Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807-1814
By Dominic Lieven
Allen Lane £30, 672 pages
FT Bookshop price: £24

Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is regarded as the summit of Russia’s literary achievement. It is also the source of an annoying national stereotype.

In the book, victory in the epic 1812 campaign against Napoleon was due not to superior leadership and a better army but accident and improvisation, the long winter and immense distances. If the Russians of War and Peace have superior skill in anything, it is the ability to see their helplessness before the onslaught of history and nature, and to act accordingly. Napoleon’s failure, according to Tolstoy, was his closely held illusion of his own leadership.

Tolstoy’s heroes are epitomised by Prince Pyotr Bagration, who gave no commands at the battle of Austerlitz but tried to appear as though everything done “by necessity, by chance, and by the will of individual officers, was all done, if not by his order, at least in accordance with his intentions”.

Napoleon’s genius, Tolstoy suggests, was a hallucinogenic bubble popped by the earthy values of Russia’s peasantry, the raw materials from which the Russian nation was being forged. Tolstoy praises the irrational over the rational, and the inevitable over the contingent. He also elevates fiction over fact, with lasting consequences; the most influential account we have of the Russian side of the conflict is Tolstoy’s own, at least until now.

Dominic Lieven, professor of Russian history at the London School of Economics, seeks to correct the entrenched view that Tolstoy has inculcated in generations of scholars of Russia, and in Russians themselves. It is one that, in Lieven’s words, “radically underestimates the Russian achievement”. In Russia Against Napoleon, the first major English-language book devoted to the Russian side of the campaign, he argues that “one key reason why Russia defeated Napoleon was that her key leaders out-thought him”.

In reality, Lieven argues, the Russian army was one of Europe’s best, its tactics carefully planned to counter those of the Grande Armée. Lieven asserts that Russia’s leadership, from Tsar Alexander down, simply understood Napoleon better than Napoleon understood Russia. From the very beginning the Russians expected an attack, thanks to their first-rate intelligence operation in Paris. They also planned for a drawn-out defensive war to wear down Napoleon.

Unlike War and Peace, Lieven’s book has no love interest to keep us turning the pages during accounts of who commanded which regiment on which flank in which battle. Instead, the fascination is to be found in court politics and the interaction between Russia’s statesmen and generals, left second-guessing one another the closer Napoleon came to Moscow. Trust in the leadership was pushed to breaking point as retreat followed retreat. Then came the need to restrain euphoria as the French turned tail, a flight that culminated in the capture of Paris.

We get a taste of the huge dust storms raised by the thousands of men and horses retreating on Russia’s unpaved roads. The faceless Russian army assumes flesh and blood in Lieven’s explanation of its multi-ethnic officer class and the life of its soldiers.

Lieven goes toe-to-toe with Tolstoy, writing the type of history disparaged by the count as that of “heroes and sovereigns”, which in the epilogue of War and Peace he compares to paper money: “Such histories may pass ... so long as no question arises as to their value.”

The value of Lieven’s history will have to be left for peer reviewers, but enjoyment of this erudite, monumental piece of historical research should not be. It’s a great tale with a clear argument, backed by an impressive array of sources and detail. Fortunately, the book is structured chronologically. We know how it ends – but there is still plenty of suspense.

Charles Clover is the FT’s Moscow bureau chief