French invasion of Russia part of the government. During the Cold War, many Western historians were inclined to see Russia as "the enemy", and there was a tendency to downplay and dismiss Russia's contributions to the defeat of Napoleon. As such, Napoleon's claim that the Russians did not defeat him and he was just the victim of fate in 1812 was very appealing to many Western historians. Russian historians tended to focus on the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and ignore the campaigns in 1813–1814 fought in Germany and France because a campaign fought on Russian soil was regarded as more important than
War and Peace first-hand accounts of how the Imperial Russian Army was structured. Tolstoy was critical of standard history, especially military history, in "War and Peace". He explains at the start of the novel's third volume his own views on how history ought to be written. His aim was to blur the line between fiction and history, to get closer to the truth, as he states in Volume II. Although the book is mainly in Russian, significant portions of dialogue are in French. It has been suggested that the use of French is a deliberate literary device, to portray artifice while Russian emerges