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
Leo Tolstoy Tolstoy was a novelist of the realist school who considered the novel to be a framework for the examination of social and political issues in nineteenth-century life. "War and Peace" (which is to Tolstoy really an epic in prose) therefore did not qualify. Tolstoy thought that "Anna Karenina" was his first true novel. After "Anna Karenina", Tolstoy concentrated on Christian themes, and his later novels such as "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1886) and "What Is to Be Done?" develop a radical anarcho-pacifist Christian philosophy which led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. For all the