get bored. This is based on a (sadly not translated to English) short story I recently re-read, called "Napoleon in Russia: Crime and Punishment", investigating a brief scenario of results of Napoleon adopting a different policy while in Russia. I will take from there:
- The PoD.
- Some of the concepts/events.
- Some of the non-historical characters that rose to prominence here.
So anyway.
IC:
Stolen from Centannia:
The Moscow Campaign
"1812: In the spring, Napoleon made the fatal decision
to go to war against Russia. He amassed a huge
pan-European army in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw.
Every state under Napoleonic domination sent an
army. Germans, Italians, and Polish troops prepared
to march to Moscow under the French flag.
Anxious to secure the Empire before the French
attack, the Russian czar Alexander guaranteed the
autonomous status of Finland in early 1812. He signed
a peace with the Ottoman Turks, abandoning Serbia
for a while, and pulled his troops out of Moldavia and
Wallachia.
As French forces were pulled out of Spain for the
Russian campaign, the Spanish and British were able
to advance into central Spain.
On June 24, 1812 the 500,000 strong French Grande
Armée crossed the border into Russia. The Prussians
and Austrians in grudging alliance with Napoleon
opened other fronts.
In August, 1812 the French army occupied Smolensk,
halfway to Moscow. The Russians strategically
retreated before Napoleon's main force, while they
defended Riga and the Baltic coast from the smaller
Prussian army.
For every foot of ground gained in Russia, another
was lost in Spain. Napoleon had apparently given up
hope of victory in Spain. He intended to keep at least
a piece of the country, but the Spanish rapidly took
over southern Spain in 1812."
STOP. COMMENCE ALTER TRAIL OF NAPOLEON'S THOUGHTS IN SMOLENSK. RESUME.
August, 1812. Napoleon begun to be worried with the reports of partisan raids, both those of the cavalry units left behind by the Russians in order to raid his supllies and those of the Russian civilians behind his lines. Also he was concerned by the outbursts of patriotism caused by Tsar Alexander's propaganda. Thus, he decided to gain some population support here via radical reforms in occupied territory. More specifically, he sent "ambassadors" throughout nearby Russian lands to declare the serfs to be free from their masters now. He called for them to rise up in his support. Though that did not have the needed result in SOME areas, where the serfs were either afraid of their masters, either of the Russian army, either of hunger (the lands were held by the nobles, after all), but in the territory surrounding Napoleon's trail, the spark appeared. Serfs rebelled, killing their masters. This anarchy disrupted Russian supplies; the Russian army was forced to retreat north. Some of the freed serfs actually joined the French army and used to harrass the Russian tsarist troops. Meanwhile, however, Napoleon accidentally trusted a new spy system, formed by one of the "serf generals", one Leontiy Petrov (OOC: apparently a fictional character of the author, Timofey Aleshkin). Slowly, but surely, Leontiy Petrov placed Napoleon and his army in dependancy on him for precise information. The French own intellegence at some point despaired, and did not even try to match him, thus getting out of shape.
But anyway. Napoleon entered Moscow, right on time. Parts of Napoleon's forces then secured Kiev. Anarchy filled large parts of Russia, as the Cossacks, remembering "Pugachev's days", rebelled as well; Napoleon was now quite sure Alexander would negotiate with him. Alexander did not do so, however; he was trying to regain control via diplomacy, while fighting back French, Prussian and serf armies near Petersburg. Prussians were dismoralized; serfs were disorganized; French were outnumbered, so Alexander could keep them at bay. But Napoleon was sure that Alexander will eventually surrender. He garrisoned the Russian cities under his control and prepared for an offensive towards St. Petersburg to hurry Alexander up. But then, these plans were suddenly wrecked. Petrov proved a cunning politician. First waiting for Napoleon to weaken the Tsar enough, Petrov built up his own "People's Guard", a well-trained unit formed from not only serfs, but also sympathetic citizens, and then, in 5th of October 1812, declared war on Napoleon, fleeing from Moscow with his Guard just before the letter was received by the French emperor.
Enraged, Napoleon ordered troops to catch Petrov, but by then Petrov managed to retreat to Ryazan, where he arranged a meeting with the other "serf generals", and with some of the REAL partisan commanders that by then were somewhat alienated by French arrogance and Napoleon's general lack of respect for them. While the French realized that they were just effectively "blinded", Petrov managed to form a (admittedly rather loose) coalition of Republican Russian forces. He was their political leader - the military command went to a hussar officer, Denis Davidov, (OOC: a real-life person) who by then became a commander of the forces in west European Russia, that were supposed to harrass Napoleon's advance in the name of the Tsar but who were forced to ally with Petrov after it became obvious that the Tsar was unlikely to be able to break out of Petersburg any time soon.
Still infuriated, Napoleon realized that the campaign towards Petersburg was too dangerous an adventure. At first he wanted to deal with the rebellion, but later he received an alarming letter intercepted by the French DIPLOMATIC intellegence, which was still quite good. Austria and Prussia, having heard of Napoleon's misfortunes in Russia and Spain alike, decided that the republicans in Russia were still rather weak and divided and thus were not an immediate threat. Therefore, the best course of action for them was to withdraw from Russia and then to attack Napoleon's empire while he and the Grande Armee are away. Napoleon also received news of a planned republican coup in Paris, where Napoleon's position was seen very vulnerable as well. "He found his Poltava" - some said.
After Alexander stubbornly refused to negotiate with him, Napoleon decided to take the following step. Declaring Ney to be the "King of Muscovy" and leaving him with a part of his army, he and the rest of it quickly moved back towards Warsaw to make sure nobody more in the Continental System rebels against him and to gather a new army (attrition is a bad thing, even if there aren't Cossacks chasing after you and if you have some supplies). He said to the world to cover his retreat that, "if Alexander does not wish to negotiate, then I shall not await his audience like a petty noble might. Let him come begging to me when he changes his mind."
Alexander, ofcourse, was quite desperate, and realized by then that the forces arranged against him were too great. The Prussian withdrawal and the end of Napoleon's alliance with Petrov gave him some breathing room though, and so he gathered his army, bloodied at Riga and at Novgorod throughout late 1812, and marched south. The serf armies were not very strong in the north, so the French were Alexander's goal. Attacking them at Tver, Kutuzov managed to seize the city. From there, he threatened Moscow itself, but in the Battle at Gjatsk in January 19th 1813, a bitter draw, Kutuzov was killed by a bullet. The Tsarist offensive bogged down.
At that point, the French control was once again limited to "Napoleon's Corridor" (the route of original march to Moscow). In the north, the Tsarists, now led by Alexander himself, were attacking. Barklay de Tolly's tsarist forces were advancing from the east/northeast as well. The republican forces at that point siezed Kiev and declared a "Russian Republic" at Tarutino. The republicans were capable of controlling large amounts of land, but they were quite inferior in direct encounters to both the Tsarist and the French forces; only the People's Guard could indeed effectively stand up to an equal-sized French unit was more then a hour. The Tsarist forces were quite diminished in size and morale by then, and were less of a threat. So they had to wage a guerrila campaign instead with most forces, occasionally (like at Kiev) attacking seriously outnumbered forces. Davidov was an expert at this; he even created an army of proffesional guerrilas, who were called "pugaches" (or "les pougatchis" by their terrified French opponents) in the name of Pugachev. The pugaches assassinated officers, raided supply lines, commited atrocities on French prisoners and made the Peninsular War seem like a walk in a park and the Spanish guerrilas like a sunday chorus (both damage-wise and atrocity-wise). Indeed, in THIS history the word "guerrila" is replaced in English by the word "pugach" ("pugaches", "pugach warfare", "pugach campaign", etc). This made Ney lose his temper and he begun punitive campaigns to burn down villages. Which resulted in more pugaches and more attrocities. Which resulted in more punitive campaigns...
And while the chaos continued in Russia, Napoleon received news of more and more defeats in Spain. By then he did not hope to hold it, and did not really want it as much, but there was a risk of Wellington crossing into France. Allowing that would be a sign of weakness, and so Napoleon sent a part of his army led by Jourdan to Spain, to replace Sult. Meanwhile, he himself continued to prepare an army for yet another campaign against Austria and Prussia, while demanding them to reenter the war against the Russians. At that point, Prussians (bolstered by some of the tsarist forces that refused to follow Davidov when he allied with Petrov) felt themselves ready for war, especially upon British and Austrian urgings.
Europe was ready to blow up; Russia was in chaos. (America was also not a peaceful place, but I don't think War of 1812 would be much different from OTL)
To be continued...
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