Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
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 pli-
able regions of the Caucasus further south, such as Georgia, had already come under czar-
ist 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
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, Ukrain-
ian and cossack settlement of the 'settler empire' came into conflict with the stout resist-
ance of the mountain peoples. Most of these peoples, apart from the majority of the Ose-
tians, 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 Cau-
casus, 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.
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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 con-
quer.
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 en-
gineers 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
