Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
RUSSIA AND THE INDEPENDENT HEARTLAND
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 yawn-
ing 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, In-
gush, Ossetes, Daghestanis, Abkhaz, Kartvelians, Kakhetians, Armenians, Azeris, and oth-
ers. 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
