Thousands of mounted French and Russian actors have recreated a 200-year-old battle at the gates of Moscow that led to the fall of Napoleon and the rise of Russian patriotic fervour.
President Vladimir Putin arrived to oversee the grandiose festivities after seeing his government spend $US1.1 million ($A1.07 million) on a celebration of not only Russian history but also its military and national resolve.
France is represented at the sleepy Borodino field 120km west of Moscow by former president Giscard d'Estaing and 1550 actors who began crossing swords with 1450 Russians before nearly 100,000 history buffs.
"The entire people rose against the invaders," Putin said in a keynote address.
"Its unprecedented heroism, spiritual strength and heartfelt love for the land filled our country with a tremendous force that had never been seen before."
Putin's chief of staff had earlier urged Russian authorities to use the occasion to expand "the patriotic education of youth".
The elaborate re-enactment - replete with cannons and feather-capped blue uniforms for the French - crowns weeks of celebrations that began when 23 Cossacks on horseback began a two-month march on Paris on August 12.
Putin's strategic use of nationalism has served the ex-KGB spy well since he rose to power in 1999.
But it has also hampered his relations with the United States and divided parts of Europe over how to handle a big neighbour that makes periodic threatening noises.
France has remained one of Putin's closest partners under a policy that survived the Soviet era and stretches back to the days when Napoleon's exploits inextricably linked the histories of the two states.
The September 7 clash of the giants at Borodino represented the definitive example of a general winning the battle but losing the war.
Napoleon watched his smaller army of 20,000 soldiers overcome 45,000 foes after a day of carnage and then decided to take time to recover before pushing on to Moscow.
He apparently had no idea that the tsar's great Field Marshal Kutuzov had decided to retreat the day after battle after learning that half his soldiers had been lost.
It was a fatal mistake for Napoleon and one that possibly altered the course of history for much of Eastern Europe.
The Russians had time to regroup in nearby villages and then plot strategy as Napoleon's stunned generals entered the ashes of a Moscow that still smouldered from the day the natives had burned down the city and left.
They then drove out Napoleon's demoralised soldiers before marching on to Paris and helping make French into the second language of all Russian aristocrats.
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