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From: "Robert Bowie" <bowierobert@bellsouth.net>
Subject: Face-Saving Fakery, Play Acting and Make Believe in Russian History and Culture

(1) The Tatar Yoke and the Chechen Wars
Date: 19 July 2008
Robert Bowie, PhD, is an independent consultant, specializing in Russian mentalities. His website is www.russianmindsetsconsultancies.com

Face-Saving Fakery, Play Acting and Make Believe in Russian History And Culture
“We play, we die: ig-rhyme, umi-rhyme.”
[Vladimir Nabokov in his short story, “’That in Aleppo Once…’”
--punning on the Russian verbs, igraem (“we play”) and umiraem (“we die”)]

(1) Fakery in Terms of Conquering and Being Conquered:
(a) Russia and the Tatar Yoke
(b) Tolstoy Looks at War against the Chechens in the 1850s

HOMO LUDENS

In Homo Ludens (Man the Player), his remarkable book about how nearly all human institutions may be linked to the concept of play, the great Dutch historian Huizinga writes: “More and more doubts arise as to whether our occupations are pursued in play or in earnest, and with the doubts comes the uneasy feeling of hypocrisy, as though the only thing we can be certain of is make-believe.” In another passage he mentions how the sophists “hint at the perpetual ambiguity of every judgement made by the human mind,” and he reluctantly tiptoes up to the “deep question of how far the process of reasoning is itself marked by play-rules. . .”[1]

Read in the context of Russian history and culture, both ancient and contemporary, Huizinga’s book has a particular resonance.

THE TATAR YOKE: SHAME, PREVARICATION, MYTH-MAKING

The great émigré scholar George Fedotov has stated that “The Mongol conquest is the most fateful catastrophe suffered by Russia during her entire history.” He adds that “The blow to national pride was deep and ineradicable.” [2] The Golden Horde (commonly known as the Mongols or Tatars) descendents of the great warlord Chingis Khan (who died in 1227), fell upon the Russian lands in force, devastating Kievan Rus in the campaigns of 1237-1240 A.D. Very soon the Mongols had gained control over almost all of what was then Russia, plus much more (China and Persia, for example). When Tatar raiding parties first appeared in 1223, the Russians had no idea who they were, and they “identified them with the peoples of Gog and Magog, whose escape from behind the mountains where Alexander the Great had locked them up signaled the apocalypse.”[3]

The Tatars forced Russia to pay tribute (in money, slaves, military recruits) for about two and one half centuries (the usually accepted time frame of the “Tatar Yoke” is 1240-1480 AD). This is roughly the same number of years that comprise the entire history of the United States of America. Following the cue of early Russian scribes (writers of the ancient chronicles), Russian historians have most frequently emphasized the brutality of the invaders and glorified the Russians who resisted them. Little or nothing is said, however, about specific incidents of humiliation. Where do we read about Russians being forced to get down on their knees when a Tatar war party rode into town? Where do we hear tales of rape and rapine? Where do we find detailed descriptions of Russian princes kowtowing to the Tatars? Practically nowhere, since the Tatars did not write these things down and the Russians made monumental efforts to pretend they had not happened. When instances of Russian collaboration with the Tatar conquerors are too blatant to miss, the historians (again following the example of the scribes), say nothing about them. Halperin calls this “the ideology of silence.”

“Among historians of Russia, neglect of the period of Mongol domination has been the rule rather than the exception. As Michael Cherniavsky aptly observed, ‘There seems to have prevailed a vague desire to get rid of, to bypass, the whole question as quickly as possible’” (Halperin preface, p. vii). True, the Russian émigré Eurasianist movement of the 1920s and 1930s attempted a new approach. The Eurasianists took a novel look at the years of the Mongol Yoke and decided that Tatar culture, as well as Turkic and Muslim culture, had had a tremendous impact on Russia. The neo-Eurasianists of recent years propagate the belief that the future of Russia lies in the East, in economic and political alliances with China, India, Iran, and the countries of Central Asia, but Eurasianist views, largely, have not abrogated the traditional denigration of the Mongols or the widely-accepted denial of their importance in Russian history.[4]

The major leitmotif of Charles Halperin’s whole book is the “ideology of silence” (see also p. 5, 8, 19-20, 61-62, 127, 129). The history of the medieval Russian chroniclers is a history of prevarication. Rather than acknowledge certain truths that are sometimes obvious, at other times not totally verifiable, but at least probable, the scribes fabricated a number of myths about Russia and the Golden Horde. These myths were then perpetuated by Russian historians and cultural figures, who often continue perpetuating them right up to the present day, while adding new myths of their own:

(1) Russian resistance saved Europe from the Tatars. If Russia had given in to Tartar occupation, it would have been only one more step for the Tartars to advance into Western Europe.

Rebuttal: The Mongol Horde never occupied Russia because it had no good reason to do so. “The institutions which permitted prolonged occupation of China, Persia, and Central Asia would hardly have been inadequate to govern Russia. The fact is that Russia remained unoccupied because it had little to offer the Mongols. It was neither part of the steppe nor located on profitable trade routes. Commerce in and through Russia may have been important for the Russians but was minor compared to the trade along the caravan routes east and south of Sarai.”[5] The advance of Khan Batu, grandson of Chingis Khan, through Eastern Europe may have been halted by an “accident of history,” the death of Great Khan Ugedei. The Mongol leaders suspended their military campaign, so this story goes, in order to attend a council that would elect his successor (Halperin, p. 47).

(2) Prince Dmitry Donskoi’s[6] great victory over the Tatars at Kulikovo in 1380 led to a recrudescence of Russian power and precipitated the dissipation of the Golden Horde.

Rebuttal: Prince Dmitry’s victory is highly significant, since it marked the first time in 140 years that Russians had defeated a Tatar army and it “shattered the legend of the military invincibility of the Mongols.”[7] But the importance of the victory has been exaggerated, and the average Russian is unaware of the complexities surrounding this event. On the famous Monument to a Thousand Years of Russian History in Great Novgorod, for example, Donskoi is depicted trampling on a vanquished Tatar, who is lying on the ground, looking up beseechingly at the Russian prince.[8] This visual image amounts to a vast oversimplification of the Kulikovo event and its importance in history; its American equivalent would be something like the tale of how young George Washington cut down a cherry tree and then said, “I cannot lie; I did it.” It is an image of legend, rather than of historical fact.

In reality, the Russian princes were making repeated alliances with the Tatars against their fellow Russian princes throughout the whole period of the Tatar Yoke. For a number of years Moscow engaged in squabbles with Tver’, which had allied itself with Tatar Khan Mamai. Under pressure from Moscow, Tver’ was forced to submit to a humiliating treaty in 1375, and when Prince Dmitry advanced against the Tatars in 1380, Tverian troops were to join his army (under the terms of the treaty), but they failed to show up. Dmitry’s victory turned out, furthermore, to be pyrrhic, since the Russians suffered great losses at Kulikovo and could not mobilize another army to continue fighting Mamai, who prepared for another campaign against Russia. Meanwhile, in 1382, “with the connivance, in part coerced, of the princes of Tver’, Riazan, and Nizhnij Novgorod,” a different Tatar khan, Tokhtamysh attacked Moscow, razed the city and re-instituted the forced payment of tribute to the Tatars.

The man who really may have put the final quietus on Mongol domination of the Russian lands was, oddly enough, the great Central Asian warlord Tamerlane (a.k.a. Temir Aksak or Timur the Lame). In order to secure his rear from the threat of Tamerlane, Tokhtamysh made concessions to the Russians. Then, in 1395, Tamerlane himself advanced into Russia with a huge contingent of troops. More myths were concocted later to explain why he did not sack Moscow (and, again, how Russian resistance saved Western Europe). So the new legend goes, Moscow paraded around the sacred image of the Vladimir Mother of God in an attempt to stop Tamerlane, whose troops had taken the southern city of Yelets. The warlord was encamped outside town, sleeping, when “The Queen of Heaven appeared unto him, surrounded by a host of warriors, and ordered him to abandon forthwith the realm of Rus. Immediately, he retreated, leaving Russia and Europe in peace. On the spot of his dream the Russians built a church named after the icon of the Blessed Yelets Mother of God. Copies of this icon, painted as the image of the Vladimir God Mother, hands raised in supplication, abound in Yelets to this day.”[9]

(3) Led by the heroic Russian princes, the Russian people resisted the Tatar Yoke and eventually drove the Mongols out of Russia. Great Novgorod, never sacked by the Mongols, was a kind of hero city, and Prince Aleksandr Nevsky (1220-1263), like Donskoi, is one of the greatest heroes of Russian history.

Rebuttal: As mentioned above, the aristocracy in charge of Russian principalities often made alliances with the Tatars against other principalities. As is so often the case in Russian history, Russians had trouble uniting in a common cause. This, of course, is not so surprising, in that, during the many centuries preceding the consolidation of Moscow’s power, there was no centralized “Russia” in the sense that there was later. But Russia under the Tatar Yoke, nonetheless, sometimes has an eerie congruency with the Russia of today. Those in power (the leaders of the principalities and the church back then; today the “new oligarchs,” power brokers from the old KGB, and others in high bureaucratic positions) fight each other for influence, making and breaking alliances if need be.

As for Novgorod, often declared to be the most significant free city remaining in Russian during the years of the Tatar Yoke, it kept its independence by dealing diplomatically with the Tatars. Like the rest of Russia “Great Lord Novgorod” (Gospodin Velikij Novograd) paid tribute to the Mongol Horde, and the city flourished because the Mongols allowed it special trading privileges (Halperin, p. 35, 80). Aleksandr Nevsky, who is prominently depicted on the Thousand Year Monument, and whose statue stands proudly in Novgorod today, on the other side of the Volkhov River, is not entirely the hero he is made out to be. Nevsky certainly deserves hero status for his victories over the Swedes in 1240 and the Livonian Knights two years later. But in dealing with the Tatars, Nevsky was a pragmatist. “His collaboration with the Tatars has been an embarrassment to patriotic historiographers ever since” (Halperin, p. 49-50, 67; see also Rossija v bronze, p. 148-49). In The Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471, the first mention of the Tatars (A.D. 1257) depicts them allied with Aleksandr, who punished rebellious Novgorodians (among them was his son Vasily): “He cut off the noses of some, and took out the eyes of others, of those who had led Vasily to evil.”[10] Modern-day patriots, however, need not be so assiduous in concealing Nevsky’s conciliatory moves. After all, he was forced to deal with enemies on both the western and eastern borders of the Russian lands, and he deserves the glory that he achieved under almost impossible circumstances. The discomfort at acknowledging Nevsky’s dealings with the Tatars is just one more affirmation of the stain on the Russian psyche that still remains, more than five hundred years after the end of the Mongol Yoke.

(4) Russia “learned wickedness” from the Tatars, or, as Harrison Salisbury once put it, modern-day Russia “still struggles against the legacy of backwardness, ignorance, servility, submissiveness, deceit, cruelty, oppression and lies imposed by the terrible Mongols” (Salisbury cited in Halperin, p. 96-97).

Rebuttal: This argument is so specious that it hardly deserves a rebuttal. Certainly there is enough wickedness, cruelty, backwardness, etc. in the human soul (see the history of the human race from time out of mind) that we can’t blame the Tatars for imposing such traits on Russians.

(5) The Tatars are at fault for Russia’s having “missed the Renaissance.”

Rebuttal: “Russia had never been part of the Roman Empire and was neither Catholic nor within the sphere of medieval Latinity. . . Russian intellectuals could hardly have participated in the revival of a classical Latin heritage that was not their own. The Renaissance was intrinsically a phenomenon of the Latin West” (Halperin, p. 122). Furthermore, Russia had its own Renaissance of sorts, and not one easily dismissed as creatively inferior. Its sources were the culture of Byzantium, plus that of the Orthodox Slavs of the South and Kievan Rus. The period inclusive of this efflorescence of Russian spirituality and creativity is, roughly, the thirteenth through the fifteen centuries (much of this time periodic coincided with the years of Mongol domination). Fedotov (II, 344) has called the fifteenth century the “golden age of Russian sanctity or spiritual life” and also “the golden age of Russian art,” but he also is careful to distinguish the Russian spirit of innovation from that of the West, whose culture the Russians refused to appropriate. There was no doctrinal reason for not translating into Slavonic certain books of secular content. Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire until 1453, had libraries rich with secular literature, but these were not translated. Therefore, there was “a tragic lack in ancient Russian culture, a complete absence of rational scientific thought, even in the theological field. . . full-fledged scientific investigation in Russia started only in the nineteenth century” (Fedotov, II, 380).

WARFARE AS POSTURING: TOLSTOY’S VIEWS ON WAR IN THE CAUCASUS

As Lev Tolstoy is so fond of emphasizing in his literary works describing politics and warfare, the people involved often act for reasons not entirely clear to them, and the consequences of their actions are unpredictable. In his last great work of fiction, “Hadji Murad” (published posthumously, in 1912), Tolstoy presents the subjugation of the Chechens in the Caucasus (1850s) as a brutal game of let’s pretend. The renowned Chechen warlord and title character is pretending to join the Russians, to fight against his enemy Shamil, who holds his family hostage. Meanwhile, the Russians are pretending to believe that Hadji Murad really intends to help them, while not for a moment really believing.

In Chapter Seventeen, the handsome officer Butler is shown enjoying the exhilaration of warfare, poeticizing it, playing this game to the hilt, while averting his eyes from the Russian dead and wounded. In the next chapter the Chechen village just ravaged by Butler’s men is depicted, and the sheer horror of war is presented in contrast to Butler’s romantic fantasies. Meanwhile, the Chechen warriors, who know no other rules by which to live except the rules of the blood feud, are often depicted exulting in the sheer joy of battle, while praising Allah. The game, and the rules by which it is played, are more important than the consequences.[11]

As he so often does in War and Peace, Tolstoy in “Hadji Murad” debunks the way myths about the battlefield quickly replace somber realities. In Chapter Five the Russian officers engage in an animated conversation about the recent death of General Slepstov. In speaking of the general, no one considers the grim fact of his demise and his “return to the great source of life from which he came.” Rather they all imagine his gallantry in death, the actions of a “dashing officer, falling upon the mountaineers saber in hand and desperately hacking away at them.

“This, despite a reality that everyone. . . knew and could not help knowing: that throughout the war in the Caucasus, and never, nowhere in any other war did there occur that hacking with the swords of hand-to-hand combat, the scene that people always conjure up and describe (and that if such hand-to-hand combat with swords and bayonets ever actually takes place, then the only soldiers being hacked and stabbed are the ones running away). . .”[12]

The Russian officers, as Tolstoy makes clear, hide behind such mythmaking in order to avoid facing the possibility of their own death. The Chechens, on the other hand, seem not to fear death at all, taking refuge (exactly in the same spirit of modern jihadists) in the grandiose legends of the Islamic religion and their firm belief that for them there is no other way to live except through perpetual strife and acting out scenarios of vengeance. As for the Russian foot soldiers, they relate to war and death with a stoicism typical of the Russian narod.

In light of all this mythmaking, one cannot help thinking of the U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan today, forcing themselves to believe that they are engaged in a noble cause. After all, how could they go about their daily lives, watching comrades wounded and killed, if they had no make believe to believe in?

WARFARE AS POSTURING: THE STAND ON THE UGRA IN 1480

I’m not sure if he ever wrote about the “battle” that marked the end of Mongol domination of the Russian lands, but Tolstoy certainly would have been delighted at the circumstances of this pivotal event in Russian history. The story is complicated, but to put it briefly, by 1480, a hundred years after Dmitry’s pyrrhic victory at Kulikovo, Ivan III, “the Great” (1462-1505), became increasing emboldened in his behavior toward the fragmented Tatar Horde. He had recently (1478) forced Great Novgorod to submit to the power of Moscow, and cooperation between the Horde and the King of Poland had not yet been solidified. In the autumn of 1480 Khan Akhmad led his troops north against Moscow, then turned west, hoping to join forces with the Poles, who never materialized. Waiting for their Polish allies, the Tatars set up camp on the banks of the Ugra River, which was the border between Lithuanian and Muscovite territories. The Russian forces led by Ivan camped on the opposite side of the river. The adversaries sat there for several days, shooting arrows across the river and occasionally shouting out insults to one another. Then the ice froze over. Fearing a cavalry attack, Ivan decided to break camp and retreat. Noticing the bustle on the other side of the Ugra, the Tatars also anticipated an attack and fled to the south. The Tatar Yoke, consequently, was lifted finally, definitively, with the Russian “victory” in a non-existent battle.[13]

In the world of Homo sapiens, as well as in the world of various other creatures, such playing at war is widespread, and the consequences of non-warfare may be just as great, or greater, than the consequences of warfare. The anthropologist Marvin Harris has described how the Maring, a tribe living in the remote Bismarck Mountains of New Guinea, wages war. They begin by holding vast pig-eating festivals, hoping that the opulence of their feasting will demoralize the enemy. In preparing to fight, they arrange, through intermediaries, an appropriate site and clear it of underbrush. Fighting begins on a day that both sides have agreed upon. After elaborate ritual preparations, including communing with their ancestors, the warriors, prancing, howling and singing, make their way to the battleground. They plant huge shields in the ground, take cover behind them, and began hurling insults at the enemy. “Occasionally a warrior pops out from behind his shield to taunt his adversaries, darting back as a shower of arrows is launched in his direction. . . As soon as someone gets killed, there is a truce.”[14]

In a demonstration of how frequently human and animal play-acting behavior converge, Hölldobler and Wilson describe the ritual combat of honeypot ants. Arranging a kind of tournament, the workers of two different honeypot colonies behave “in the manner of medieval knights, one on one. They walk about with legs stretched out in a stiltlike posture while lifting their heads and abdomens and occasionally inflating their abdomens to a slight degree. The total effect is to make each ant appear larger than it really is. . . When two antagonists first meet, they perform a formicid pas de deux: they turn their bodies about to face one another head-on, then stand side by side while straining to raise their bodies ever higher, and then often circle each other slowly while drumming their antennae on the opponent’s body and kicking out at her with their legs. . . All this effort is ritualized and gentle, far short of the ants’ fighting potential. Either ant could easily seize and slash the opponent with her sharp mandibles, or spray her with formic acid, both actions having a fatal result. But during the tournaments such violence rarely occurs. After several seconds one of the displayers yields, and the encounter ends. The two ants then strut off on stilt legs in search of other rivals.” As with the Marings, “the desired result is the communication of fighting ability. All-out war is rare.”[15]

Certainly there are beneficial things that humans could learn from the ants. Unfortunately, however, the ritualized behavior of the honeypots described here does not mean that they, or other ants, are capable of resolving their problems without bloodshed. Elsewhere in their fascinating book the authors note that if ants possessed nuclear weapons, the world would already have ceased to exist. On the other hand, unlike the Maring, the Chechens, and practically all other human social and national groups, ants never launch raids on other ants to get back at them for injuries to their person or pride. Ants do not know the concept of humiliation, and, consequently, of vengeance (Journey to the Ants, p. 63).

Taking history and turning it into legend seems to perpetuate itself endlessly. New legends are concocted, through ramifications of previous legends. July 6 (New Style) is the day commemorating the miracle-working icon of the Vladimir Mother of God, who, as noted above, is given credit for stopping Tamerlane as he advanced upon Moscow in 1395. But the story told on the tear-off desk calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church for this date relates the celebration of the icon to the “victory” on the Ugra:

“In 1480 Khan Akhmat brought a huge army to the banks of the Ugra River in order to wage war with Rus. Moscow was on the verge of being besieged. Then the Grand Duke Ioann Vasielevich [Ivan the Great], arming himself with the prayers and blessing of Herontius, metropolitan of all of Russia, and of Vassian, the archbishop of Rostov, set out to battle the Tatars on the Ugra. For some time the adversaries faced off against each other, hesitating to make a decisive move. Finally, through the intercession of the Mother of God, a splendrous miracle occurred. The Tatars were imbued with fear; they became frightened of one another and fled, pursued by no one. Thus it was that the Lord, through the prayers of the Most Holy Mother of God, granted unto the Christians a unique and most joyous, bloodless victory over their enemies, thereby sparing His demesne­the city of Moscow and all of Russia. When the Grand Duke with his armies returned to the capital, all of its people voiced their most exultant joy, praising the Lord and the God Mother for their glorious deliverance.”[16]

What does a nation (Russia, or any other country) get out of mythologizing history and play acting games of warfare? Ultimately, one big thing, respect: both self-respect and (they hope) the respect of other nation states. In Russia respect, both self-respect and the respect Russians think that they deserve from abroad, is still in short supply today. So the game of make believe goes on. But not only in Russia. We in the U.S. today are also heavily invested in making believe. Just read some of the most recent statements by the Presidential candidates.

[1] J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, paperback, 1955), p. 191, 152.

[2] G. P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind. Vol. II: The Middle Ages. The 13th to the 15th Centuries (Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 1.

[3] Charles J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: the Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 64.

[4] The most prominent émigré Eurasianists were N.S. Trubetskoj, P.N. Savitskij, and George Vernadsky. For information on the neo-Eurasianists, see James H. Billington, Russia in Search of Herself (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004), p. 67-94.

[5] Halperin, p. 30. Sarai was the capital city of the Golden Horde, established by Khan Batu near the mouth of the Volga River. See also Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians: A History (Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 54: “the Mongols did not occupy and settle Rus as they did some other parts of their empire. It had too little to offer them in terms of either commerce or grazing lands.” In Part Six of his book Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (NY: Henry Holt and Co., 2002,) titled “Descendants of Genghiz Khan,” another British historian, Orlando Figes, makes much of Tatar and Asian influence on Russian culture and history. He also stresses “the sense of national shame” that memories of the Tatar Yoke still evoke in Russians and mentions the tendency of Russian historians to assert that Mongol domination left no trace on Russia’s cultural or political institutions (p. 366-67).

[6] In the recent “Name of Russia” contest, which aims at determining the most influential and illustrious personages in the history of the country, Grand Duke of Moscow and Vladimir, Dmitry Donskoi (1350-1389), made the semi-final cut and was named among the top fifty. So did Aleksandr Nevsky (1220-1263), whose life is discussed below.

[7] Entry written by Muriel Heppell in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union, edited by Archie Brown, John Fennell, Michael Kaser, and H.T. Willetts (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 87.

[8] See Viktor Smirnov, Rossija v bronze: pamjatnik tysjacheletiju Rossii i ego geroi [Russia in Bronze: the Monument to a Thousand Years of Russian History and its Heroes] (Novgorod: Russkaja provintsija, 1993), p. 150-52. This source provides more significant details about Dmitry and the Kulikovo battle; it also notes that he was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church, but only in 1988. The book has a photo of Dmitry on the monument, with his right leg propped on the leg of the vanquished Tatar.

[9] Notes to the story “Temir-Aksak-Khan,” in the book, Ivan Bunin, Night of Denial: Stories and Novellas, translated with notes and an afterword by Robert Bowie (Northwestern University Press, 2006), p. 622-23. The information on Tokhtamysh and the alliances between the Tverians and the Mongols comes from Halperin, p. 56-57. The tale of how Tamerlane panicked and retreated from Yelets is told on the back of a post-card sized depiction of the Yelets Mother of God (sold in Yelets). In this account nothing is said about the sad fact that Yelets fell to the conquerors and was sacked.

[10] Cited from the English translation of the chronicle in Basil Dmytryshyn, editor, Medieval Russia: a Source Book, 900-1700 (Hinsdale, Illinois: The Dryden Press, second edition, 1973), p. 145.

[11] In Homo Ludens Huizinga devotes a whole chapter (Ch. V, p. 89-104) to “Play and War.” He points out, however, that the concept of “total war” and the invention of nuclear weapons have done much to extinguish the play element in modern warfare. Notwithstanding his reservations, it seems clear that, even in the face of total annihilation of the human race, men go on playing at diplomacy and warfare today.

[12] My translations of passages from L.N. Tolstoj, Sobranie sochinenij [Collected Works in 20 Volumes] (Moscow: “Khudozhestvennaja literatura,” Vol. 14, 1964, p. 102-07, 46.

[13] Melvin C. Wren, The Course of Russian History (NY: The Macmillan Company, 1958), p. 173-74. Other historians provide slightly different accounts of this “non event.” See, e.g., Hosking, Russia and the Russians, p. 85-88, and Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde, p. 70-73.

[14] Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: the Riddles of Culture (NY: Random House, Vintage Books Edition, 1989), p. 63-64.

[15] Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants: a Story of Scientific Exploration (Harvard University, 1994), p. 69-70.

[16] My translation from the entry of July 6, 2008, on the desk calendar Pravoslavnyj tserkovnyj kalendar’, 2008. Doroga k khramu [Orthodox Church Calendar, 2008. The Pathway to the Temple] (Kostroma, 2007).