page_title: Battle of Borodino
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Battle of Borodino / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: 1 Rubel coin 1987 depicting the battle of Bordino
context_page_description: The Battle of Borodino was a battle fought on 7 September 1812 in the Napoleonic Wars during the French invasion of Russia.
  The fighting involved around 250,000 troops and left at least 68,000 dead, making Borodino the deadliest day of the Napoleonic Wars and the bloodiest single day in the history of warfare until the First Battle of the Marne in 1914. Napoleon's Grande Armée launched an attack against the Imperial Russian Army, driving it back from its initial positions but failing to gain a decisive victory. Both armies were exhausted after the battle and the Russians withdrew from the field the following day. Borodino represented the last Russian effort at stopping the French advance on Moscow, which fell a week later. However, the French had no clear way of forcing Tsar Alexander to capitulate because the Russian army was not decisively defeated, resulting in the ultimate defeat of the French invasion following the retreat from Moscow in October.
  After a series of Russian retreats at the beginning of the campaign, the nobility grew alarmed about the advancing French troops and forced the Tsar to dismiss the army's commander, Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly.
context_section_description: Poet Mikhail Lermontov romanticized the battle in his poem Borodino.
  The battle was famously described by Leo Tolstoy in his novel War and Peace, "After the shock that had been received, the French army was still able to crawl to Moscow; but there, without any new efforts on the part of the Russian troops, it was doomed to perish, bleeding to death from the mortal wound received at Borodino.
  In 1904, the Imperial Russian Navy named a battleship after the battle. A huge panorama representing the battle was painted by Franz Roubaud for the centenary of Borodino and installed on the Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow to mark the 150th anniversary of the event. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky also composed his 1812 Overture to commemorate the battle. In Russia, the Battle of Borodino is reenacted yearly on the first Sunday of September. On the battlefield itself, the Bagration flèches are preserved; a modest monument has been constructed in honour of the French soldiers who fell in the battle. There are also remnants of trenches from the seven-day battle fought at the same battlefield in 1941 between the Soviet and German forces (which took fewer human lives than the one of 1812).
  A commemorative 1-ruble coin was released in the Soviet Union in 1987 to commemorate the 175th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, and four million were minted. A minor planet 3544 Borodino, discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh in 1977 was named after the village Borodino. From May 1813 to the present, at least 29 ships have been named Borodino after the battle (see list of ships named Borodino).
caption: 1987 Soviet commemorative coin, reverse
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