RUSSIA AND THE INDEPENDENT HEARTLAND - The Revenge of Geography - page 124

followed Russian military advances in the Kara Kum (Black Sand) and Kyzyl Kum (Red
Sand) deserts south of the Central Asian steppe, in the area of present-day Turkmenistan
and Uzbekistan. Because of the proximity of the Indian Subcontinent, where British power
was then at its zenith, this bout of Russian imperial activity joined the “Great Game”
between Russia and Britain for the control of Asia. Meanwhile, a line was built to connect
Baku, on the western shore of the Caspian, with Batumi, on the Black Sea, so as to span
the Caucasus. And in 1891, the Russians began a railway from the Urals to the Pacific,
four thousand miles away, through Siberia and the Far East, and all the forests, mountains,
swamplands, and permafrost in between. By 1904 there were 38,000 miles of railways in
Russia, a fact that gave St. Petersburg access to eleven time zones, all the way to the Ber-
ing Strait between Russia and Alaska. Motivating this latest Russian version of Manifest
Destiny was, once again, insecurity: the insecurity of a land power that had to keep attack-
ing and exploring in all directions or itself be vanquished.
On a relief map of Eurasia a great fact stands out—one that explains the story of Russia.
From the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Central Siberian plateau in the east there
is nothing but lowland plains, with the Urals in between as but a small eruption on this flat,
continent-sized landscape. This plain, which includes Mackinder's Heartland, extends from
the Arctic Ocean inlets of the White and Kara seas to the Caucasus, and to the Hindu Kush
and Zagros mountains in Afghanistan and Iran, so that Russian imperialism has always
been tempted by the vague hope of a warm water outlet on the close-by Indian Ocean. But it
wasn't only in the cases of the Caucasus and Afghanistan where Russians ventured beyond
the core region of this great plain and deep into the mountains. From the early seventeenth
century into the twentieth, Russians—Cossacks, fur trappers, and traders—bravely reached
beyond the Yenesei River, from western into eastern Siberia and the Far East, a frigid im-
mensity of seven major mountain ranges 2,500 miles across where the frost can last nine
months of the year. While the conquest of Belarus and the Ukraine was natural because of
the close affinity and common, intertwined history of these lands with Russia, in Siberia
the Russians carved out an entirely new “boreal riverine empire.” 19 As W. Bruce Lincoln
writes in his magesterial history, 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 ex-
perience in its most intense form. Philip Longworth writes:
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 rela-
tionships, for Russians have needed a greater degree of organization than most