A sickly boy judged unfit for soldiering became Russia's undefeated generalissimo
Alexander Suvorov's father thought his frail son belonged in the civil service. A visiting general, Gannibal, talked with the boy and persuaded the family otherwise. Suvorov went on to fight for half a century without losing a major engagement and is widely rated the greatest commander in Russian history.
Born in Moscow in 1729 or 1730 to a noble family, Suvorov was the son of a general and senator who had translated the fortification writer Vauban into Russian. Stuck indoors as a sickly child, he raided his father's library, learning French, German, Polish and Italian and reading Plutarch, Caesar and Charles XII, which gave him an early grasp of sieges, artillery and engineering. A family legend traced the name to a Swedish immigrant of 1622, but linguists and genealogists argue it comes from an old Russian name meaning severe.
He enlisted at 17 in the Semyonovsky Guards, where troops adored him though everyone found him odd. His first real fighting came against Prussia in the Seven Years' War; after the great Russian victory at Kunersdorf he complained that he would have marched straight on Berlin had he been in command. During a raid on Berlin he looked after a lost boy for the whole campaign and wrote kindly to the child's widowed mother offering to raise him. He made colonel in 1762.
Campaigns in Poland and against the Ottoman Empire made his name. Victories at Focșani and Rymnik, followed by the storming of the fortress of Izmail, established him as Russia's finest general and perhaps Europe's. Catherine the Great's successor, Paul I, quarrelled with him, but Suvorov was recalled when the French Revolutionary Wars broke out.
Leading an Austro-Russian army in Italy, he took Milan and Turin and nearly undid Napoleon's Italian conquests of 1796 and 1797. Then, ordered into Switzerland, he found himself cut off by André Masséna in the Alps. Extracting his exhausted, outnumbered and poorly supplied force earned him promotion to generalissimo. He died in May 1800, remembered as perhaps the best general revolutionary France ever faced.
Source: Alexander Suvorov
