The ordinary Russian soldier was typically poorly fed, poorly equipped, but decently trained and ferocious in battle

I have just started reading The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army by Stephan Talty and am enjoying it.  It was published in 2009, long preceding the current Russian-Ukrainian War.  Which made the following passages striking.  The tropes are not new, they are well established stereotypes.  Still, there is a freshness to them when read in the context of the current war some 210 years after Napoleon's invasion.  Hardy and ruthless but neglected frontline soldiers, a non-existent NCO level, weak officers and chaotic general leadership.  All still true these nearly ten generations later. 

Alexander's frontline forces in the beginning numbered only about 162,000, giving the French a three-to-one advantage at the beginning of the war. His army was strong at the bottom, dissolute in the middle, and often chaotic at the top. The ordinary Russian soldier was typically poorly fed, poorly equipped, but decently trained and ferocious in battle, especially in a defensive posture. Nowhere else would Napoleonic troops encounter soldiers who fought as fanatically or bravely when defending a position; a famous epigram said that you not only had to kill the Russian soldier, you had to then push him over.

The officer corps was a glaring weakness. Officers gambled, whored, and drank when they should have been drilling their men. Commanders weren’t held to account for the performance of their troops or junior officers. They treated the common soldiers more like automatons or serfs they had inherited than men to be inspired and led.

And the Russian high command, although it contained some brilliant officers, was riven with dissension. “The headquarters of the Emperor were already overrun with distinguished idlers,” wrote Carl von Clausewitz, the brilliant German strategist attached to the Russian headquarters staff. Petty intrigues, nationalist posturing between the Russians and Germans and Austrian commanders, coteries and cliques all contributed to an atmosphere where decisions were made and unmade in hours. Alexander lacked the backbone to stop the intriguing that every general, sensing the chance to mold the tsar to his wishes, engaged in.