The tsar versus the emperor

BOOKS that genuinely break new ground don’t come along very often, and even then they tend to be academic rather than reader-friendly.

Dominic Lieven’s Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807-1814 is both readable and a landmark historical work.

As Lieven points out, no western professor has written a book on Russia’s contribution to Napoleon’s defeat. Because of the difficulty in accessing Russian sources before the fall of the Soviet Union, most work has focused on British, French, and German sources, and on Russia only until the end of the French invasion of 1812.