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

The Conquest of a Continent:
Siberia and the Russians
, “the conquest that has defined her [Russian] greatness
has been in Asia,” not Europe.
20
The drama that played out in eastern Siberia
and beyond summed up the Russian historical experience in its most intense
form. Philip Longworth writes:

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The harshness of the climate has made them hardy and enduring; the
immensity of their landscape and the low density of settlement, as well
as the brevity of the growing season, have encouraged both
cooperation and coercion in social relationships, for Russians have
needed a greater degree of organization than most peoples in order to
survive.… In the past this need has favored centralized, authoritarian
forms of government and discouraged more participatory forms.
21
The Yenesei swells to a flood as much as three miles wide and is the sixth
longest river in the world. It flows north for 3,400 miles from Mongolia to the
Arctic. Much more so than the Urals, it is the true dividing line between two
Russias—between western and eastern Siberia, with thousands of miles of
lowland plain beckoning on its western bank and thousands of miles of plateau
and snowy mountains on its eastern bank. The British traveler Colin Thubron
writes that “it is the flow of the river out of emptiness, like something incarnate,
time-bearing, at once peaceful and rather terrible, which tightens my stomach.”
At another, more northerly point along the river, beyond the Arctic Circle, he
goes on: “the earth is flattening out over its axis. The shoreline is sinking away.
Nothing, it seems, has ever happened here. So … history becomes geology.”
22
The lure of animal furs first brought explorers to this glacial back-of-beyond.
Later it would be the natural resources: oil, natural gas, coal, iron, gold, copper,
graphite, aluminum, nickel, and a plethora of other metals and minerals, as well
as the electric power generated by Siberia’s mighty rivers: for just as the Yenesei
divides western and eastern Siberia, the equally majestic Lena divides eastern
Siberia from the Russian Far East. Indeed, whereas the great rivers of Siberia
flow south to north, their tributaries stretch east and west, “like the intersecting
branches of … mammoth trees,” creating a great portage system.
23
The mines punctuating this landscape were to constitute the heart of the
czarist and Soviet penal systems. Indeed, the geography of Siberia has been a
synonym for cruelty and strategic wealth, making Russia over the decades both a
morally dark and an energy-rich power. The sudden appearance of Russia among
the great powers of Europe in the early 1700s was related to the rich supplies of
iron ore found in the Ural forests, fit for making cannons and muskets, so
necessary for waging modern war. Likewise, in the mid-1960s, the discovery of
vast fields of oil and natural gas in northwestern Siberia would make Russia an
energy hyperpower in the early twenty-first century.
24
Siberia’s conquest also
achieved something else: it brought Russia into the geopolitics of the Pacific,
and into conflict with both Japan and China. It has been the Russian conflict

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with China that was at the heart of Cold War dynamics, even as that conflict
could be central to America’s own strategy for dealing with both powers in the
twenty-first century.
25
Unlike the Irtych, Ob, Yenesei, and Lena, the Amur River flows not south to
north, but west to east, linking up with the Ussuri River to form today’s border
between the Russian Far East and Chinese Manchuria. This frontier region,
known as Amuria to the north of the Chinese border and Ussuria to the east of it,
has been fought over between czarist Russia and Qing (Manchu) China since the
mid-seventeenth century, when Russian freebooters entered the region, to be
followed by Muscovite soldiers, and later by diplomats at a time when the
Manchus were distracted by their conquests of Taiwan and parts of the mainland.
This process culminated in 1860 when a weak China with a decaying dynasty
was forced to accept the transfer of 350,000 square miles of territory from
Chinese to Russian sovereignty, creating the current frontiers.
26
 Now that China
is strong and Russia comparatively weak this border is again coming under
pressure from Chinese settlers and corporations seeking to move north, in order
to take advantage of this region’s oil, natural gas, timber, and other resources.
Geography commands a perennially tense relationship between Russia and
China, obscured by their tactical, somewhat anti-U.S. alliance of the moment. In
July 2009, Chief of the Russian General Staff Nikolai Makarov made a slide
presentation in which it was reportedly said that “NATO and China … are the
most dangerous of our geopolitical rivals.”
27
What this geography illuminates is something that is often forgotten: that
Russia has historically been very much a part of East Asian power dynamics.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 was partially instigated by Japan’s
demand that Russia acknowledge Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria (as well as
Japan’s freedom to intervene in Korea), to which the Russians objected. That
war’s ending, in addition to humiliating the czarist regime, even more so
constituted a humiliation of Qing China, as it was fought over land that the
Manchus considered part of their patrimony. To wit, Russia’s defeat still left it in
control of Amuria and Ussuria, which the Manchus coveted.
More so than the Russo-Japanese War, in which Russia lost the southern half
of Sakhalin Island and parts of southern Manchuria (which according to
geographic logic should have belonged to China anyway), it was the Russian
Revolution of 1917 and its chaotic aftermath that really shook loose Russia’s
control of its own Far East. China, Japan, and the United States (an emerging Far
Eastern power in its own right) took control of pieces of the Trans-Siberian
Railway between Lake Baikal in the west and the port of Vladivostok in the east,

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while Vladivostok itself came under Japanese occupation between 1918 and
1922. Eighty thousand Japanese troops occupied the Amur region during this
period.
Gradually, though, Lenin’s Red Army turned the tide of the civil war against
the White Russian antirevolutionaries. Consequently, the new Soviet state was
able to take back the territories on its margins: especially in the ethnic Turkic
areas of the Central Asian deserts, where the Bolsheviks feared they were
vulnerable to attack from the British in India, acting through Afghanistan. The
Bolsheviks, notwithstanding their professed ideology about the unity of all the
workers of the world, were realists when confronted with the “age-old problem”
of a sprawling land power: the threat of attack on its peripheries. Whoever ruled
Russia had to face the fact of a cursedly flat landmass spilling into contiguous
states in several directions. To compensate, the Bolsheviks became Russian
imperialists like the czars before them: Moldovans, Chechens, Georgians,
Azeris, Turkmens, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Buriat-Mongols, Tatars,
and others all came under their sway. The Bolsheviks easily rationalized their
conquests: after all, they had given the blessing of communism to these peoples,
even as they awarded them Soviet republics of their own.
28
Following the
dictates of geography, however subconsciously, the Bolsheviks moved the
capital back eastward to Moscow from St. Petersburg on the Baltic, restoring the
largely Asiatic reality that was always central to Russia’s being. In place of the
semi-modernized regime bestowed by Peter the Great, which ruled Russia from
its Baltic “window on the West,” there now arose a state ruled from the Kremlin,
the historic semi-Asiatic seat of medieval Muscovy.
29
The new Soviet Union
consisted of three Union Republics—Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus—and eleven
Autonomous Republics and subregions. But because many of these republics did
not neatly overlap with ethnic borders—for example, there was a large Tajik
minority in Uzbekistan and a larger Uzbek one in Tajikistan—secession was
impossible without civil war, and so the Soviet Union became a prison of
nations.
This prison of nations was as aggressive as ever in the twentieth century, even
as it had more cause for insecurity than ever before. In 1929 Soviet infantry,
cavalry, and aircraft attacked the western edge of Manchuria to seize control of a
railroad passing through Chinese territory. In 1935 the Soviet Union made a
virtual satellite out of western China’s Xinjiang Province, while Outer Mongolia
became the Mongolian People’s Republic, strongly aligned with the Soviet
Union. Meanwhile, in European Russia, the signing of the 1939 Russo-German
pact allowed Stalin to annex eastern Poland, eastern Finland, Bessarabia, and the

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Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Russia, under the guise of the
Soviet Union, now stretched from Central Europe to the Korean Peninsula. And
yet, as events would demonstrate, Russia was still not secure. Geography
continued to have a say in the matter. Hitler’s 1941 invasion eastward across the
plain of European Russia brought German troops to the outskirts of Moscow and
within reach of the Caspian Sea, until they were stopped at Stalingrad in early
1943. At the end of the war, the Soviets exacted their revenge, giving vent to
centuries of geographical insecurity going back to the Mongol depredations
against Kievan Rus.
Following the collapse of Nazi Germany and fascist Japan, the Soviet Union
effectively acquired the entire eastern half of Europe by erecting a system of
communist satellite states, the loyalty of which was guaranteed in most cases by
the presence of Soviet troops, who had surged back across the flat plain
westward—back across the Dnieper, the Vistula, and the Danube—as the
logistics of Hitler’s war machine failed amid the vastness of European Russia,
much as Napoleon’s had the century before. This Soviet Eastern European
empire now stretched deeper into the heart of Central Europe than had the
Romanov Empire of 1613–1917, and included all of the territory promised
Russia in the Nazi-Soviet pact.
30
At the opposite end of the Soviet Union,
Moscow took possession of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands north of Japan,
adjoining the Russian Far East. The chaotic and weakened state of China
following the Japanese occupation and the struggle for power between Mao
Zedong’s communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists allowed for a large
Russian troop presence in Manchuria, the consolidation of a pro-Soviet Outer
Mongolia, and a friendly communist regime in the northern half of the Korean
Peninsula. In the Korean Peninsula the great land power of the Soviet Union—
and that of soon-to-be-communist China—would encounter the sea power of the
United States, helping to facilitate the Korean War five years after World War II.
For the upshot of World War II was the creation of Mackinder’s Heartland power
in the form of Soviet Russia, juxtaposed with Mahan’s and Spykman’s great sea
power in the form of the United States. The destinies of Europe and China would
both be affected by the very spread of Soviet power over the Heartland, even as
the Greater Middle East and Southeast Asia in the Eurasian rimland would feel
the pressure of American sea and air power. This was the ultimate geographical
truth of the Cold War, which the ideology of communism coming from Moscow
and the ideal of democracy coming from Washington obscured.
But the Cold War, which seemed interminable to those like myself who had

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grown up during the period, proved to be merely another phase of Russian
history that ended according to the familiar dictates of Russian geography.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to reform Soviet communism in the 1980s revealed
the system for what it actually was: an inflexible empire of subject peoples,
inhabiting in many cases the steppe-land and mountainous peripheries of the
Russian forests and plains. Once Gorbachev himself, in effect, announced that
the ideological precepts on which the empire rested were deeply flawed, the
whole system began to fall apart with the marginal pieces breaking off from the
Russian center much as they had following the failure of Kievan Rus in the
middle of the thirteenth century, medieval Muscovy in the early seventeenth, and
the Romanov Empire in the early twentieth. This is why historian Philip
Longworth notes that repeated expansion and collapse over a generally flat
topography has been a principal feature of Russian history. In fact, as geographer
and Russian specialist Denis Shaw explains, while the open frontier and the
military burden which that engendered “fostered the centralization of the
Russian state”—indeed, the power of the czars was legendary—Russia was,
nevertheless, a weak state, because the czars did not develop sturdy
administrative institutions in the far-flung provinces. This made Russia even
more open to invasion.
31
In 1991, when the Soviet Union officially disbanded, Russia was reduced to
its smallest size since before the reign of Catherine the Great. It had lost even
Ukraine, the original heartland of Kievan Rus. But despite the loss of Ukraine
and the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, despite the military
uncertainties of Chechnya, Dagestan, and Tatarstan, and despite the emergence
of Outer Mongolia as an independent state free of Moscow’s tutelage, Russia’s
territory still surpassed that of any other nation on earth, covering over a third of
mainland Asia, with land borders still stretching over almost half of the world’s
time zones from the Gulf of Finland to the Bering Sea. And yet this vast and
naked expanse—no longer guarded by mountains and steppes at its fringes—
now had to be protected by a population that was only a little over half that of
the former Soviet Union.
32
(Russia’s population was smaller than that of
Bangladesh, in fact.)
Perhaps never before in peacetime was Russia so geographically vulnerable.
In all of Siberia and the Far East there were only 27 million people.
33
 Russia’s
leaders lost no time in assessing the dire situation. Less than a month after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev told