The Revenge of Geography (24 page)

Of course, Russia is not going to be taking control of Greece anytime soon. Yet it is interesting to contemplate what would have happened during the Cold War had the negotiations between Churchill and Stalin gone differently: imagine how much stronger the Kremlin’s strategic position would have been with Greece inside the communist bloc, endangering Italy across the Adriatic Sea, to say nothing of the whole eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. The Greek financial crisis, so emblematic of Greece’s political and economic underdevelopment, rocked the European Union’s currency system beginning in 2010, and because of the tensions it wrought between northern and southern European countries was nothing less than the most significant challenge to the European project since the wars of the Yugoslav secession. As Greece ably demonstrates, Europe remains a truly ambitious work in progress: one that will be influenced by trends and convulsions from the south and east in a world reeling from a crisis of room.

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

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.
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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.
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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 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.”
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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.
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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 they did under Ivan IV.