thumb|right|"General Winter", from a 1916 front page illustration of the French periodical [[Le Petit Journal (newspaper)|Le Petit Journal]]
Russian Winter, sometimes personified as "General Frost" or "General Winter", Russians call these muddy conditions rasputitsa, which occur with autumnal rains and spring thaws in Russia and make transport over unimproved roads difficult.
Winter as a contributing factor to military defeat
thumb|Russians used skis in the [[Muscovite–Lithuanian War#Third war (1507–1508)|third Muscovite–Lithuanian War (1507–1508).]]
In his study of winter warfare in Russia, author Allen F. Chew concludes that "General Winter" was a 'substantial contributing factor'—not a decisive one—in the military failures of both Napoleon's invasion of the Russian Empire and Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. He notes that Napoleon's army was already suffering significant attrition before winter, owing to lack of supplies, disease, desertions and casualties of war. Likewise, Hitler's Wehrmacht had already suffered 734,000 casualties and was running low on supplies in November 1941, before the arrival of winter.
French invasion of 1812
thumb|right|Charles Minard's graph showing the strength of the as it marched to Moscow and back, with temperature (in [[Réaumur scale|Réaumur) plotted on the lower graph for the return journey. –30 degrees Réaumur = –37.5 °C = –35.5 °F]]
thumb|The Night [[Military camp|Bivouac of Napoleon's Army during retreat from Russia in 1812.]]
Napoleon's of 610,000 men invaded Russia, heading through territory of today's Belarus towards Moscow, in the beginning of summer on 24 June 1812. The Russian army retreated before the French and again burnt their crops and villages, denying the enemy their use. Napoleon's army was ultimately reduced to 100,000. His army suffered further, even more disastrous losses on the retreat from Moscow, which started in October. Multiple sources concur that winter and its aftermath was only a contributing factor to Napoleon's defeat and retreat.
According to Chew in 1981, the main body of Napoleon's , initially at least 378,000 strong, "diminished by half during the first eight weeks of his invasion, before the major battle of the campaign. This decrease was partly due to garrisoning supply centres, but disease, desertions, and casualties sustained in various minor actions caused thousands of losses. At the Battle of Borodino, about 110 km from Moscow, on 7 September 1812—the only major engagement fought in Russia—Napoleon could muster no more than 135,000 troops and he lost at least 30,000 of them to gain a narrow and pyrrhic victory almost 600 miles inside hostile territory. The sequels were his uncontested and self-defeating occupation of Moscow and his humiliating retreat, which began on 19 October, before the first severe frosts later that month and the first snow on 5 November." Lieven cites the difficulty of finding food for troops and forage for horses in winter as an important contributing factor.
Allied intervention in Russia, winter 1918–19
During the Northern Russian expedition of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War in the Archangelsk region, both sides, the Allied forces and the Bolshevik Red Army knew or quickly learned the principles of winter warfare and applied them whenever possible. However both sides had their resources strained and at times one side or other suffered the severe consequences of underpreparedness, but Chew concluded that winter did not provide a decisive advantage to any of the combatants. In fact his eastern army suffered more than 734,000 casualties (about 23% of its average strength of 3,200,000) during the first five months of the invasion before the winter started in recently occupied Poland and Soviet Belarus, Ukraine, and western Russia.
See also
- History of Russia
- Graveyard of empires
- Winter War