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

The Icon and the Axe
. “Geography, not history,” he
says, has dominated Russian thinking:

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Harsh seasonal cycles, a few, distant rivers, and sparse patterns of
rainfall and soil fertility controlled the lives of the ordinary peasant;
and the ebb and flow of nomadic conquerors often seemed little more
than the senseless movement of surface objects on an unchanging and
unfriendly sea.
8
In other words, the very flatness of Russia, extending from Europe to the Far
East, with few natural borders anywhere and the tendency for scattered
settlements as opposed to urban concentrations, has for long periods made for a
landscape of anarchy, in which every group was permanently insecure.
Clustered in the forest with their enemies lurking on the steppe, the Russians
took refuge in both animism and religion. The springtime festival of Orthodox
Easter “acquired a special intensity in the Russian north,” writes Billington. The
traditional Easter greeting “was not the bland ‘Happy Easter’ of the modern
West, but a direct affirmation of the central fact of sacred history, ‘Christ is
risen!’ ” And the reply was, “In truth, risen!” This spoke not only to the
ascended Christ but to nature as well. For the long and dark winter was nearly
over, with the trees shedding snow and putting out their leaves. Eastern
Orthodox Christianity contains more than a hint of paganism. And Russian
communism with its Bolshevik emphasis on totality was another form of
Russian religion—the secular equivalent of Orthodoxy, according to the early-
twentieth-century Russian intellectual Nicolas Berdyaev. As the title of
Billington’s book shows, the icon was a vivid reminder to the harassed
frontiersmen of the power of their Orthodox faith, and the security and higher
purpose it brought, while the axe “was the basic implement of Great Russia: the
indispensable means of subordinating the forest” to their own purposes.
9
Russia’s religious and communist totality, in other words, harked back to this
feeling of defenselessness in the forest close to the steppe, which inculcated in
Russians, in turn, the need for conquest. But because the land was flat, and
integrally connected in its immensity to Asia and the Greater Middle East,
Russia was itself conquered. While other empires rise, expand, and collapse—
and are never heard from again, the Russian Empire has expanded, collapsed,
and revived several times.
10
Geography and history demonstrate that we can
never discount Russia. Russia’s partial resurgence in our own age following the
dissolution of the Soviet Empire is part of an old story.
Russia’s first great empire, and really the first great polity of Eastern Europe,
was Kievan Rus, which emerged in the middle of the ninth century in Kiev, the

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most southerly of the historic cities along the Dnieper River. This allowed
Kievan Rus to be in regular contact with the Byzantine Empire to the south,
facilitating the conversion of Russians to Orthodox Christianity, which, as we
know, would be enriched with the particular intensity that Russians gave to it, on
account of their own encounter with a wintry landscape. Geography also decreed
that Kievan Rus would demographically constitute a joining of Scandinavian
Vikings (traveling down rivers from the north) and the indigenous eastern Slavs.
The poor soils in the area meant that large tracts of land had to be conquered for
the sake of a food supply, and thus an empire began to form, which brought
together two dynamic regional forces, those of the Vikings and of the
Byzantines. Russia, as a geographic and cultural concept, was the result.
Kievan Rus perennially struggled against steppe nomads. In the mid-thirteenth
century it was finally destroyed by the Mongols under Batu Khan, Genghis’s
grandson. Successive years of drought in their traditional grazing lands had
driven the Mongols westward in search of new pastures for their horses, which
were the source of both their food and mobility. And so, the first great attempt at
Russian imperial expansion over the Eurasian heartland was overrun.
The result was that, through innumerable movements and countermovements,
as well as political dramas that were the stuff of human agency, Russian history
shifted gradually north to cities like Smolensk, Novgorod, Vladimir, and
Moscow, with Moscow emerging strongest in the later medieval centuries: these
medieval centuries were in turn characterized by, as we have seen, autocracy and
paranoia, which were partly the consequence of Mongol pressure. Moscow’s rise
to prominence was helped by its advantageous position for commerce, on the
portage routes between the rivers in the basin of the mid-and upper Volga. Bruce
Lincoln writes: “Moscow stood at the center of the upland in which the great
rivers of European Russia had their beginnings … it was a hub from which
Russia’s river highways zigged and zagged outward like the irregularly shaped
spokes of a lopsided wheel.”
11
Yet because in this phase of their history the
Russians avoided the steppe where the Tatars roamed, they concentrated on
further developing the impenetrable forest tracts, where a state could better
cohere.
12
Medieval Muscovy was surrounded and virtually landlocked. To the
east was only taiga, steppe, and Mongol. To the south, the Turks and Mongols on
the steppe denied Muscovy access to the Black Sea. To the west and northwest
the Swedes, Poles, and Lithuanians denied it access to the Baltic Sea. Ivan IV,
“the Terrible” (1553–1584), had access to only one seaboard, barely usable, in
the far north: the White Sea, an inlet of the Arctic Ocean. Threatened on all sides
of the infinite plain, the Russians had no choice but to try to break out, which

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they did under Ivan IV.
Ivan the Terrible is a historical figure of controversy, both a monster and folk
hero, whose sobriquet is a misleading translation of 
Groznyi
, the Dread, given to
him by supporters for his punishment of the guilty. Ivan showed that in his time
and place the only antidote to chaos was absolutism. Ivan was Russia’s first great
imperialist, a role that was partially thrust on him by history and geography. For
in 1453, Greek Byzantium was overrun by the Ottoman Turks, and Greek
refugees filtered north from Constantinople into Moscow, bringing with them
political, military, and administrative expertise vital to empire building. Ivan,
upon becoming czar, defeated the Kazan Tatars, which gave him access to the
Urals; while later in his reign he took a major step toward the conquest of
Siberia by defeating the Mongol khanate of Sibir near the Irtysh River, northwest
of present-day Mongolia. Ivan’s cruelty and cunning summarized what his
people had learned from generations of “patient and supple dealings” with the
Asiatics.
13
The speed of the Russian irruption over this vast landscape was such
that less than six decades later, in the early seventeenth century, Russians were at
the Sea of Okhotsk, on the margins of the Pacific Ocean.
Ivan also eyed the south and southeast, specifically the Muslim khanate of
Astrakhan, an offshoot of the Golden Horde which oversaw the estuary of the
Volga and the roads to the Caucasus, Persia, and Central Asia. Here was the land
of the Nogai Horde, Turkic nomads who spoke a form of Kypchak. Even as the
Nogais were political enemies of Muscovy, they traded with the principality, and
welcomed Ivan’s soldiery to keep the main roads safe. The sea of grasslands was
a complex enormity in which Mongols and Tatars, with their armies sometimes
overlapping, made war—and also had commerce—with the Russians. And
remember, as hard and complicated as the flatlands were, the Caucasus range
was more so, and thus more exotic to Russian eyes, accounting for the Russian
obsession with them.

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Ivan was indefatigable. On the heels of his victory in the south, he made war
in the region of present-day Estonia and Latvia in order to secure a perch on the
Baltic, but was defeated by a combination of the Hanseatic League and the
German Order of Livonia. This crucially cut Russia off from the West, even as it
was being influenced by its newly taken lands in the Middle East and Asia.
Russia’s first thrust at a continental empire in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries established the reputation of the Cossacks, employed by
the Russian state to firm up its position in the Caucasus. Though the word
“Cossack,” or 
kazak
, originally referred to a freelance Tatar warrior, the
Cossacks came to be individual Russians, Lithuanians, and Poles, who,
despairing of the harsh conditions on the estates of their homelands, migrated to
the Ukrainian steppes. Here amid the chaotic conditions of a former Mongol

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frontier, they made their livings as thieves, traders, colonists, and mercenaries,
gradually coalescing into irregular units of Ivan’s army because they were tough
and came cheap. Cossack settlements emerged in the river valleys, principally
those of the Don and the Dnieper.
14
As it happens, Nikolai Gogol’s classic