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.”
35
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.
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.
36
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,
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