The Revenge of Geography (27 page)

Of course, the Soviet Union would never be reconstituted. However, a looser form of union reaching to the borders of the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent might still be attainable. But what would be the uplifting rallying cry behind it? What would be the idea with which the Russians could morally justify the next wave of expansion? Zbigniew Brzezinski in
The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives
writes that in the 1990s Russians began to resurrect the nineteenth-century doctrine of Eurasianism as an alternative to communism, in order to lure back the non-Russian peoples of the former Soviet Union.
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Eurasianism fits nicely with Russia’s historical and geographical personality. Sprawling from Europe to the Far East, and yet anchored in neither, Russia, in the way of no other country, epitomizes Eurasia. Moreover, a closed geography featuring a crisis of room in the twenty-first century—one that erodes the divisions of Cold War area specialists—makes more palpable the very idea of Eurasia as a continental, organic whole. But while Eurasia may become an ever more useful concept for geographers and geopoliticians in the coming years, that doesn’t mean that Georgians, Armenians, or Uzbeks, with all the historical and emotional baggage that goes with such ethnic identities, will begin to think of themselves as “Eurasians.” The Caucasus are
the Caucasus precisely because they are a cauldron of ethnic identities and conflicts: identities that with the collapse of Cold War power blocs have the potential to become even more richly developed. The same holds true to a large extent for Central Asia. Even if Russians and, say, Kazakhs can suppress their ethnic rivalry through a “Eurasian Union” of sorts, Eurasianism does not appear to be something that people will die for; or something that will send a chill up their spine; especially as Ukrainians, Moldovans, Georgians, and others pine to be Europeans. But if Eurasianism can suppress differences however slightly in some quarters of the former Soviet Union, and therefore help stability, is it not worthwhile in its own right?

Just as geography is not an explanation for everything, neither is it a solution. Geography is merely the unchanging backdrop against which the battle of ideas plays out. Even when geography is a unifier—as in the case of America or Great Britain, or India or Israel—the ideals of democracy and liberty and Zionism (with its spiritual element) have, nevertheless, been basic to national identity. And when a people have nothing else to unite them except geography, as in the case of Egypt under former dictator Hosni Mubarak or Japan under the former ruling Liberal Democratic Party, then the state is afflicted by an overpowering malaise: stable it may be, thanks to geography, but that is all. Thus Russia, shorn of czardom and communism, requires an uplifting, unifying ideal beyond geography if it is to succeed in attracting back former subject peoples, particularly at a time when its own meager population is rapidly diminishing. Indeed, because of low birth rates, high death rates, a high rate of abortion, and low immigration, Russia’s population of 141 million may drop to 111 million by 2050. (Accelerating this are the toxic levels of water and soil pollution, as part of a general environmental degradation.) Meanwhile, Russia’s nominal Muslim community is increasing and may make up as much as 20 percent of the country’s population within a decade, even as it is based in the north Caucasus and the Volga-Ural area, as well as in Moscow and St. Petersburg, so that it has a tendency toward regional separatism, while also possessing the ability to engage in urban terrorism. Chechen women have more than a third
as many children as their Russian counterparts. To be sure, a mere appeal to geography—which is really what Eurasianism and the attendant Commonwealth of Independent States are about—will probably not allow for the rebirth of a Russian empire to compete with Kievan Rus, medieval Muscovy, the Romanov dynasty, and the Soviet Union.

Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, argues that in the twenty-first century, “the power of attraction trumps that of coercion,” and, therefore, “Soft power should be central to Russia’s foreign policy.” In other words, a truly reformed Russia would be in a better position to project influence throughout its Eurasian peripheries. For the Russian language is the lingua franca from the Baltics to Central Asia, and Russian culture, “from Pushkin to pop music,” is still in demand. A Russian-language television station could, in the event of an intellectually revitalized Russia, “become a sort of al Jazeera for Russophones.” In this way of thinking, liberal democracy is the only ideal that could allow Russia to once again achieve what in its eyes is its geographic destiny.
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Such an idea dovetails with Solzhenitsyn’s remark in 1991 that “the time has come for an uncompromising
choice
between an empire of which we ourselves are the primary victims, and the spiritual and physical salvation of our own people.”
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In fact, there is a geographic side to Trenin’s analysis. He argues that Russia should put more emphasis on its extremities—Europe and the Pacific—than on its Eurasian heartland. A stress on cooperation with Europe would move Russia attitudinally westward. The population map of Russia shows that despite a territory that occupies eleven time zones, the overwhelming majority of Russians live in the extreme west adjacent to Europe. Thus, true political and economic reform merged with demographics could make Russia an authentic European country. As far as the Pacific is concerned, “Russia would do well to think of Vladivostok as its twenty-first-century capital,” Trenin writes. Vladivostok is a cosmopolitan seaport, in close proximity to Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, and Tokyo, the world’s most economically dynamic region.
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Indeed, because the old Soviet
Union regarded its Far East as an area to exploit for raw materials rather than as a gateway to the Pacific Rim, the economic rise of East Asia that began in the 1970s and has continued through the present completely bypassed Russia.
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Trenin says that it is past time to rectify that—for Russia is suffering as a result. China, which, rather than Russia, followed the lead of its fellow Pacific Rim countries Japan and South Korea in adopting market capitalism, is now emerging as the great power in Eurasia. Beijing has given $10 billion in loans to Central Asia, helped Belarus with a currency swap, gave a billion dollars in aid to Moldova at the other end of the continent, and is developing an area of influence in the Russian Far East. For Russia, a corresponding strategy would be to politically attach itself to Europe and economically attach itself to East Asia. Thus would Russia solve its problems in the Caucasus and Central Asia—by becoming truly attractive to those former Soviet republics, whose peoples are themselves desirous of the freedoms and living standards that obtain at the western and eastern edges of Eurasia.

Russia actually had a chance for a similar destiny a century ago. Had power in Russia at a particularly fragile moment in 1917 not been wrested by the Bolsheviks, it is entirely possible, likely even, that Russia would have evolved in the course of the twentieth century into a poorer and slightly more corrupt and unstable version of France and Germany, anchored nevertheless to Europe, rather than becoming the Stalinist monster that it did. After all, the ancien régime, with its heavily German czardom, its French-speaking nobles, and bourgeois parliament in the European capital of St. Petersburg, was oriented westward, even if the peasantry was not so.
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Again, while the relief map of Russia spreads across Asia, Russia’s population map favors Europe.

The Bolshevik Revolution was a total rejection of this quasi-Western orientation. Likewise, the low-dose authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin since 2000, both as president and later as prime minister, is a rejection of the cold turkey experiment with Western democracy and market capitalism that brought a chaotic Russia to its knees in the 1990s, following the collapse of communism. Putin and
Russian president Dimitri Medvedev in recent years have not been quite orienting Russia toward Europe and the Pacific, and consequently have not been reforming Russia in order to make it more of an attractive power to its former subject peoples. (Indeed, in trade, foreign investment, technology, infrastructure, and educational attainment, the “clouds have darkened” for Russia under Putin.
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) Though Putin is not strictly speaking an imperialist, Russia’s latest empire-in-the-making is being built on the wealth of Russia’s immense natural resources which are desperately needed at the European periphery and in China, with the profits and coercion that go along with that. Putin and Medvedev have had no uplifting ideas to offer, no ideology of any kind, in fact: what they do have in their favor is only geography. And that is not enough.

Russia boasts the world’s largest natural gas reserves, the second largest coal reserves, and the eighth largest oil reserves, much of which lie in western Siberia between the Urals and the Central Siberian plateau. This is in addition to vast reserves of hydropower in the mountains, rivers, and lakes of eastern Siberia at a time in history when water shortages are critical for many nations, especially China. Putin has used energy revenues for a quadrupling of the military budget, the air force in particular, during his first seven years in office. And the military budget has gone up ever since. Because of geography—Russia, as I’ve said, has no clear-cut topographical borders save for the Arctic and Pacific oceans—Russians appear to accept “the deep-seated militarization” of their society and the “endless search for security through the creation of a land-based empire,” which Putin through his energy caliphate has given them.
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Rather than liberalize Russia and unleash its soft power potential throughout the former Soviet Union and the adjacent Eurasian rimland, Putin has opted for neo-czarist expansionism, which his country’s abundant natural resources make possible for the short term.

Yet even Putin has not altogether given up on the European dimension of Russian geography. To the contrary, his concentration on Ukraine as part of a larger effort to re-create a sphere of influence in the near-abroad is proof of his desire to anchor Russia in Europe,
albeit on nondemocratic terms. Ukraine is the pivot state that in and of itself transforms Russia. Abutting the Black Sea in the south and former Eastern European satellites to the west, Ukraine’s very independence keeps Russia to a large extent out of Europe. With Greek and Roman Catholics in the western part of Ukraine and Eastern Orthodox in the east, western Ukraine is a breeding ground for Ukrainian nationalism while the east favors closer relations with Russia. In other words, Ukraine’s own religious geography illustrates the country’s role as a borderland between Central and Eastern Europe. Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that without Ukraine, Russia can still be an empire, but a “predominantly Asian” one, drawn further into conflicts with Caucasian and Central Asian states. But with Ukraine back under Russian domination, Russia adds 46 million people to its own Western-oriented demography, and suddenly challenges Europe, even as it is integrated into it. In this case, according to Brzezinski, Poland, also coveted by Russia, would become the “geopolitical pivot” determining the fate of Central and Eastern Europe and, therefore, of the European Union itself.
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The struggle between Russia and Europe, and in particular between Russia and Germany-France, goes on, as it has since the Napoleonic Wars, with the fate of countries like Poland and Romania hanging in the balance. Communism may have collapsed, but Europeans still need natural gas from Russia, 80 percent of which comes via Ukraine.
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The victory in the Cold War changed much, to be sure, but it did not altogether mitigate the facts of geography. And a resurgent Russia, writes Australian intelligence analyst Paul Dibb, might be willing to “contemplate disruption in order to create strategic space.”
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As the 2008 invasion of Georgia showed, Putin’s Russia is not a status quo power.

Ukraine, under severe pressure from Russia, has agreed to extend the lease of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet base in return for lower natural gas prices, even as the Kremlin tries to put Ukraine’s network of gas pipelines under its control. (Ukraine is also dependent on Russia for much of its trade.) Not all pipeline geography in Eurasia works in Russia’s favor, though. There are the pipelines that bring Central Asian hydrocarbons to China. Pipelines bring Azerbaijan’s Caspian
Sea oil across Georgia to the Black Sea and via Turkey to the Mediterranean, thus avoiding Russia. There is also a plan for a natural gas pipeline from the Caspian across the southern Caucasus and Turkey, through the Balkans, to Central Europe, which also avoids Russia. Meanwhile, though, Russia is planning its own gas pipeline southward under the Black Sea to Turkey, and another westward under the Black Sea to Bulgaria. Turkmenistan, on the far side of the Caspian, exports its natural gas through Russia. Thus, even with diverse energy supplies, Europe—especially Eastern Europe and the Balkans—will still be dependent on Russia to a significant degree. The future of Europe, as in the past, hinges in Mackinderesque fashion to a significant extent on developments to the east.

Russia has other levers, too: a powerful naval base lodged between Lithuania and Poland on the Baltic Sea; the presence of large Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic States, Caucasus, and Central Asia; a pro-Russian Armenia; a Georgia that is threatened by the pro-Russian breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; missile test sites and an air base in Kazakhstan; an air base in Kyrgyzstan in range of Afghanistan, China, and the Indian Subcontinent; and a Tajikistan that permits Russian troops to patrol its border with Afghanistan. Moreover, it was a Russian-orchestrated media campaign and economic pressure that helped oust Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev from power in 2010, for the crime of hosting an American air base.

In many of these places, from Chechnya in the north Caucasus to Tajikistan next door to China, Russia must deal with a resurgent Islam over a vast southern frontier that is historically part of a Greater Persian cultural and linguistic realm. Therefore, Russia’s recovery of its lost republics, by the establishment of a sphere of influence over them, definitely requires a friendly Iran that does not compete with Russia in these areas, and does not export Islamic radicalism. Russia, for reasons rooted in geography, can only offer meager help in America’s campaign against the Iranian regime.