ABSTRACT
In Russian and Soviet historical literature guerrilla or irregular warfare has been seen as an important factor in both the victory of 1812 against Napoleon and that of the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. The former case bears many similarities with 1941, in the first instance in that a foreign power had invaded a country in which the peasantry was apparently strongly dissatisfied with its legal relationship to the land and alienated from the elite governing the country. In 1812 underlying discontent was focused in particular on the continued yoke of serfdom with its associated obligations, and increasing pressure on land available to peasant households as they grew in size and subdivided. Discontent stemming from such underlying issues was exacerbated, as Moon notes, during wartime, when additional demands for taxes and recruits for the army resulted in increased peasant unrest.1 Even Soviet authors such as Zhilin, torn between Marxist-Leninist antifeudalism and a Soviet nationalism increasingly becoming a form of Great Russian chauvinism, admitted the potential for Napoleon to win over the peasants if willing to emancipate them. The fact that he did not, and that the French army was forced to live off the land at the expense of the peasantry, pushed the peasantry into opposition much as Western historiography in particular would argue would happen in 1941-2 in the case of German invasion of the Soviet Union.2
