While it may be little consolation to the current inhabitants of that country, Russia's present difficulties pale into insignificance beside those it faced 186 years ago. It was on September 14th, 1812, that the Emperor Napoleon reached the gates of Moscow, the defeated Russians having made their last stand a week before at Borodino. But the weather ultimately provided a solution to their problems.
On his triumphal entry into the city, Napoleon expected the sullen capitulation of a million Muscovites. Instead, to his astonishment, he found an empty city, deserted by almost all of its inhabitants. Then two days later came what was called at the time le patriotisme feroce de Rostopchine. A fire broke out among the empty buildings, started allegedly on the orders of Count Feodor Rostopchine, the Governor of Moscow, and it raged for five days until the greater part of the former Russian capital was reduced to ashes.
The emperor's victory had acquired a very hollow ring. He lingered for a month - a fateful month as it turned out - and on October 18th he ordered the retreat from Moscow. Voila, said the wise old Talleyrand when he heard of this development. Voila le commencement de la fin! (this is the beginning of the end).
The Russian winter of 1812 was one of the most severe ever experienced in that country, and it descended mercilessly on the retreating French before they had covered half the distance to the frontier.
By the middle of November snow was falling continuously. The swollen rivers of Russia, running north-south across the westward path of the fugitives, contained large blocks of swiftly moving ice; building the bridges necessary to cross those rivers became an engineering feat of almost heroic proportions.
By December the retreating forces of the emperor were in total disarray, and the suffering of the ill-clad soldiers was intense. As many as two or three thousand might perish in a single night; some froze to death, dying in the snow where they had fallen; others were slain by peasants and by the wild marauding Cossacks driving home their new advantage. Of the Grande Armee of 400,000 men that had marched proudly into Russia six months previously, only a tiny fraction finally lived to tell the tale.
Napoleon himself, as we know, survived the retreat from Moscow, but it was indeed the beginning of the end. The events of that Russian winter culminated in his abdication in April 1814, and after a brief Indian summer of ephemeral triumph, his role in history finally ended two months later in the small Belgian village of Waterloo.