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Hundreds of Russian imperial officers’ letters intercepted by the Prussians after the Battle of Zorndorf have just been discovered in a Berlin archive. Will they shed new light on what happened? Will they provide new answers or any answers at all? Or maybe they will help historians to articulate new questions? How do the generals, officers, and clerks who wrote in Russian, German, French, Georgian come off these pages? How will they measure up to their Prussian counterparts at this «feast of Mars»? The book tries to answer these questions by examining letters from both sides in the context of outside accounts. Detailed portraits emerge of the people of 1758 who lived and fought at this eventful turning-point of the eighteenth century.
The letters were sent in September of 1758, three weeks after the Battle of Zorndorf, as the Russian army retreated across Pomerania into Polish lands. The courier who was in possession of official relations as well as hundreds of personal letters was seized at night close to the Prussian border. The letters were then sent to the Kabinettsministerium in Berlin, which at the time fulfilled the function of the Prussian ministry of foreign affairs. The great mathematician Leonhard Euler, who had lived in Russia and knew the language before moving to Berlin, translated parts of the letters. These selected translations would then become part of the «epistolary war» between Russia and Prussia as each claimed victory at Zorndorf, although it proved to be a bloody stalemate, which cost both sides tens of thousands of lives.
The main part of the publication contains the texts of the letters and accompanying materials, such as Prussian letters and eyewitness accounts of residents around Zorndorf. All the letters are published in full and authentic form. The non-Russian-language letters are published in the original with a Russian translation afterwards. When necessary, short commentaries follow individual letters or groups of letters.
An Introduction opens the volume. Personal documents are important primary sources for Russia’s eighteenth-century socio-cultural history because they offer insight into the self-identification of social groups and the mechanism of articulating «self-identification idioms.» From the middle of the eighteenth to the first quarter of the nineteenth century when the Russian Empire was at war almost constantly, this issue was closely linked with the autobiographical documents of the military estate, which coincided almost completely with the nobility.
The authors of the letters belonged to all levels of the military command from the supreme commander and his generals all the way to the junior officers, intendants and headquarter clerks.
The Baroque-era theatrum belli always presupposed portraying all the actors on the stage, so the accounts of the Russians are coupled with those of their Prussian counterparts. This includes the letters of Prussian officers from Russian archives, in addition to other personal accounts.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, Russia’s epistolary culture was still in the process of formation — the country was still traversing the threshold from old to new Russia. The tradition of continuous and content-rich letter-writing was not something in which all officers engaged. One can assume that we are dealing with the crème de la crème of the army, especially given that the elite guards units did not take part in the Seven Years War.
The volume describes and analyzes the character and structure of the letters: their appearance, contents, and style. In addition to epistolary formulae taken from translated letter-writing manuals there are many elements from spoken Russian that goes back to pre-Petrine Russia. Each letter’s style and appearance depended on the status and age of the author and recipient, as well as its content. The same young man writes a gallant letter to a lady at Court that mixes Russian and French and then composes a patriarchally-respectful letter to his father asking for money. There are also letters of a genre new to the eighteenth century, like love letters and friendship letters. Comparing them to each other demonstrates differences in their emotional content. The emotionality comes across in how the authors divide their text blocks, use interjections (not yet the universal European «Ah!» and «Oh!» but those belonging to the more traditional Muscovite style), and articulate feelings, such as «Merciful Lord, God, how miserable we are.»
A detailed reconstruction of the events leading up to and following the letter’s composition follows, covering the beginning of the campaign in January 1758 to its end in November. The Battle of Zorndorf offers remarkably fertile soil for this. Because it ended indecisively, «never has any battle been written about more than Zorndorf,» as memoirist Andrei Bolotov put it, which includes contemporary accounts as well as official Russian and Prussian documents. The current volume’s aim is not to determine «how things actually happened,» but to incorporate the letters into the microhistory of this stage of the Seven Years War.
As a theatrum belli play, Zorndorf fully demonstrated the role of chance and fate. Both the Prussians and the Russians (who were much less experienced) found themselves in a situation that ran against all the traditional rules of Baroque-era warfare and military order. The losses were enormous — from half to a third of the armies; the battle’s emotional level was unprecedented, and no prisoners were taken. «The Russians fought like devils,» — British military observer Sir Andrew Mitchell recollected. The heat and dust made orientation impossible and led to many fatal mistakes; with commanders missing in action, the armies became uncontrollable. Both sides experienced looting and drunkenness. Disgruntled Russian soldiers attacked their officers.
Many letters reflected the emotional shock of these experiences, which also demanded individual improvisations outside the command structure and the rules of war. Many officers therefore found themselves facing moral questions. To fight or to flee? To help the dying army or to survive? Eventually, they had to come to terms with their decisions. From the military point of view, the verdict of Sir Andrew Mitchell seems most adequate: «The battle of Zorndorf […] was won and lost by both sides.»
Personal accounts have also been used to reconstruct in detail the events unfolding around the letter-writers in the fall of 1758 — the movement of the Russian army eastwards, problems with supplies and transportation, as well as disagreements with the allies — all of which resulted in the retreat behind the Vistula and the end of the campaign.
The introduction identifies at which points and in what form reflections on the battle appear in the letters. It is a pity for the historian that the Prussians did not capture the courier immediately after the battle, but then again, reactions to the carnage needed time to take form and find their articulation after the initial shock.
(Self)-censorship has no practical influence on the letters: Russia had only minimal lustration of personal correspondence at this point, while the sensibility threshold was much higher at the time than in later periods. Nevertheless, many officers write openly about their inability to articulate their feelings in the wake of such extraordinary and shocking events. The real war differs a lot from their normative understanding of it and they often refer to the battle as carnage and butchery. At the same time, the younger officers present the events as a bloody «feast of Mars».
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