As Russian confidence grew, so arguments over strategy with
western commanders became more frequent. The most significant such dispute came
at Grodno in early 1706, where Peter had deputed Menshikov to keep an eye on
the Scottish field-marshal Ogilvy who, following the departure of Augustus, was
in sole command of forty-five infantry battalions and six dragoon regiments,
some 35,000 men.58 All correspondance with Ogilvy was conducted via Repnin, the
senior Russian officer present, who received a copy of every order Peter sent
Ogilvy. As Charles advanced on Grodno, Peter, fearing the loss of much of his
precious army, ordered Ogilvy to abandon the city and withdraw towards the
Russian frontier. Ogilvy, despite the fact that supplies were running short,
and against the advice of Repnin, Menshikov, Hallart and Wenediger, argued that
it was impossible to evacuate Grodno, expressing his wish that Charles would
attack, adding that: ‘do not doubt that it will bring complete victory in a few
hours.’ He objected that he would be forced to destroy the heavy artillery
because he did not have enough horses to transport it. Peter’s reply, sent
after he received news of the disaster at Fraustadt, was sharp: he ordered
Ogilvy to abandon Grodno forthwith, to take only regimental artillery with him,
and to destroy the heavy guns. Once he had left the city, Ogilvy was to divide his
forces and send them eastwards by separate routes. This might expose individual
sections to destruction, but Peter wished at all costs to avoid a general
battle which might wipe out the whole army. Ogilvy finally began the evacuation
on 11/22 March, but not before he had once more risked Peter’s wrath by bluntly
contesting his order, stating that it would be better to stay in Grodno until
the summer, despite the shortage of provisions; as he admitted, the Swedish
light cavalry was picking off foraging parties sent out from the city. Even
when he was on the point of abandoning Grodno, he urged Peter to retake it.
The dispute with Ogilvy demonstrated the extent to which
Peter and his Russian commanders had begun to liberate themselves from the
assumptions of their western advisers. Defence must be based on mobility, not
fortresses, which could be death-traps for armies, something which Peter could
not risk. The different philosophies were revealed in a further argument over
the composition of the army, when Peter rejected Ogilvy’s recommendation of a
force of thirty regiments of foot and only sixteen of horse, deciding on a
ratio of forty-seven infantry to thirty-three cavalry regiments; as Sheremetev
recognised, cavalry was vitally important even in siege warfare in the east.
The parting of the ways was not long delayed. In April, Ogilvy requested his
release from Russian service; in September, he was finally allowed to leave.
Henceforth, the Russian army was largely commanded by Russians. The long apprenticeship
was over, and the new maturity of Russian strategic thinking was apparent in
the council which met in Żółkiew in April 1707. Here the decision was taken not
to join battle in Poland-Lithuania, despite Polish pressure, or to garrison
fortresses in the Commonweath, but to withdraw through Lithuania into Russia
itself, and organise a flexible defence against possible Swedish lines of
attack.64 Although Peter is often credited as the creator of this plan, it is
clear that Russian commanders, especially Sheremetev, played an important part
in its formulation. It was dangerous, since it risked alienating the Sandomierz
confederates, who wished to adopt an offensive strategy and force Charles to a
decisive battle in the Commonwealth.
As the Swedes marched east, the Russians melted away before
them, destroying everything in their path. The Swedes faced similar problems to
those experienced by Batory 130 years earlier. Lyth’s description of marching
through deep forest in the autumn of 1708 could have been lifted from
Piotrowski’s diary:
we lost many men and many horses, which died of hunger,
so that our misery grew ever greater; we had to watch as both men and horses
alike, exhausted by hunger, dropped to the ground and died there miserably; so
it remained for us doubly worse.
A month later the army emerged into a wilderness of deserted
and smoking villages, whence everything had been carried away, in which they
were constantly harried by enemy raids, so that they were not safe from attack
‘for a single hour’, as the great cry went up from the army ‘what shall we
eat?’ Like Batory’s army at Pskov, units had to forage for miles in all
directions to obtain supplies. There was one major difference, however. When
Batory laid siege to Pskov he was facing an exhausted and disorganised enemy,
and his cavalry dominated the theatre of operations. Charles, for all the
formidable qualities of his army, was facing a very different opponent. Peter
might be cautious about exposing his precious new army in open battle, but his
forces, augmented by large numbers of Cossack and Kalmuk irregulars, were more
than capable of subjecting the Swedes to the high-level harrassment Charles X’s
armies had experienced in Poland in the 1650s. This ensured that Swedish supply
problems steadily increased: forage parties were easy targets for roaming
Russian units, and the constant skirmishes hit morale badly. The Swedish
cavalry may have been superior on the battlefield, but the Russians were
numerically stronger and well-suited to a campaign of harassment.
For all the sense of tragic inevitability which pervades
accounts of Charles’s Russian campaign, he had little choice but to attempt
what he recognised was a risky operation, and his conduct of it was by no means
as strategically inept as it is often portrayed. There were good reasons for
the decision to turn south in the autumn of 1708. The move into the Ukraine
would open easier lines of communication through Volhynia, Podolia and Ruthenia
to Leszczyński, and bring the Swedes closer to the Turks and Tatars, whom
Charles had good reason to believe might be persuaded to join the war against
Russia. Whether or not Charles wished to force Peter to a decisive battle after
crossing the Dnieper, or, as Stille believes, he was attempting an ambitious
flanking move, he had failed by mid-September. The Swedes did catch the Russian
cavalry at Tatarsk (10/21 September), but the ground was unfavourable and
Charles was unwilling to risk an attack. A march north was now impossible. The
Russians were laying waste the countryside – the Swedes counted the flames of
twenty-four burning villages from their encampment – while Lewenhaupt and
Rehnskióld agreed that the roads from Smolensk to Moscow would be impassible.
The supply situation was becoming serious, morale was suffering, and the army
greeted the decision to turn south with relief:
we have been in a very desolate country … half a mile
from the boarders of Muscovy, where we found nothing but what was burnt and
destroyd, and of large villages little left but the bare names, we had allso
news of the like destruction as farr as Smolensko, which has had this happy
effect on His Maj:ty that he has desisted from pursuing the ennemy, and turnd
his march to the right, with intention as is supposd to make an incursion into
Ukrain, this is a country … wery plentifull of all necessaryes and where no
army as yet has been.
It was undoubtedly an error to turn south without waiting
for Lewenhaupt, or turning back towards the Dnieper to meet him, as Piper
urged; it is clear that Charles, despite optimistic reports that Lewenhaupt was
across the Dnieper, was aware that he was not. Charles was confident that
Lewenhaupt would be capable of beating off any attack, but underestimated the
Russian ability to seize the opportunity. Peter sent Sheremetev to shadow the
main Swedish army, while detaching a force of 6,795 dragoons and 4,830
infantry, mounted on horses to ensure rapidity of movement. This korvolant
(corps volant) moved swiftly on Lewenhaupt’s force, whose speed was reduced by
the need to maintain full battle order on the march to protect the cumbersome
wagon train. The Swedes gave a good account of themselves at Lesnaia, but
although they slightly outnumbered the Russians, they were unable to save the
vital supply-train, losing nearly half their strength into the bargain. The
Russian horse might be inferior to the Swedish cavalry, but Lesnaia underlined
the usefulness of dragoons in the eastern theatre of war.
Charles had paid the price of not waiting for Lewenhaupt,
and it is unlikely that Peter would have risked an attack if the main Swedish
army had not turned south. Nevertheless, if the loss of the supply train was a
blow, it was by no means fatal. Initially it seemed that the move south was
justified. On crossing into the Ukraine in early November, Lyth reported that
it was rich in grain, fruit, tobacco and cattle, with few forests and extensive
fields. There was an abundance of honey, flax and hemp, which could be bought
very cheaply; although the Russians had made some effort at destruction, the
Swedes were able to excavate buried supplies, and bread, beer, spirits, wines,
mead, honey, cattle and fodder for the horses were plentiful. By December,
however, the situation had deteriorated sharply; although the Swedes found
ample supplies of tobacco, food and fodder began to be a problem, while the
growing shortages were exacerbated by a sudden and vicious turn in the weather
in what was to prove one of the fiercest winters of the century. In the coldest
snap, in late December, men froze to death in the saddle overnight; on
Christmas Eve, 25–26 men from Lyth’s company succumbed and Lewenhaupt
calculated that 4,000 men fell victim to the cold. This seriously weakened the
army and had a severe effect on morale, but Charles cannot be blamed for the
exceptional severity of the winter. The period of extreme cold was relatively
brief, and although conditions thereafter were far from comfortable, they were
bearable, and if the Swedes suffered, so did the Russians. The Russians were
far better able to replace their losses, however, and it remains true that the
Swedish losses helped shift the balance of advantage towards Peter.
If Charles’s strategy was undoubtedly risky, it was not the
work of a madman or an aggressive psychopath. Nevertheless, the Swedes were
always fighting at a disadvantage in country familiar to their enemies. Further
reverses were to follow. After the loss of Lewenhaupt’s baggage train it was essential
that an alternative store of supplies be secured, but the Swedes lost by a
whisker the race for Baturyn, Mazepa’s headquarters. After the Cossack hetman
had finally declared for Charles, on 24 October (OS), Menshikov sacked Baturyn
(2/13 November), cruelly massacring the population and destroying or carrying
off the precious reserves of arms, ammunition and food with which Charles had
hoped to augment his rapidly-diminishing supplies.
Although Mazepa’s defection was a considerable boost for
Charles, especially when it was followed in March 1709 by that of the Zaporozhians,
it was not to prove decisive. The 1650s, when the Cossacks had briefly promised
to emerge as a significant political force in the southeast, were long gone.
The Ukrainian Ruina had shattered Cossack unity. By looking to the Swedes
Mazepa and the Zaporozhian hetman Kost’ Hordiienko were merely continuing the
politics of the last half century, in which Cossack leaders had manoeuvred
between Poland, Russia and the Ottomans, seeking a basis for the autonomy they
had enjoyed under Khmelnytsky. The Cossacks, although still extremely useful as
sharpshooters and irregular troops, were not the military force they had once
been. Indeed, the heavy casualties which Mazepa’s Cossacks had incurred when
forced by Peter to fight in the north against the Swedes, where they had proved
no match for regular troops, had played a significant role in alienating them.
Moreover, the Zaporozhians were strongly hostile to the Poles, and Charles’s
ill-disguised scheming with Mazepa to eliminate the Commonwealth once and for
all from the Ukraine not only ensured the continuing hostility of the
Sandomierz confederates, it also threatened his relations with Leszczyński, the
Ottomans and the Tatars. In March 1709, Wiśniowiecki, who had extensive
Ukrainian estates, abandoned Leszczyński and rejoined the Sandomierz
Confederation. The destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich by a Russian force in
May 1709 merely demonstrated that Charles’s hopes for a widespread Ukrainian
rebellion against Russia were ill-founded, and that the mobile and much larger
Russian forces were in control of the wider theatre of campaign.
Thus when Charles’s diminishing army finally launched the
general battle he had sought for so long at Poltava on 27 June 1709 (OS) it was
not under the favourable circumstances for which he had hoped. Indeed, although
it was characteristically the Swedes who took the initiative with an ambitious
plan to assault the Russian camp, it was the Russians who had issued the
challenge by crossing the Vorskla to the north of Poltava on 20 June (OS),
three days after Charles’s luck ran out when he received a bad wound in his
foot from a stray bullet while observing the Russian positions. Two days later,
he received final confirmation that neither Leszczyński nor Krassau would be
joining him. Although he accompanied his army into battle borne on a litter,
Rehnskióld took operational command. Unable to provide the inspirational
leadership for which he was famous, Charles was condemned to follow the battle
from a distance, while the morale of his troops was undoubtedly affected.
Nevertheless, a battle was necessary. A Swedish victory, while it might not
destroy the Russian army, would relieve the pressing supply problems, would help
Leszczyński, and might tempt the Ottomans and Tatars to commit themselves. The
only viable alternatives were to withdraw across the Dnieper, southwards to the
Crimea or back towards Poland; both would be hazardous with the Russians across
the Vorskla
