The Relics of Dmitry Donskoy Go to War: The Kremlin Repeats the Trick of Peter and Stalin

Astonishing." Nobody, however, was looking for a miracle. It was made by hand, to Putin's order. Dmitry Donskoy's tomb sits exactly where it was left in 1389. It was opened in the 1860s. In 2007, Patriarch Alexy II had already asked for fragments of the relics to be removed, and the work was halted then because of technical difficulties. Nobody was searching for anything. The cathedral floor subsided, the tombstones began to collapse, restorers lifted a cracked slab. That is called emergency repair work. It only gets called a miracle when a miracle is needed.

And one is needed right now. Vakhtang Kipshidze, deputy head of the Russian Orthodox Church's synodal department, has already explained on state television that delivering the prince's relics to the war zone would be a sensible decision, and that Orthodox servicemen should be given the chance to venerate them as soon as possible. Patriarch Kirill has blessed the placing of three fragments into three reliquaries. One of them is going to the front.

So a six-hundred-year-old bone has been formally added to the list of means of waging war.

A miracle with a pedigree

The thing is, all of this has happened before. Not something vaguely similar, not a distant echo, but exactly this same wholly unexpected finding of relics, with the same gestures and the same intonation.

In the summer of 1723, Peter I ordered the relics of Alexander Nevsky moved from Vladimir to his new capital. The procession took almost a year, wintered in Shlisselburg and reached St Petersburg on 30 August 1724. The date was not chosen at random: it was the anniversary of the Treaty of Nystad, the victory over Sweden. Peter personally steered the galley carrying the reliquary up the Neva, taking the helm himself. The logic is transparent: a prince who beat the Swedes on the Neva in the thirteenth century is appointed heavenly guarantor of the fact that Peter beat the Swedes in the eighteenth. The dead Alexander was written into the treaty as a co-author.

More than that, the empire immediately rewrote the saint himself. A Synod decree of 1724 banned depicting Alexander Nevsky in the monastic habit in which he died, having taken the schema. From then on, only princely robes, only armour, only the warrior. The state edited the icon to suit its military requirements. The monk was erased, the general was painted in.

And this despite the fact that the real Alexander Yaroslavich resisted the Horde in no way at all. He travelled to Sarai, collected his yarlyks, brought the punitive Nevryuy army down on his own brother Andrei, and personally enforced the Horde's census in Novgorod so that tribute would be collected properly. Novgorodians who resisted the census had their noses cut off and their eyes put out. None of this ever troubled the empire, because what interested the empire was not Alexander but his profile on a banner.

Cinema instead of relics

Stalin used the same instrument, only with better technology. Carting relics around was inconvenient and ideologically awkward, especially now that cinema existed.

In 1938 came Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky. Not a historical film but a mobilisation poster in twelve reels: the German knight in his closed helmet, infants thrown into the fire, "whoever comes to us with a sword." A year later, in August 1939, the pact with Germany was signed and the film was quietly pulled from cinemas. On 22 June 1941 it was just as quietly put back on the screens. No new facts about the thirteenth century had emerged in those two years. What had changed was the requirement.

In July 1942 the Order of Alexander Nevsky was instituted, bearing the prince's profile. No contemporary images of Alexander exist, so the medal carries the face of the actor Nikolai Cherkasov from Eisenstein's film. A Soviet officer received, for military valour, a medallion portrait of an actor playing a prince whom the empire had two centuries earlier redressed from monk into armour. Three layers of makeup, and not one genuine face.

Then came Ivan the Terrible. Part one was released in January 1945 and won the Stalin Prize, first class. Part two was banned by a Central Committee resolution in 1946 and sat on the shelf until 1958, because Ivan had come out other than as required. In February 1947, Stalin explained it to Eisenstein and Cherkasov in person: Ivan Vasilyevich was a progressive sovereign, and his chief mistake was that, unlike Stalin, he failed to finish off five boyar families. There is the entire methodology in a single sentence. A historical figure is good exactly to the extent that it justifies current practice.

And alongside all this came something that rhymes with today's reliquary almost word for word. On 30 December 1942, Metropolitan Sergius appealed to parishes to raise money for a tank column named after Dmitry Donskoy. More than eight million roubles were collected, forty machines were built at the Nizhny Tagil plant, and on 7 March 1944 they were handed over to the army near the village of Gorelki outside Tula. Church money also paid for an air squadron named Alexander Nevsky. Metropolitan Nikolai told the tank crews: let the glorious name of Dmitry Donskoy lead you into battle.

Note the difference. In 1944, the name of Donskoy was attached to forty brand-new T-34-85s and flamethrower OT-34s. In 2026, the name of Donskoy is attached to a small box containing a fragment of a heel bone. The church used to give the front tanks. Now it gives relics. This is not about faith. It is about the fact that money, despite budgets that have swollen enormously for the war, is something the church and the state have learned to absorb better and more efficiently. Why send anything real and useful to the front when rattling a few bones will do?

What the textbooks drummed in and what they cut out

Ask anyone who went to a Soviet school what Dmitry Donskoy is famous for. The answer comes back word-perfect: he crushed the Mongol-Tatars at Kulikovo Field and began the liberation of Rus from the yoke. Then came the numbers that took your breath away: three hundred thousand men of the Horde, one hundred and fifty thousand Russians. An unequal fight and an astonishing victory of the Russian spirit.

All of it splendid, and all of it a lie. The truth, as ever, never fitted into an imperial history textbook.

Mamai was never the ruler of the Horde and could not have been. He was a temnik, a military commander. Not a legitimate Chinggisid but a usurper who ruled through khans he installed himself. The legitimate ruler of the Horde was Tokhtamysh. The Battle of Kulikovo was not an uprising against the Horde but the destruction of the rebel Mamai, who was an obstacle to the Horde's lawful ruler. For this feat of arms, Tokhtamysh even sent Dmitry his congratulations on the victory. Somehow that never made it into the Moscow history textbook then. It is not there today either.

Nor did the fact that two years later, in 1382, Tokhtamysh came to the victor himself. For tribute. Dmitry Donskoy did not wait for him and left on business for Kostroma. Moscow was burned. Thousands were killed. The tribute was not merely restored but increased, and his eldest son Vasily was sent to Sarai as a hostage, where he remained until he escaped in 1386. In his will, Dmitry set out separately the procedure for paying the Horde's levy.

But here is the main thing cut out of the school story: as a result of that battle fought on behalf of the Horde's khan, Moscow gained no freedom whatsoever. Moscow discharged its vassal duty, and what followed was the burning of the capital and a heavier tribute. There was a victory. There was no release from vassal obligations. The textbook ended halfway through the sentence.

Also missing from the textbook was what Dmitry did the rest of the time. Waged endless wars and internecine feuds. Tver, Ryazan, Novgorod, Lithuania. They burned each other's towns, burned the standing crops, drove off the population. The consequence was famine, and the consequence of famine was epidemics. The chronicle for 1387 records that the plague wiped out Smolensk entirely: five survivors walked out of the gates and shut the empty town behind them.

Nor did it fit that the nickname "Donskoy" attached itself to the prince no earlier than the sixteenth century, a century and a half after his death. First came the required and matchlessly heroic storyline, and only then was a hero selected for it and issued with a title.

And of course the real numbers did not fit. Three hundred thousand men of the Horde is the invention of the compilers of The Tale of the Rout of Mamai, a text written a century or more after the events. A medieval army of three hundred thousand could not have fed itself and would not have fitted onto the field. Historians' realistic estimates run into the thousands on each side. The archaeology of Kulikovo Field yields finds consistent with a modest skirmish rather than a battle of nations.

The myth is always larger than the event. That is its basic operating characteristic, not a defect.

The saint is thirty-eight years old

One detail everyone runs past. Dmitry Donskoy was canonised in 1988, at the Local Council marking the millennium of the baptism of Rus. Which means he has been a saint for thirty-eight years. He is younger than perestroika. He is younger than most of the people now crossing themselves before his sarcophagus.

Accordingly, no centuries-long veneration of these relics ever existed. They were not carried in processions, no healings were attributed to them, no pilgrims travelled to them. They simply lay in the ground beneath the cathedral floor, because they were designated relics in the ecclesiastical sense at the end of the twentieth century, and were taken out in the twenty-sixth year of the twenty-first.

For six hundred years nobody was bothered by bones lying in a tomb. It became a bother precisely when the offensive stalled.

Conjuring up a military advantage

From here on it is pure magic, and here it is worth speaking plainly.

The idea that an object can confer military advantage has a long and thoroughly pagan history in the Moscow tradition. The Vladimir icon supposedly turned Timur away from Moscow in 1395, although Timur had his own reasons for turning back: he was on his way to finish off Tokhtamysh, not to conquer forests.

The Kazan icon supposedly secured the victory of 1612.

The apotheosis is a very recent urban legend claiming that in 1941 Moscow was flown around by an aircraft carrying an icon on board, and was thereby saved from capture. Not one document, not one flight order, not one entry in a sortie log. The legend was born in the nineties and has been repeated as fact ever since.

The logic of all these matchless and unquestionably historic events is always the same. If you won, the holy object helped. If you lost, you did not pray hard enough. The scheme is unfalsifiable and therefore ideal for governing. It removes the question of the quality of the command, of supply, of corruption, of men, of equipment. It moves the war out of the realm where things can be checked and into the realm where they cannot.

And so, in the twenty-first century, a nuclear power pulls a six-hundred-year-old skeleton out from under the floor and sends a fragment of it to the front line in order to conjure up an advantage. Not factories, not training, not logistics. A reliquary of victory.

How the sarcophagus was actually opened is also worth keeping in mind. You have found unique organic remains more than six centuries old, and you immediately open them up in ordinary air, in front of television cameras, under studio lights, amid swings in humidity and temperature. That is precisely how one treats ancient remains one intends to preserve. But of course.

Vladimir Medinsky, Putin's aide for culture and a man for whom history long ago turned into a mythological allotment, called the whole thing almost fairytale-like. There, for the first time in ages, he did not lie. A fairy tale is exactly what it is.

Some develop artificial intelligence, others write myths

Putin declared that the find "reinforces all the most significant foundations of our history." Consider the construction. How can a set of bones reinforce the foundations of history? What does that even mean?

It means precisely one thing. The man saying it genuinely believes that a half-decayed skeleton will help him in his war. Not metaphorically, not as a symbol for the television picture, but literally. Russia is ruled by a superstitious medieval old man, and his inner circle is sunk in omens, dates, signs and relics.

None of this, obviously, has anything to do with Dmitry Donskoy. He does not care. He died in 1389 at the age of thirty-eight and has no connection to the Rossiya television channel, to reliquaries, to Pechenegs, or to the front line. All of this is about a technology.

The technology is called mobilisation through the dead. A state that has nothing to offer the living except a horrific death needs an intermediary to explain that their pointless death matters and has meaning. A dead prince is ideal for the role: he does not argue, does not give interviews, does not point out that after his glorious victory Moscow was burned and the tribute went up. He stays silent, and others speak for him.

That is how Peter I made Alexander Nevsky keep silent in his favour. Stalin made Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible and that same Donskoy on a tank turret keep silent in his.

Putin is doing the same thing, except that instead of a fleet, a film industry and tank columns he has emergency repairs in a cathedral and an eighteen-minute television segment.

The difference between them is not in the design but in the scale of the resource. After Nystad, Peter attached a real victory to the myth. Stalin passed the collection plate around the myth and came away with forty new tanks. Putin has nothing to attach, so a heel bone goes into the reliquary.

In the twenty-first century some are building data centres and training models, while others cart a sack of bones along the front and wait for the bones to work. Decide for yourselves whose future it is.

Though, to be honest, there is not much left to decide.