Vasily Vereshchagin. In Defeated Moscow. Arsonists or Shooting in the Kremlin. The description of the picture.

                                    Tanais Gallery

Very city taken by the enemy has to obey the winner. After entering Moscow Napoleon at once appointed some persons to keep order in this new-taken city. He appointed Marshal Mortier the General-Governor and former French Consul Lesseps the Commissary of the Moscow Province.

But the troubles made by the terrible fire were redoubled by numerous robberies in that took part both the soldiers of the Great Army and many Russian criminals too that were dismissed from prisons by Moscow Governor Rostopchin just before Napoleon's army entered Moscow.

The Moscow fire irritated the French very much and they needed somebody to vent their anger upon. Napoleon ordered to form the military courts and execute the captured arsonists without any mercy. And hunting for them began. It was enough only to be somewhere near the burning house to be suspected, captured, taken to the military court and executed...

Why Moscow burned?

The best explanation of the tragedy so far belongs to Leo Tolstoy, who wrote in his ‘War and Peace”:

"The French attributed the Fire of Moscow au patriotisme feroce de Rostopchine, the Russians to the barbarity of the French. In reality, however, it was not, and could not be, possible to explain the burning of Moscow by making any individual, or any group of people, responsible for it… Deserted Moscow had to burn as inevitably as a heap of shavings has to burn on which sparks continually fall for several days. A town built of wood, where scarcely a day passes without conflagrations when the house owners are in residence and a police force is present, cannot help burning when its inhabitants have left it and it is occupied by soldiers who smoke pipes, make campfires of the Senate chairs in the Senate Square, and cook themselves meals twice a day…"

                      Mikhail Lermontov.
Moscow, Moscow! .. love you like a son,
As Russian — much flame and gently!
I love thy holy shine sedin
And the Kremlin is serrated, serene.
In vain, thinking alien ruler
With you, hundredth Russian giant,
Pomeryatsya head and deceit
You overthrow. Vain break
You alien: you vzdrognul — he fell down!
Universe zamolkla ... Majestic,
One you are alive, the heir of glory.