Alexander M. Martin
Moscow after Napoleon: Reconciliation, Rebuilding, and Contested Memories
Moscow, Russia’s largest city, was the principal site where European urban culture penetrated into the interior of the empire. The Napoleonic invasion of 1812 left the city physically ruined and socially divided, and dealt a severe blow to the effort to make Russia a full-fledged European country. In the immediate aftermath, determined above all to restore social harmony, the regime eschewed prosecutions for wartime looters and collaborators and offered assistance to the economically devastated middle classes. In the decades that followed, it took a twofold approach to strengthening stability. On the one hand, it resumed the long-term project of Europeanization by restoring the spatial, social, and institutional structures created in Moscow in the age of enlightened absolutism. On the other hand, it departed from Enlightenment tradition by embracing a new rhetoric that represented Moscow’s martyrdom in 1812 as proof that it was the repository of morally superior “Russian” values. Moscow as the synthesis of European Enlightenment and Russian nationality was an important ideological prop of the post-Napoleonic Russian regime; the partial discrediting of this construct from the 1840s onward helped undermine the regime’s credibility.
Alexander Martin is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on imperial Russia. He is the author of Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762–1855 (2013) and Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (1997), and the editor and translator of Dmitrii Rostislavov’s Provincial Russia in the Age of Enlightenment: The Memoir of a Priest’s Son (2002). His next project, tentatively titled Seeking a New Life in an Age of Revolution: A German-Russian Odyssey, 1768–1870, is an examination of the history of Germany and Russia through the lens of the experience of one German emigrant family.
