Mikhaïl Illarionovitch Golenichtchev-Koutouzov

Kutuzov was born in 1745 into a noble family; he rose under Catherine II, fought the Ottomans, studied heavy infantry and steppe logistics. In 1805 he was present at Austerlitz but did not command the whole: the Russo-Austrian defeat marked him. In 1812, when Napoleon crossed the Niemen, Alexander hesitated between Barclay de Tolly — advocate of structured retreat — and Bagration, more offensive. Kutuzov, an elderly one-eyed heavyset man, embodied compromise: prestige of the old soldier, diplomatic reputation with the tsar.

His appointment to unified command in August 1812 aimed to calm factions. Kutuzov knew he could not crush Napoleon in one pitched battle: he had to wear the enemy by space, partisans, burned supplies. This strategy, long credited only to the « Russian people », actually rested on staff decisions the marshal assumed before a sceptical court.

On 7 September 1812 near Borodino village, two hundred thirty thousand men fought the greatest battle of the invasion. Kutuzov accepted shock to slow Napoleon, not to destroy him. The bloody day — redoubts, Murat’s and Ney’s cavalry, Raevsky’s counter-attacks — decided nothing: the French held the field, the Russians withdrew in good order toward Moscow. Napoleon, exhausted, did not launch the total pursuit his marshals demanded.

Kutuzov reported to Alexander a famous formula: Russia had not lost if the army still existed. Empty then burned Moscow became the ultimate argument: Napoleon had no clear political goal left. The marshal organised strategic retreat toward Tarutino then Kaluga while Cossacks and small war gnawed French columns. Borodino remains « glory enough for one day » — words lent to Napoleon, but the strategic sense is Russian: avoid annihilation, preserve the core.

Kutuzov did not cross the Berezina alone: he coordinated pincers that kept Napoleon from exploiting his breakthrough. The French army emerged in tatters; the Russian army, sick and exhausted too, held a siege inverted from the Napoleonic model. Alexander elevated the marshal; Russian public opinion saw him as saviour of the fatherland — an image Tolstoy in War and Peace both magnified and humanised as a tired old man close to the people.

Kutuzov died in April 1813 at Bunzlau in Silesia as the 1813 campaign opened. He would see neither Leipzig nor Paris. His military posterity influenced theories of defence in depth; for Empire Napoléon he remains the tactical antithesis of the thunderbolt: the one who won by refusing Napoleonic play on its own ground.