RUSSIA AND THE INDEPENDENT HEARTLAND - The Revenge of Geography - page 117

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 be-
spoke 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. 5 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 Asiat-
ic 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 pur-
pose 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. 6 The Tatar yoke, according to his-
torian 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.” 7
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:
Harsh seasonal cycles, a few, distant rivers, and sparse patterns of rainfall and
soil fertility controlled the lives of the ordinary peasant; and the ebb and flow
of nomadic conquerors often seemed little more than the senseless movement of
surface objects on an unchanging and unfriendly sea. 8
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 urb-
an 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 spe-