Napoleon, Alexander and 1812 Will Never Be Seen in the Same Light Again

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RUSSIA AGAINST NAPOLEON: THE BATTLE FOR EUROPE, 1807-1814 By Dominic Lieven (Allen Lane, Pounds 30) WHEN US envoy Averell Harriman congratulated Stalin on taking Berlin, the Soviet dictator snapped back: "Yes, but Alexander I made it to Paris." The story of 1812 contains everything: the hubristic arrogance of the brilliant dictator, Napoleon, who thought he could conquer from Madrid to Moscow; the shambolic withdrawal of the inept Russian army under the direction of weak-willed Emperor Alexander I and his wise general, Kutuzov; the fall and burning of Moscow; Napoleon's disastrous retreat, the genius defeated only by snow and Russia's vastness, followed by Napoleon's abdication in 1814. The story owes everything to French and German memoirs and the mythology of Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace, while no western scholar has really researched the Russian side. As an addicted reader of Napoleonic and Russian history, I've always longed for an account that reveals what really happened on the Russian side and that places 1812 in context. Now that book has arrived. It will change the way Napoleon and 1812 are henceforth covered by future historians.

"For very many years I've wanted to write this story," writes its author Professor Dominic Lieven, "but I'm an old-fashioned historian who likes his stories to be true. I came to the conclusion that the story [of 1812] told in Europe was very far from the truth." So Lieven's purpose "is to tell the story of how and why Russia defeated Napoleon in a more truthful way".

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Napoleon, Alexander and 1812 Will Never Be Seen in the Same Light Again

Using massive new sources, Lieven has written a magnificent and outstanding tour-de-force that is truly a triumph of brilliant storytelling, original research, revelatory ...

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