This.
And this! Though I'd say the second was the weakest link (depending on what we're looking at).
At enormous effort, but Russia delivered a very good performance in 1812-1815. I don't know if it would have done as well in different circumstances - for instance, the offensive campaigns were paid for with generous help from allies - but "Russia didn't really do anything" arguments are an attempt to make the Great Napoleon look like he was defeated by a force beyond his control rather than by a combination of his bad judgment and Russia's leaders taking full and complete advantage of it.
Precisely.
About the Russian officership: they lacked a proper general staff, but then, so did everybody except the Prussians. But the Russian system proved perfectly able to send sufficiently competent men to the top. Sure, they weren't all Suvorov, but they were handling an army good enough that they didn't need to be.
An interesting point about military technology is that in the 18th century the situation with the only really big complicated thing - cannon - was rather the reverse of what we might expect from an experience of 20th century warfare. We know that the less industrialised a country was during WW2, the less able it was to furnish the needs of modern warfare. From America with its giant airforce and mechanised divisions, through us, on to the Germans and Soviets with their tanks thundering ahead and horse-drawn supplies trudging along behind, through Italy and Japan and down to China.
But in the 18th century, big iron-works, as opposed to complexes of proto-industrial iron-goods manufacture, depended on the wish of a country to equip its armed forces. The iron-works made and the army bought. After all, what got made of iron before the railway? Nails, chains, horseshoes, cutlery, pots, pans, farming implements, swords, and 12-pounders. One of these things is unlike the others.
The ironworks of Wales grew up in symbiosis with the royal navy, which was probably the largest consumer of large cast-iron things in the world at that time. And Russia had cannon, because in the Great Northern War it had needed cannon and couldn't easily buy them and so Peter the Great had with Stalinistic simplicity called iron-works into being. You couldn't just call a tank-plant into being without first developing the kind of civilisation that could support motor-vehicles. But in Napoleonic times, a country with sufficient willpower could call the most modern army out of a primitive peasant population.
Paying for it, as you note, was another thing again. But
everybody was being subsidised by us after 1813.