When the Russians had eventually reoccupied Moscow, they had been forced to pile up 12,000 corpses on huge pyres and burn them. The reconstruction of the city only began properly in 1814, with parks and gardens springing up where once there had been a jumble of narrow streets, and a grand new palace for the tsar. For more than a generation Moscow remained a building site; the commission established to oversee the city’s reconstruction was only wound up in 1842, and even then, Moscow still had far to go before it could regain its former splendour.
