Tolstoy & Pirabhakaran Parallels
21 January 2004
Front Note by Sachi Sri Kantha
Recently, I located an interesting essay by environmental scientist David
Ehrenfeld (Rutger’s University) which appeared in the Conservation Biology
journal in 2000. Ehrenfeld had served as the first editor of this journal
from 1986 to 1993. In this essay, he had described succinctly Napoleon’s
disastrous military adventure in Russia and the role of his nemesis Marshal
Mikhail Kutuzov (1745-1813), as viewed by Leo Tolstoy - the famed Russian
author. Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born fifteen years after the death of
Kutuzov.
Many of us have learnt about the military heroics of Napoleon
during our school days, but were rather clueless about his Russian
adversary, who played his cards efficiently, in check-mating the mighty
French army in 1812. Largely because of the British imperialistic hegemony
in the 19th century, the military exploits of Napoleon’s British
adversaries, namely Viscount Horatio Nelson (1758-1805, the hero of the
Battle of Cape Trafalgar, 1805) and Duke of Wellington (1769-1852, the hero
of the Battle of Waterloo, 1815) have been widely disseminated, but Marshal
Kutuzov had remained a shadowy warrior, less admired other than by Tolstoy.
Nearly nine decades ago, a junior contemporary of Tolstoy and the inimitable
Tamil poet Subramaniya Bharathi (1882-1921), in one of his well-known
verses, complained about the petty mind-set of Tamils, as follows:
‘Nenjil uramu minri - Nermai thiranu minri
Vanjanai solvaaradi – Kiliye
Vaai chollil Veeraradi.’
[Without strength in their soul – Without a
straight spine
They pout poisonous words – Baby
They are the talk warriors.]
The parade of ‘talk warriors’ among Tamils
in Colombo and Chennai, as Bharathi complained, continue to spew bile on
Pirabhakaran and LTTE. This parade of political sin-eaters like Lakshman
Kadirgamar and Douglas Devananda make effective use of wordsmiths like
D.B.S.Jeyaraj. For example, in his routine Sunday Leader (January 18, 2004)
commentary, pundit Jeyaraj – while paying compliments to Devananda’s
“constructive contributions to the Hindu religion” (whatever that means has
not been elaborated by the wordsmith!) in his one year ministerial tenure,
snidely slipped in the sentence “The TNA parliamentarians, with the
exception of Anandasangaree, have dedicated their bodies, minds and souls to
the LTTE.” If it is really so, good for them.
Compared to the deeds of
these talk warriors in the past decade, when I read Ehrenfeld’s essay, I saw
more than a few parallels between the strategy adopted by Marshal Kutuzov
(in 1812) and Pirabhakaran (1987-2002). Quite many would also have been
wondering for the past many months what Pirabhakaran and LTTE is up to,
since the February 2002 ceasefire? Thus, I provide the relevant segment of
Ehrenfeld’s interesting essay for digestion.
David Ehrenfeld’s Essay entitled ‘War and Peace and Conservation Biology’
[courtesy: Conservation Biology, February 2000; vol.14, pp.105-112]
“…We
are like the child who pretends to be controlling the car from the back seat
by means of a toy steering wheel. What does one do in circumstances such as
these? Is there a strategy to follow?
The Historical Perspective
Fortunately, this question is as old as history. We can benefit from the
wisdom and experience of others who were grappling with this problem long
before any of us were born. A celebrated example is provided by the
prolonged and often inspired debate over the course of events that began to
unfold in the year 1810, although the real beginnings of such great events
do not have an identifiable date. In that year the Emperor Napoleon, then at
the peak of his power, secured his European flank by marrying Marie-Louise,
daughter of his former enemy, Emperor Francis I of Austria, and began to
move his forces eastward into Prussia and Poland, closer and closer to the
Russian border. By the summer of 1812, he had assembled a huge army at
Kovno, on the Niemen River, and on the night of 24-25 June crossed the river
with his troops to begin the invasion of Russia.
To understand the
argument about Napoleon’s Russian campaign that has continued until the
present day, we need to review its basic outlines. First, the major actors.
In addition to Napoleon, who had supreme authority over the armies of France
and its reluctant allies, including Prussia and Austria, there was Tsar
Alexander I of Russia; Sir Robert Wilson, the representative of Russia’s
principal ally, England, who was attached as commissioner to the Russian
army; and, most important, the elderly Russian commander-in-chief, Field
Marshal Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov. Only a few facts from this enormously
well-documented campaign need concern us. Napoleon’s farthest advance was to
Moscow, which he reached on 14 September. Moscow was huge for its time,
magnificent, but empty, having been deserted by most of its inhabitants, who
systematically set fires as they left. By the night of 15-16 September, much
of the city was burning. Napoleon, who had been sleeping in the Kremlin,
narrowly escaped with his life. After a frustrating and pointless month in
what remained of Moscow, Napoleon marched his army southwestward out of the
city and began his famous retreat, which ended on 14 December, when Marshal
Ney, commanding the French rear guard, sent his few surviving soldiers, some
of whom had stayed alive by eating their comrades, back across the Niemen
into Kovno in temperatures that hovered between 35o and 40o below zero,
Fahrenheit. Napoleon, who had preceded Ney, remarked as he passed through
Warsaw on his way to Paris: ‘I was carried away by events. Perhaps I made a
mistake by going to Moscow, perhaps I should not have stayed there long; but
there is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and it is up to
posterity to judge.’ Of the 420,000 men of the French Grand Army who had
crossed the Niemen in June 1812, plus the 150,000 reinforcements who came
later – 570,000 in all – not quite 30,000 remained alive and capable of
holding a gun at the end of the campaign.
And here is the strangest fact
of all: during the entire campaign only one major battle was fought, at
Borodino, on the road to Moscow and not far from the city. The Battle of
Borodino, one of the bloodiest in history, resulted in the loss of more than
50,000 French soldiers (including 47 generals) and 58,000 Russians. The dead
and wounded were piled so thick on the ground afterward that a sullen and
silent Napoleon, touring the battlefield with bloodshot eyes, found that his
horse had no place to put its feet. Two things stand out about this battle.
First, it seemed to be a draw, yet Kutuzov immediately organized a skillful
and rapid retreat through Moscow to Tarutino, abandoning Moscow to Napoleon,
despite the violent protests of its scheming mayor, Rostopchin. Second,
Kutuzov had not wanted to fight at Borodino but was forced to by
overwhelming pressure from most of his general staff and from the tsar and
General Robert Wilson, the latter of whom considered Kutuzov lazy,
incompetent, and possibly afraid of Napoleon.
Who was Kutuzov? On the one
hand, he was a veteran of the Napoleonic wars, a hero to the Russian people,
and revered by the common soldiers of the army. He was a figure so beloved,
so legendary, that even Tsar Alexander and Robert Wilson, who hated and
despised Kutuzov and worked ceaselessly with disaffected generals on his
staff to undermine the field marshal, were unable to get rid of him. On the
otherhand, he was a fat, self-indulgent, womanizing old man with one eye who
had the disconcerting habit of falling sleep at staff meetings before major
battles, while the final disposition of guns and soliders was being
discussed by his subordinates. In one view of history commonly held after
1812, Kutuzov did nothing to earn the Russian victory over Napoleon: it was
the Russian winter that deserved all the credit. In fact, in this view
Kutuzov was to be blamed for the inactivity that allowed Napoleon to escape,
for not pressing his advantage effectively while the disintegrating French
army, in full retreat, was crossing the treacherously thin ice over the
River Berezina. If Napoleon had been captured at that time, Wilson and
others later argued, Europe would have been spared the ordeal of three more
years of bloody war that culminated in Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo.
But
there was another view of Kutuzov, a view that is especially relevant to the
great issues of our time, from ethnic cleansings to the global onslaught on
biodiversity. This reading of history was advanced by Leo Tolstoy in War and
Peace (1941), first published in 1868-1869. Kutuzov, according to Tolstoy,
understood one grand idea that neither his generals nor the tsar was able to
grasp; great leaders do not really control great events; it is an illusion
to say that a Napoleon determines the outcome of battles and wars through
his reason, his mastery of military science, the application of his genius.
Battles such as Borodino, like most of the truly momentous things that move
history, are enormously more complex, have vastly more variables and
unpredictable events than any human being could possibly control. No general
fully understands a great battle while it is happening. Kutuzov knew this,
said Tolstoy. He knew that Napoleon could be beaten only by a force that no
field marshal could manage, although he (Kutuzov) could take advantage of it
– the force generated by the infinitely subtle interaction between Russian
geography, Russian climate and the spirit of the Russian people. Tolstoy was
convinced that Kutuzov’s reluctance to fight resulted not from fear and not
from passivity. It was in fact an active strategy: avoid bloodshed and the
risks of unpredictable battles, while Russia itself expels the invader. Use
the Russian Army skillfully first to contain the invading force and then to
direct its retreat, but fight only as a last resort. Kutuzov is known to
have said on a number of occasions that he was building Napoleon a ‘golden
bridge’ by which he could leave Russia.
In War and Peace, Kutuzov thinks, ‘They must understand that we can only
lose by taking the offensive. Patience and time are my warriors, my
champions…’ [A]ll Kutuzov’s activity, continued Tolstoy, ‘was directed
towards restraining his troops, by authority, by guile and by entreaty, from
useless attacks, manoeuvers, or encounters with the perishing enemy’. In a
commentary about War and Peace, also written in 1868, Tolstoy (1941)
remarked: ‘Studying so tragic an epoch, so rich in the importance of its
events, so near to our own time, and regarding which so many varied
traditions survive, I arrived at the evident fact that the causes of
historical events when they take place cannot be grasped by our
intelligence.’ This is a difficult idea for late twentieth century people to
understand. We live in a world of simplified representations of the great
events going on around us, from stock market fluctuations to ethnic
conflicts to extinctions. Our world is one of models, of analyses based on
models, and of expert predictions based on the analyses. Our entire
technological civilization is predicated on the assumption that we, the
ultimate managers, can isolate all the important variables from the chaotic
events now happening, make sense of them, and act accordingly. That this
assumption is usually not true occurs to few people.
Tolstoy was an
accomplished historian whose accounts of historical figures such as Kutuzov,
Alexander, and his leading generals were based on his large collection of
documents and sources from the Napoleonic period. His descriptions of events
are supported by the historian Eugene Tarle, writing in 1942, with full
access to previously closed archives in the USSR. Tarle wrote that, ‘Kutuzov
did not believe that Napoleon could retain his world empire after his defeat
in Russia, and he refused to shed Russian blood to obtain a result that was
inevitable in any case.’ According to Tarle, Kutuzov more than anyone knew
the weakness and suffering of his own army, and he kept it carefully out of
Napoleon’s way during the retreat by marching on a parallel course some
miles to the south, despire enormous pressure to fight from the tsar,
Wilson, and his own general staff. General Loewenstern, one of Kutuzov’s
staff officers, wrote in his journal after a successful raid against the
French rear guard: ‘Nothing could compel Kutuzov to act; he even grew angry
with those who pointed out to him the extent of the enemy’s demoralization,
and he chased me from his study for telling him, upon my return from the
battlefield, that half of the French army was rotten.’ Tarle quotes the
brilliant and daring General Denis Davydov, a Kutuzov supporter, who said
that while Napoleon was desperately manoevering to get his army across the
Berezina, Kutuzov deliberately confused his own field commander, Admiral
Chichagov, by sending him incorrectly dated reports on Russian and French
troop movements, thus preventing the bewildered admiral from getting
anywhere near Napoleon’s army….”
End-Note by Sachi Sri Kantha
‘Nobody’s perfect’, as Joe Clark pouted the punch line at the end of Billy
Wilder’s classic movie Some Like it Hot (1959). One should note that Tolstoy
is not one hundred percent perfect in his view that ‘great leaders do not
really control great events.’ By his own logic, how could Tolstoy anticipate
and comprehend the developments in military science (for instance, the use
of air force) and sphagetti-like intertwined global society which
materialized after his death? David Ehrenfeld, in his essay, had
subsequently included three paragraphs citing a revision of Tolstoy’s view
by Sir Isiah Berlin (Russia-born, Oxford philosopher) in his classic The
Hedgehog and the Fox(1953). Tolstoy’s view was based on the period he wrote
War and Peace; i.e. the late 1860s.
Nevertheless, Tolstoy’s description
of the Napoleonic wars and Marshal Kutuzov’s strategy in defeating
Napoleon’s army reveal more than a few lessons in analyzing events close to
our times and knowledge. Parallels to General Pirabhakaran’s strategy in
successfully check-mating the Indian army (1987-90), deflecting the thrust
of Sri Lankan army’s Jaffna capture (1995), regaining the Elephant Pass
(2000) and the currently holding ceasefire (2002-2004) are markedly
comparable.
