evidence: Kutuzov was Russia’s sixth most senior general when Napoleon crossed the River Niemen into the Russian empire on June 24 1812. An aristocrat who had won a war and signed a peace with the Ottomans, he had been a war hero ever since he had survived being shot in the head, not once but twice (blinding him in one eye). This superb biography portrays Kutuzov as "charming, intelligent, calculating, artful" – but, crucially, not the author of the scorched earth retreat-and-wait strategy that was to rout Napoleon’s 600,000-strong army. [...] Kutuzov is hero-worshipped by Russians today, who at the millennium voted him the greatest Russian of the 19th century. Mikaberidze, who has worked extensively in the Russian, French and Lithuanian archives for this book, rightly considers him underappreciated in the West, despite Kutuzov’s doing more to break Napoleon even than the Duke of Wellington, Field Marshal Blücher of Prussia or the Austrian commander Karl von Schwarzenberg. [...] During the Second World War, Russian propaganda depicted Kutuzov as a proto-Stalin, the patriotic Russian genius crushing the invader with his strategic insights and never putting a foot wrong, a cult that Mikaberidze, who left Georgia in the 1990s and now teaches at Louisiana State University, dismantles deftly. Stalin instituted the military Order of Kutuzov during the Great Patriotic War, but Mikaberidze concludes Kutuzov "deserves better than either disparaging dismissal or hero worship".