The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

Chapter X

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RUSSIA AND THE INDEPENDENT HEARTLAND
Alexander Solzhenitsyn opens his epic novel on World War I, 
August 1914
, with
a 
rhapsody 
about 
the 
Caucasus 
range, 
whose 
“each 
single
indentation … brilliantly white with deep blue hollows … towered so vast above
petty human creation, so elemental in a man-made world, that even if all the men
who had lived in all the past millennia had opened their arms as wide as they
could and carried everything they had ever created … and piled it all up in
massive heaps, they could never have raised a mountain ridge as fantastic as the
Caucasus.” Solzhenitsyn continues on in this vein, writing about the “snowy
expanses,” “bare crags,” “gashes and ribs,” and “vaporous fragments
indistinguishable from real clouds.”
1
The Caucasus have throughout history held Russians, especially fierce
nationalists like Solzhenitsyn, in fear and awe. Here, between the Black and
Caspian seas, is a land bridge where Europe gradually vanishes amid a six-
hundred-mile chain of mountains as high as eighteen thousand feet—
mesmerizing in their spangled beauty, especially after the yawning and flat
mileage of the steppe lands to the north. This is Russia’s Wild West, though the
mountains lie to the south of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Here, since the
seventeenth century, Russian colonizers have tried to subdue congeries of proud
peoples: Chechens, Ingush, Ossetes, Daghestanis, Abkhaz, Kartvelians,
Kakhetians, Armenians, Azeris, and others. Here, the Russians encountered
Islam in both its moderation and implacability. The complex emotional reaction
of the Russians to the very fact of the Caucasus, which both tantalize and
threaten them, opens a window onto the entire Russian story.
Russia is the world’s preeminent land power, extending 170 degrees of
longitude, almost halfway around the globe. Russia’s principal outlet to the sea is
in the north, but that is blocked by Arctic ice many months of the year. Land
powers are perennially insecure, as Mahan intimated. Without seas to protect
them, they are forever dissatisfied and have to keep expanding or be conquered
in turn themselves. This is especially true of the Russians, whose flat expanse is
almost bereft of natural borders and affords little protection. Russia’s fear of
landbound enemies is a principal theme of Mackinder. The Russians have
pushed into Central and Eastern Europe to block nineteenth-century France and
twentieth-century Germany. They have pushed toward Afghanistan to block the
British in India and to seek a warm water outlet on the Indian Ocean, and have

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pushed into the Far East to block China. As for the Caucasus, those mountains
constitute the barrier that the Russians must dominate in order to be safe from
the political and religious eruptions of the Greater Middle East.
Another geographical fact about Russia is its severe cold. The northernmost
part of the United States lies at the 49th parallel of north latitude, where Canada
begins. But the great mass of Russia lies north of the 50th parallel, so that the
Russian population inhabits an even colder climate than do the Canadians, who
live mainly along the U.S. border. “Because of latitude, remoteness from open
seas, the barrier effects of mountains, and continentality,” writes geographer Saul
Cohen, Russia’s climate leaves much of it both too cold and too dry for large-
scale, permanent settlement.
2
But the Caucasus, along with the parts of the
Russian Far East that are close to the North Korean border, are the exceptions to
this principle: so that another attraction of the Caucasus is their relatively mild
temperatures at the 43rd parallel.
3
Truly, the Russian climate and landscape are
miserably rugged, and as such hold the keys to the Russians’ character and to
their history.
The intense cold seems to have developed in the Russians “a capacity for
suffering, a certain communalism, even a willingness to sacrifice the individual
for the common good,” writes historian of Russia Philip Longworth, who
explains that the short growing season of the high northern latitudes required

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“interdependence between farmers,” as well as “frenetic, strenuous effort, long
hours in the field, and the mobilization of children,” because both sowing and
reaping had to be done in haste. Moreover, low surpluses because of the cold
encouraged the elites of the emerging Russian state to control wide areas, killing
the incentive of farmers to work harder without compulsion, and contributing to
a “violent tendency” in daily life.
4
Russian communism, as well as a certain
disdain for personal freedom until recently, have had their roots in a frigid
landscape. The clearing of land, the building of churches and fortifications on
the icy plain, and the chanting of Orthodox prayers all bespoke a heartrending
communalism.
The northern belt of Russia between the Arctic Circle and the Arctic Ocean is
frozen treeless tundra, covered in moss and lichen. When it melts in summer
slush covers the land, which is infested with giant mosquitoes. South of the
tundra lies the taiga, the world’s greatest coniferous forest, stretching from the
Baltic to the Pacific. About 40 percent of these regions in Siberia and the
Russian Far East are covered in permafrost. Finally, in southern Russia, reaching
all the way from the Hungarian plain in the west, through Ukraine, the northern
Caucasus, and Central Asia to far-off Manchuria, lies the steppe, the world’s
vastest grassland, “the great grass road,” in the words of Russia scholar W. Bruce
Lincoln.
5
 As Mackinder writes, the Russians were originally a people huddled in
the shielding enclosure of the forest who, for the sake of their own security, had
to seek out and conquer—from the High Middle Ages into the early modern era
—the incoming Asiatic nomads of the steppe to the south and east. In particular,
the protracted and humiliating presence of the Mongols—the Golden Horde near
medieval Muscovy and the Blue Horde in Central Asia—which played a role in
denying Russia the experience of the Renaissance, gave to the victimized
Eastern Orthodox Slavs a commonality, energy, and sense of purpose that was
crucial to them being able to eventually break out of the Tatar yoke and roll up
large expanses of territory in more recent centuries.
6
The Tatar yoke, according
to historian G. Patrick March, instilled in the Russians a “greater tolerance for
tyranny,” while inuring them to privation and afflicting them with a “paranoid
fear of invasion.”
7
Insecurity is the quintessential Russian national emotion. “The desire to find
both roots and vindication in history grew partly out of the insecurity of the
Eastern Plain,” writes Librarian of Congress James H. Billington in his great
tome about Russian culture,