Item: i109602

 Authentic Coin of:

Russia
The 250th Anniversary of the Birth of M.I. Kutuzov
Series: Outstanding Personalities of Russia
1995 Proof Silver 2 Roubles 33mm (15.80 grams) 0.500 Silver (0.2551 oz. ASW)
Reference: Y# 415, CBR# 5110-0010, Schön# 408 Engravers: | I. I. Kopytkin
 ДВА РУБЛЯ 1995г. Ag 500 ММД 7.78 БАНК РОССИИ, The two-headed eagle (designed by I.Bilibin).
ГЕНЕРАЛ-ФЕЛЬДМАРШАЛ КНЯЗЬ ГОЛЕНИЩЕВ-КУТУЗОВ СМОЛЕНСКИЙ 1745 1813, A portrait of M.A. Kutuzov, laurel branch below.

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Prince Mikhail Illarionovich Golenishchev-Kutuzov (Russian: Князь Михаи́л Илларио́нович Голени́щев-Куту́зов, tr. Knyaz’ Mikhaíl Illariónovich Goleníshchev-Kutúzov; German: Mikhail Illarion Golenishchev-Kutuzov Graf von Smolensk; 16 September  S. 5 September] 1745 – 28 April O.S. 16 April 1813) was a Field Marshal of the Russian Empire. He served as a military officer and a diplomat under the reign of three Romanov monarchs: Empress Catherine II, and Emperors Paul I and Alexander I. Kutuzov was shot in the head twice while fighting the Turks (1774 and 1788) and survived the serious injuries seemingly against all odds. He defeated Napoleon as commander-in-chief using attrition warfare in the Patriotic war of 1812. Alexander I wrote that Europe will remember him as one of the famous commanders and that Russia will never forget his worthiness.

In 1805, Kutuzov commanded the Russian corps to oppose Napoleon’s advance on Vienna, but the Austrians were quickly defeated at Ulm in mid-October before they could meet up with their Russian allies.

Kutuzov was present at the battle of Austerlitz on 2 December 1805. On the eve of battle, Kutuzov tried to convince the Allied generals of the necessity of waiting for reinforcements before facing Napoleon. Alexander believed that waiting to engage Napoleon’s forces would be seen as cowardly. Kutuzov quickly realised that he no longer had any power with Alexander and the Austrian chief of staff General-Major Franz von Weyrother. When he asked Alexander where he planned to move a unit of troops, he was told “That’s none of your business.” Though Alexander’s orders made it clear that the Russians should move off the strategic Pratzen Plateau, Kutuzov stalled for as long as possible as he recognised the advantage that Napoleon would gain from this high ground. Finally, Alexander forced Kutuzov to abandon the Plateau. Napoleon quickly seized the ridge and broke the Allied lines with his artillery which now commanded the battlefield from the Pratzen Plateau. The battle was lost, and over 25,000 Russians were killed. Kutuzov was put in charge of organising the army’s retreat across Hungary and back into Russia as Alexander was overcome by grief.

Kutuzov was then put in charge of the Russian army operating against the Turks in the Russo-Turkish War, 1806–1812. Understanding that his armies would be badly needed in the upcoming war with the French, he hastily brought the prolonged war to a victorious end and concluded the propitious Treaty of Bucharest, which stipulated the incorporation of Bessarabia into the Russian Empire.

When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly (then Minister of War), with his army being outnumbered 2:1, chose to follow the scorched earth principle and retreat rather than to risk a major battle. His strategy aroused grudges among most of the generals and soldiers. As Alexander after the Battle of Smolensk had to choose a new general, there was only one choice: Kutuzov. He was popular among the troops mainly because he was Russian (most of the generals commanding Russian troops at that time were foreign), he was brave, had proven himself in battle, strongly believed in the Russian Orthodox Church, and he looked out for the troops’ well-being. The nobles and clergy also regarded Kutuzov highly. Therefore, when Kutuzov was appointed commander-in-chief on the 17th and joined the army on 29 August 1812 at Tsaryovo-Zaymishche, Russians supported his appointment. Only Alexander, repulsed by Kutuzov’s physique and irrationally holding him responsible for the defeat at Austerlitz, did not celebrate Kutuzov’s commission. The day before he left he met with Madame de Stael a strong opponent of Napoleon.

Within a week Kutuzov decided to give major battle on the approaches to Moscow. He withdrew the troops still further to the east, deploying them for the upcoming battle. Two huge armies clashed near Borodino on 7 September 1812, involving nearly a quarter of a million soldiers, ratio about 1.1 French to 1 Russian soldier. The result of the battle of Borodino was a kind of Pyrrhic victory for Napoleon, with near a third of the French army killed or wounded. Although the Russian losses were nearly 50% higher, the Russian army had not been destroyed.

On 10 September was the main quarter of the Russian army situated at Bolshiye Vyazyomy. Kutuzov settled in a manor on the high road to Moscow. The owner was Dmitry Golitsyn, who entered military service again. The next day September 11th  S. August 30th] 1812 Tsar Alexander signed a document that Kutuzov was promoted General Field Marshall, the highest military rank. Russian sources suggest Kutuzov wrote a number of orders and letters to Rostopchin, the Moscow military governor, about saving the city or the army. On 12 September  S. 31 August] 1812, the main forces of Kutuzov departed from the village, now Golitsyno and camped near Odintsovo, 20 km to the west, followed by Mortier and Joachim Murat’s vanguard. On Sunday afternoon the Russian military council at Fili discussed the risks and agreed to abandon Moscow without fighting. Leo Tolstoy wrote Fyodor Rostopchin was invited also and explained the difficult decision in quite a few remarkable chapters in his book War and Peace.

Tolstoy portrays the decision-making after Borodino in the first four chapters of book 11 of War and Peace. This opens with an essay on the difficulty, or maybe even the impossibility, or determining cause and effect in history. He attacks, in particular, the ‘great man’ theory of history, which says that events can be explained by “the actions of some one man—a king or a commander”: that Kutuzov, for example, gave the order for the army to abandon Moscow to the French, and therefore they did so.

This came at the price of losing Moscow, whose population was evacuated. After a council at the village of Fili, Kutuzov withdrew to the rich southeast of Moscow. On 19 September Murat lost sight of Kutuzov who changed direction and turned west to Podolsk and Tarutino where he would be more protected by the surrounding hills and the Nara river. On 3 October Kutuzov and his entire staff arrived at Tarutino. He wanted to go even further in order to control the three-pronged roads from Obninsk to Kaluga and Medyn, so that Napoleon could not turn south or southwest.

Kutuzov’s food supplies and reinforcements were mostly coming up through Kaluga from the fertile and populous southern provinces, his new deployment gave him every opportunity to feed his men and horses and rebuild their strength. He refused to attack; he was happy for Napoleon to stay in Moscow for as long as possible, avoiding complicated movements and manoeuvres.

Kutuzov avoided frontal battles involving large masses of troops in order to reinforce his Russian army and to wait there for Napoleon’s retreat. This tactic was sharply criticised by Chief of Staff Bennigsen and others, but also by the Autocrat and Emperor Alexander. (Barclay de Tolly interrupted his service for five months and settled in Nizhny Novgorod. Each side avoided the other and seemed no longer to wish to get into a fight. On 5 October, on order of Napoleon, the French ambassador Jacques Lauriston left Moscow to meet Kutuzov at his headquarters near Tarutino. Kutuzov agreed to meet, despite the orders of the Tsar. On 18 October, at dawn during breakfast, Murat’s camp in a forest was surprised by an attack by forces led by Bennigsen, known as Battle of Winkovo. Bennigsen was supported by Kutuzov from his headquarters at distance. Bennigsen asked Kutuzov to provide troops for the pursuit. However, the General Field Marshal refused. Napoleon’s goal was to get around Kutuzov, but on the 24th he was stopped at Maloyaroslavets on his way to Medyn and forced to go north on the 26th.

After the Battle of Maloyaroslavets, ratio 1:1, Napoleon decided to avoid a decisive battle and marched north via Mozhaisk to Smolensk into a higher probability of starvation, as it was the devastated route of his advance. The old general “escorted” Napoleon on the more southern roads but attacked him at the Battle of Vyazma, at the Battle of Krasnoi, ratio 1 French soldier to 1.4 Russian, and at the Battle of Berezina, ratio 1:1.75. In parallel Cossack bands and peasants assaulted isolated French units during their whole retreat. With Kutusov’s strategy of attrition warfare, on 14 December the remainder of the French main army left Russia. The only remaining troops were the flanking forces (43,000 under Schwarzenberg, 23,000 under Macdonald), about 1,000 men of the Guard and about 40,000 stragglers, about 110,000, all that were left of the 612,000 (including reinforcements)that had entered Russia.

Alexander I awarded Kutuzov the victory title of His Serene Highness Knyaz Golenischev-Kutuzov-Smolensky (Светлейший князь Голенищев-Кутузов-Смоленский) on 18 December 6 December 1812, for his victory at the Battle of Krasnoi at Smolensk in November 1812.

Russia (Russian: Росси́я, tr. Rossiya), also officially known as the Russian Federation (Russian: Российская Федерация, tr. Rossiyskaya Federatsiya), is a country in Eurasia. At 17,125,200 square kilometres (6,612,100 sq mi), Russia is the largest country in the world by surface area, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth’s inhabited land area, and the ninth most populous, with over 144 million people at the end of March 2016. The European western part of the country is much more populated and urbanised than the eastern; about 77% of the population live in European Russia. Russia’s capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world; other major urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Ufa and Kazan.

Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (both with Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the U.S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait.

The East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, the medieval state of Rus arose in the 9th century. In 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus’ ultimately disintegrated into a number of smaller states; most of the Rus’ lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion and became tributaries of the nomadic Golden Horde in the 13th century. The Grand Duchy of Moscow gradually reunified the surrounding Russian principalities, achieved independence from the Golden Horde, and came to dominate the cultural and political legacy of Kievan Rus’. By the 18th century, the nation had greatly expanded through conquest, annexation, and exploration to become the Russian Empire, which was the third largest empire in history, stretching from Poland on the west to Alaska on the east.

Following the Russian Revolution, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic became the largest and leading constituent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world’s first constitutionally socialist state. The Soviet Union played a decisive role in the Allied victory in World War II, and emerged as a recognized superpower and rival to the United States during the Cold War. The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the world’s first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the world’s second largest economy, largest standing military in the world and the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, twelve independent republics emerged from the USSR: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and the Baltic states regained independence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania; the Russian SFSR reconstituted itself as the Russian Federation and is recognized as the continuing legal personality and sole successor state of the Soviet Union. It is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic.

The Russian economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2015. Russia’s extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the leading producers of oil and natural gas globally. The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. It is permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, as well as a member of the G20, the Council of Europe, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as being the leading member of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and one of the five members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), along with Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.