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

Taras
Bulba
, published initially in 1835 with a final version a decade later, is a story of
the Dnieper Cossacks. Gogol was a Russian nationalist but he saw the real,
primordial Russia in the Ukraine (a word meaning “borderland”), whose
unremitting and unimpeded steppes—lacking natural boundaries and drained by
relatively few navigable rivers—had made its colliding peoples warlike.
Although Gogol used the words “Russian,” “Ukrainian,” and “Cossack” to
denote specific identities, he also recognized that these identities overlapped (as
local identities still do).
15
Gogol’s story is dark with unredemptive violence.
While the utter lack of humanity portrayed in these pages is the work of
individuals making their own awful choices, it is also true that the violence of
Taras Bulba
is at least partly an expression of the geography of the Russian and
Ukrainian steppes, where flatness, continentality, and migration routes lead to
conflict and swift changes of fortune.
Ivan IV’s empire continued to expand under Boris Godunov (1598–1605),
particularly in the southeasterly direction of Stalingrad, the Urals, and the
Kazakh steppe. But then medieval Muscovy collapsed, as Kievan Rus had before
it, this time with Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, and Cossacks carving pieces out of
the carcass. Medieval Muscovy had fashioned itself as the “Third Rome,” the
rightful successor of both Rome itself and Constantinople. Hence Muscovy’s
undoing, known as the Time of Troubles—the result of factionalism in the
capital—made it appear that an entire world and civilization were ending. And
yet Russia was not finished, in spite of how it seemed at the time. Within a few
short years, in 1613, Michael Romanov was installed as the czar, and a new
dynasty as well as a new chapter in Russian history commenced.
It was the Romanov dynasty that came to define modern Russia, to give
mechanization and further administrative organization to Russian imperialism,
an improvement over the somewhat romantic, ad hoc forays of medieval
Muscovy. Under the three-hundred-year rule of the Romanovs, Russia subdued
Poland and Lithuania, destroyed Sweden, humbled Napoleonic France, took
back the Ukraine, expanded into the Crimea and the Balkans at the expense of
the Ottoman Turks, and both extended and formalized its hold on the Caucasus,
Central Asia, and Siberia unto China and the Pacific. Russia recovered from
reverses in the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–
1905). And in keeping with the grand theme of Russian history, that of

---

momentous expansions and equally momentous retreats against the backdrop of
a vast, unimpeded geography, the Romanovs lost both Poland and western
Russia to Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812, only to recover within a few weeks
and hasten a French withdrawal back to Central Europe that reduced Napoleon’s
forces to ashes.
Peter the Great, who ruled Russia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, was to the Romanov dynasty what Ivan IV had been to medieval
Muscovy: an extraordinary individual whose actions demonstrate that geography
is only part of the story. Of course, Peter is most well known to history for his
building of St. Petersburg on the shores of the Baltic, which he began in 1703,
and which entailed a grueling war against the Swedish Empire: with Sweden
invading across the Masurian Marshes in the area of Belarus, and the Russians
burning crops as part of a scorched earth policy in the dry areas, a tactic that they
would later use against both Napoleon and Hitler. And yet Peter’s grand
achievement of consolidating Russia’s Baltic coast, establishing a new capital
there that faced toward Europe, in an effort to change Russia’s political and
cultural identity, would ultimately fail. For with conquests in every other
direction, too, Russia remained more properly a Eurasian country, arguably the
archetypal one, the only one in fact, straining to be European even as geography
and the history of invasions exemplified by the Mongols denied it that status.
Alexander Herzen, the great nineteenth-century literary intellectual of Russia,
remarked:
To this day we look upon Europeans and upon Europe in the same way
as provincials look upon those who live in the capital, with deference
and a feeling of our own inferiority, knuckling under and imitating
them, taking everything in which we are different for a defect.
16
Though Russians should have had nothing to be ashamed of, for they could
only be what they were: a people that had wrested an empire from an impossible
continental landscape, and were consequently knocking at the gates of the
Levant and India, thus threatening the empires of France and Britain. For at
about the same time that Herzen wrote those words above, Russian forces took
Tashkent and Samarkand on the ancient silk route to China, close to the borders
of the Indian Subcontinent.
Whereas the maritime empires of France and Britain faced implacable
enemies overseas, the Russians faced them on their own territory, so that the
Russians learned from early on in their history to be anxious and vigilant. They
were a nation that in one form or another was always at war. Again, the

---

Caucasus provide a telling example in the form of the Muslim Chechens of the
north Caucasus, against whom the armies of Catherine the Great fought in the
late eighteenth century, and continued fighting under succeeding czars
throughout the nineteenth, to say nothing of the struggles in our own time. This
was long after more pliable regions of the Caucasus further south, such as
Georgia, had already come under czarist control. Chechen belligerency stemmed
from the difficulty of earning a living from the stony mountain soil, and from the
need to bear arms to protect sheep and goats from wild animals. Because trade
routes traversed the Caucasus, the Chechens were at once guides and robbers.
17
And though converts to Sufi Islam—often less fanatical than other branches of
the faith—they were zealous in defense of their homeland from the Orthodox
Christian Russians. In the Caucasus, writes the geographer Denis J. B. Shaw,
“the Russian, Ukrainian and cossack settlement of the ‘settler empire’ came into
conflict with the stout resistance of the mountain peoples. Most of these peoples,
apart from the majority of the Osetians, are Islamic in culture, and this
reinforced their determination to fight the Russian intruder.” Because of their
fear of the independent spirit of the people of the north Caucasus, the Bolsheviks
refused to incorporate them into a single republic and split them up, only to
rejoin them into artificial units that did not conform to their linguistic and ethnic
patterns. Thus, Shaw goes on, “the Karbardians were grouped with the Balkars,
despite the fact that the former have more in common with the Cherkessians and
the latter with the Karachay.” Stalin, moreover, exiled the Chechens, Ingush,
Kalmyks, and others to Central Asia in 1944, for their alleged collaboration with
the Germans.
18
The Caucasus have contributed mightily to making the face of Russian
imperialism hard. Such, as we’ve said, is often the destiny of land powers, who
have often the need to conquer.
So the Russians pressed on, inspiring Mackinder to formulate his pivot theory
by a surge of Russian railway building in the second half of the nineteenth
century: fifteen thousand miles of lines between 1857 and 1882, so that Moscow
was connected with the Prussian frontier to the west and with Nizhniy-Novgorod
to the east, as well as with the Crimea on the shore of the Black Sea to the south.
Moreover, between 1879 and 1886, Russian engineers built a rail line from
Krasnovodsk, on the eastern shore of the Caspian, to Merv, more than five
hundred miles to the east, close to the borders of Persia and Afghanistan; by
1888 that line reached another three hundred miles northeastward to Samarkand.
(And a spur was built from Merv south to near the Afghan border.) These new
arteries of empire followed Russian military advances in the Kara Kum (Black

---

Sand) and Kyzyl Kum (Red Sand) deserts south of the Central Asian steppe, in
the area of present-day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Because of the proximity
of the Indian Subcontinent, where British power was then at its zenith, this bout
of Russian imperial activity joined the “Great Game” between Russia and
Britain for the control of Asia. Meanwhile, a line was built to connect Baku, on
the western shore of the Caspian, with Batumi, on the Black Sea, so as to span
the Caucasus. And in 1891, the Russians began a railway from the Urals to the
Pacific, four thousand miles away, through Siberia and the Far East, and all the
forests, mountains, swamplands, and permafrost in between. By 1904 there were
38,000 miles of railways in Russia, a fact that gave St. Petersburg access to
eleven time zones, all the way to the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska.
Motivating this latest Russian version of Manifest Destiny was, once again,
insecurity: the insecurity of a land power that had to keep attacking and
exploring in all directions or itself be vanquished.
On a relief map of Eurasia a great fact stands out—one that explains the story of
Russia. From the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Central Siberian
plateau in the east there is nothing but lowland plains, with the Urals in between
as but a small eruption on this flat, continent-sized landscape. This plain, which
includes Mackinder’s Heartland, extends from the Arctic Ocean inlets of the
White and Kara seas to the Caucasus, and to the Hindu Kush and Zagros
mountains in Afghanistan and Iran, so that Russian imperialism has always been
tempted by the vague hope of a warm water outlet on the close-by Indian Ocean.
But it wasn’t only in the cases of the Caucasus and Afghanistan where Russians
ventured beyond the core region of this great plain and deep into the mountains.
From the early seventeenth century into the twentieth, Russians—Cossacks, fur
trappers, and traders—bravely reached beyond the Yenesei River, from western
into eastern Siberia and the Far East, a frigid immensity of seven major
mountain ranges 2,500 miles across where the frost can last nine months of the
year. While the conquest of Belarus and the Ukraine was natural because of the
close affinity and common, intertwined history of these lands with Russia, in
Siberia the Russians carved out an entirely new “boreal riverine empire.”
19
As
W. Bruce Lincoln writes in his magesterial history,