According to Nigel Nicolson in "Napoleon 1812," Tolstoy's fatalistic outlook about the war (if not all of his historical detail) is actually fairly accurate. Th

According to Nigel Nicolson in "Napoleon 1812," Tolstoy's fatalistic outlook about the war (if not all of his historical detail) is actually fairly accurate. The Russians didn't fend off Napoleon by understanding the nature of the complex system in which they were embedded, but rather through sheer indecision, which had the effect of an accidental Fabian strategy: preserving their army by avoiding any catastrophic battle in which it would have been entirely destroyed. The one major action fought at Borodino — which has a near-mystical significance for Russians — was motivated mostly by political pressure (to avoid the appearance of cowardice), but probably wasn't necessary at all. It was likely that Napoleon had already doomed his army the minute he crossed the Neman, due to his refusal to grasp the sheer scale of the supply and transport problem related to marching half a million troops into Western Russia in late June. In fact, his Marshals had mostly recommended against it — but due to the caprice of one man, one million people died in a year. It's hard to argue that one could understand, predict, or mitigate this. Nicolson goes on to point out how the Nazis — who were well aware of the example — made many of the same mistakes as Napoleon, who himself was repeating the same mistakes as Charles XII in his doomed invasion a hundred years earlier. It's not to say that the problems of war and society are impossible to understand — but human factors such as hubris, bias, cults of personality, politics by committee, etc. usually conspire to obscure their solutions, even with the perspective of time.