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known Russophile writer, Valentin Rasputin, which contained the
following out-and-out militaristic warning: "Is Fate not bringing
closer to us the time when we shall again go forth onto the Field of
Kulikovo to defend Russian soil and Russian blood?"
In Russian history, the battle of Kulikovo between the Russians
and the Tatars is rated as one of the greatest-on a par with Borodino
in 1812 and Stalingrad in 1942. The Russians see Kulikovo not as a
battle between states but as· one between races and continents. Al–
though it took place six hundred years ago, the Russians are quite sure
it will have to be fought again in the near future.
The anniversary number of the "thick" journal
Nash Sovremen–
nik
contained a poem about the campfires lighted on Kulikovo Field,
"which have still not been damped down with ashes":
I caSl an anxious gaze loward the Easl,
And an equally anxious one loward the Wesl.
I fear thal lomorrow we shall sel oUl
Along a road lighled by campfires.
Who is ready lO lead us in lhis campaign?
Are the young princes yel in the saddle?
In the Soviet Union today, people are yearning not for the dead Stalin
but for new Stalins, the "young princes " who are openly contrasted
with the Kremlin gerontocrats in the Soviet press. Novels, novellas,
articles, poems, scholarly studies, entire issues of magazines-all this
fuss about the sixth centennial of Kulikovo has marked a new upsurge
of nationalist chauvinism and militaristic propaganda. It looks as if
the "young princes " were not just getting into the saddle but have been
there for some time already, waiting for the trumpet to sound the
charge and summon them to defend the Russian empire against both
East and West-Afghans and Poles, Chinese and Americans, native and
foreign Jews-against all those who, from the Russians' viewpoint, are
goyim.
It
is generally thought that the Russians won the battle of
Kulikovo, although only one out of every ten Russian soldiers was left
alive, and although a few years later the Tatars again captured the chief
Russian cities, including Moscow and its citadel, the Kremlin . From
Kulikovo to World War II, military victories have cost the Russians so
dearly in terms of human lives that they might as well be regarded as
defeats. Russia's apocalyptic fear of China is due,
inter alia,
to the
latter 's great stock of cannon fodder: its population is now four times
that of Russia, and by the year 2000 it will be five times as great. For
