The Revenge of Geography (26 page)

The Yenesei swells to a flood as much as three miles wide and is the sixth longest river in the world. It flows north for 3,400 miles from Mongolia to the Arctic. Much more so than the Urals, it is the true dividing line between two Russias—between western and eastern Siberia, with thousands of miles of lowland plain beckoning on its western bank and thousands of miles of plateau and snowy mountains on its eastern bank. The British traveler Colin Thubron writes
that “it is the flow of the river out of emptiness, like something incarnate, time-bearing, at once peaceful and rather terrible, which tightens my stomach.” At another, more northerly point along the river, beyond the Arctic Circle, he goes on: “the earth is flattening out over its axis. The shoreline is sinking away. Nothing, it seems, has ever happened here. So … history becomes geology.”
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The lure of animal furs first brought explorers to this glacial back-of-beyond. Later it would be the natural resources: oil, natural gas, coal, iron, gold, copper, graphite, aluminum, nickel, and a plethora of other metals and minerals, as well as the electric power generated by Siberia’s mighty rivers: for just as the Yenesei divides western and eastern Siberia, the equally majestic Lena divides eastern Siberia from the Russian Far East. Indeed, whereas the great rivers of Siberia flow south to north, their tributaries stretch east and west, “like the intersecting branches of … mammoth trees,” creating a great portage system.
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The mines punctuating this landscape were to constitute the heart of the czarist and Soviet penal systems. Indeed, the geography of Siberia has been a synonym for cruelty and strategic wealth, making Russia over the decades both a morally dark and an energy-rich power. The sudden appearance of Russia among the great powers of Europe in the early 1700s was related to the rich supplies of iron ore found in the Ural forests, fit for making cannons and muskets, so necessary for waging modern war. Likewise, in the mid-1960s, the discovery of vast fields of oil and natural gas in northwestern Siberia would make Russia an energy hyperpower in the early twenty-first century.
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Siberia’s conquest also achieved something else: it brought Russia into the geopolitics of the Pacific, and into conflict with both Japan and China. It has been the Russian conflict with China that was at the heart of Cold War dynamics, even as that conflict could be central to America’s own strategy for dealing with both powers in the twenty-first century.
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Unlike the Irtych, Ob, Yenesei, and Lena, the Amur River flows not south to north, but west to east, linking up with the Ussuri River to form today’s border between the Russian Far East and Chinese
Manchuria. This frontier region, known as Amuria to the north of the Chinese border and Ussuria to the east of it, has been fought over between czarist Russia and Qing (Manchu) China since the mid-seventeenth century, when Russian freebooters entered the region, to be followed by Muscovite soldiers, and later by diplomats at a time when the Manchus were distracted by their conquests of Taiwan and parts of the mainland. This process culminated in 1860 when a weak China with a decaying dynasty was forced to accept the transfer of 350,000 square miles of territory from Chinese to Russian sovereignty, creating the current frontiers.
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Now that China is strong and Russia comparatively weak this border is again coming under pressure from Chinese settlers and corporations seeking to move north, in order to take advantage of this region’s oil, natural gas, timber, and other resources. Geography commands a perennially tense relationship between Russia and China, obscured by their tactical, somewhat anti-U.S. alliance of the moment. In July 2009, Chief of the Russian General Staff Nikolai Makarov made a slide presentation in which it was reportedly said that “NATO and China … are the most dangerous of our geopolitical rivals.”
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What this geography illuminates is something that is often forgotten: that Russia has historically been very much a part of East Asian power dynamics. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 was partially instigated by Japan’s demand that Russia acknowledge Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria (as well as Japan’s freedom to intervene in Korea), to which the Russians objected. That war’s ending, in addition to humiliating the czarist regime, even more so constituted a humiliation of Qing China, as it was fought over land that the Manchus considered part of their patrimony. To wit, Russia’s defeat still left it in control of Amuria and Ussuria, which the Manchus coveted.

More so than the Russo-Japanese War, in which Russia lost the southern half of Sakhalin Island and parts of southern Manchuria (which according to geographic logic should have belonged to China anyway), it was the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its chaotic aftermath that really shook loose Russia’s control of its own Far East. China, Japan, and the United States (an emerging Far Eastern power
in its own right) took control of pieces of the Trans-Siberian Railway between Lake Baikal in the west and the port of Vladivostok in the east, while Vladivostok itself came under Japanese occupation between 1918 and 1922. Eighty thousand Japanese troops occupied the Amur region during this period.

Gradually, though, Lenin’s Red Army turned the tide of the civil war against the White Russian antirevolutionaries. Consequently, the new Soviet state was able to take back the territories on its margins: especially in the ethnic Turkic areas of the Central Asian deserts, where the Bolsheviks feared they were vulnerable to attack from the British in India, acting through Afghanistan. The Bolsheviks, notwithstanding their professed ideology about the unity of all the workers of the world, were realists when confronted with the “age-old problem” of a sprawling land power: the threat of attack on its peripheries. Whoever ruled Russia had to face the fact of a cursedly flat landmass spilling into contiguous states in several directions. To compensate, the Bolsheviks became Russian imperialists like the czars before them: Moldovans, Chechens, Georgians, Azeris, Turkmens, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Buriat-Mongols, Tatars, and others all came under their sway. The Bolsheviks easily rationalized their conquests: after all, they had given the blessing of communism to these peoples, even as they awarded them Soviet republics of their own.
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Following the dictates of geography, however subconsciously, the Bolsheviks moved the capital back eastward to Moscow from St. Petersburg on the Baltic, restoring the largely Asiatic reality that was always central to Russia’s being. In place of the semi-modernized regime bestowed by Peter the Great, which ruled Russia from its Baltic “window on the West,” there now arose a state ruled from the Kremlin, the historic semi-Asiatic seat of medieval Muscovy.
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The new Soviet Union consisted of three Union Republics—Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus—and eleven Autonomous Republics and subregions. But because many of these republics did not neatly overlap with ethnic borders—for example, there was a large Tajik minority in Uzbekistan and a larger Uzbek one in Tajikistan—secession was impossible without civil war, and so the Soviet Union became a prison of nations.

This prison of nations was as aggressive as ever in the twentieth century, even as it had more cause for insecurity than ever before. In 1929 Soviet infantry, cavalry, and aircraft attacked the western edge of Manchuria to seize control of a railroad passing through Chinese territory. In 1935 the Soviet Union made a virtual satellite out of western China’s Xinjiang Province, while Outer Mongolia became the Mongolian People’s Republic, strongly aligned with the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, in European Russia, the signing of the 1939 Russo-German pact allowed Stalin to annex eastern Poland, eastern Finland, Bessarabia, and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Russia, under the guise of the Soviet Union, now stretched from Central Europe to the Korean Peninsula. And yet, as events would demonstrate, Russia was still not secure. Geography continued to have a say in the matter. Hitler’s 1941 invasion eastward across the plain of European Russia brought German troops to the outskirts of Moscow and within reach of the Caspian Sea, until they were stopped at Stalingrad in early 1943. At the end of the war, the Soviets exacted their revenge, giving vent to centuries of geographical insecurity going back to the Mongol depredations against Kievan Rus.

Following the collapse of Nazi Germany and fascist Japan, the Soviet Union effectively acquired the entire eastern half of Europe by erecting a system of communist satellite states, the loyalty of which was guaranteed in most cases by the presence of Soviet troops, who had surged back across the flat plain westward—back across the Dnieper, the Vistula, and the Danube—as the logistics of Hitler’s war machine failed amid the vastness of European Russia, much as Napoleon’s had the century before. This Soviet Eastern European empire now stretched deeper into the heart of Central Europe than had the Romanov Empire of 1613–1917, and included all of the territory promised Russia in the Nazi-Soviet pact.
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At the opposite end of the Soviet Union, Moscow took possession of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands north of Japan, adjoining the Russian Far East. The chaotic and weakened state of China following the Japanese occupation and the struggle for power between Mao Zedong’s communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists allowed for a large Russian troop
presence in Manchuria, the consolidation of a pro-Soviet Outer Mongolia, and a friendly communist regime in the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. In the Korean Peninsula the great land power of the Soviet Union—and that of soon-to-be-communist China—would encounter the sea power of the United States, helping to facilitate the Korean War five years after World War II. For the upshot of World War II was the creation of Mackinder’s Heartland power in the form of Soviet Russia, juxtaposed with Mahan’s and Spykman’s great sea power in the form of the United States. The destinies of Europe and China would both be affected by the very spread of Soviet power over the Heartland, even as the Greater Middle East and Southeast Asia in the Eurasian rimland would feel the pressure of American sea and air power. This was the ultimate geographical truth of the Cold War, which the ideology of communism coming from Moscow and the ideal of democracy coming from Washington obscured.

But the Cold War, which seemed interminable to those like myself who had grown up during the period, proved to be merely another phase of Russian history that ended according to the familiar dictates of Russian geography. Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to reform Soviet communism in the 1980s revealed the system for what it actually was: an inflexible empire of subject peoples, inhabiting in many cases the steppe-land and mountainous peripheries of the Russian forests and plains. Once Gorbachev himself, in effect, announced that the ideological precepts on which the empire rested were deeply flawed, the whole system began to fall apart with the marginal pieces breaking off from the Russian center much as they had following the failure of Kievan Rus in the middle of the thirteenth century, medieval Muscovy in the early seventeenth, and the Romanov Empire in the early twentieth. This is why historian Philip Longworth notes that repeated expansion and collapse over a generally flat topography has been a principal feature of Russian history. In fact, as geographer and Russian specialist Denis Shaw explains, while the open frontier and the military burden which that engendered “fostered the centralization
of the Russian state”—indeed, the power of the czars was legendary—Russia was, nevertheless, a weak state, because the czars did not develop sturdy administrative institutions in the far-flung provinces. This made Russia even more open to invasion.
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In 1991, when the Soviet Union officially disbanded, Russia was reduced to its smallest size since before the reign of Catherine the Great. It had lost even Ukraine, the original heartland of Kievan Rus. But despite the loss of Ukraine and the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, despite the military uncertainties of Chechnya, Dagestan, and Tatarstan, and despite the emergence of Outer Mongolia as an independent state free of Moscow’s tutelage, Russia’s territory still surpassed that of any other nation on earth, covering over a third of mainland Asia, with land borders still stretching over almost half of the world’s time zones from the Gulf of Finland to the Bering Sea. And yet this vast and naked expanse—no longer guarded by mountains and steppes at its fringes—now had to be protected by a population that was only a little over half that of the former Soviet Union.
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(Russia’s population was smaller than that of Bangladesh, in fact.)

Perhaps never before in peacetime was Russia so geographically vulnerable. In all of Siberia and the Far East there were only 27 million people.
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Russia’s leaders lost no time in assessing the dire situation. Less than a month after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev told
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
that “we rapidly came to understand that geopolitics is replacing ideology.”
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“Geopolitics, persistently demonized during the days of the Soviet Union,” writes University of Edinburgh professor emeritus John Erickson, “has returned with a vengeance to haunt post-Soviet Russia.” Gone were the denunciations of geopolitics as the tool of capitalist militarism: not only was geopolitics as a discipline rehabilitated in Russia, but so were the reputations of Mackinder, Mahan, and Karl Haushofer even. In “unabashed neo-Mackinderian style,” the old-guard communist leader Gennady Zyuganov declared that Russia had to restore control of the “Heartland.”
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Given the ups and downs of Russian history, in addition to its new geographical
vulnerabilities, Russia had no choice but to become a revisionist power, intent on regaining—in some subtle or not so subtle form—its near-abroad in Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, where 26 million ethnic Russians still lived. During the lost decade of the 1990s, when Russia teetered on the brink of economic collapse and was consequently weak and humiliated, a new cycle of expansion was nevertheless being nurtured. The Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky suggested that the southern Caucasus as well as Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan now all had to come under Russian domination. While Zhirinovsky’s extremism was not shared by the majority of Russians, he still tapped into a vital undercurrent of Russian thinking. Truly, Russia’s present weakness in Eurasia has made geography itself a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Russian obsession.