Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
peoples in order to survive.… In the past this need has favored centralized, au-
thoritarian forms of government and discouraged more participatory forms.
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The Yenesei swells to a flood as much as three miles wide and is the sixth longest river
in the world. It flows north for 3,400 miles from Mongolia to the Arctic. Much more so
than the Urals, it is the true dividing line between two Russias—between western and east-
ern Siberia, with thousands of miles of lowland plain beckoning on its western bank and
thousands of miles of plateau and snowy mountains on its eastern bank. The British trav-
eler Colin Thubron writes that “it is the flow of the river out of emptiness, like something
incarnate, time-bearing, at once peaceful and rather terrible, which tightens my stomach.”
At another, more northerly point along the river, beyond the Arctic Circle, he goes on: “the
earth is flattening out over its axis. The shoreline is sinking away. Nothing, it seems, has
ever happened here. So … history becomes geology.”
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The lure of animal furs first brought explorers to this glacial back-of-beyond. Later it
would be the natural resources: oil, natural gas, coal, iron, gold, copper, graphite, alumin-
um, nickel, and a plethora of other metals and minerals, as well as the electric power gener-
ated by Siberia's mighty rivers: for just as the Yenesei divides western and eastern Siberia,
the equally majestic Lena divides eastern Siberia from the Russian Far East. Indeed, where-
as the great rivers of Siberia flow south to north, their tributaries stretch east and west, “like
the intersecting branches of … mammoth trees,” creating a great portage system.
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The mines punctuating this landscape were to constitute the heart of the czarist and
Soviet penal systems. Indeed, the geography of Siberia has been a synonym for cruelty and
strategic wealth, making Russia over the decades both a morally dark and an energy-rich
power. The sudden appearance of Russia among the great powers of Europe in the early
1700s was related to the rich supplies of iron ore found in the Ural forests, fit for making
cannons and muskets, so necessary for waging modern war. Likewise, in the mid-1960s,
the discovery of vast fields of oil and natural gas in northwestern Siberia would make
achieved something else: it brought Russia into the geopolitics of the Pacific, and into con-
flict with both Japan and China. It has been the Russian conflict with China that was at
the heart of Cold War dynamics, even as that conflict could be central to America's own
strategy for dealing with both powers in the twenty-first century.
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Unlike the Irtych, Ob, Yenesei, and Lena, the Amur River flows not south to north, but
west to east, linking up with the Ussuri River to form today's border between the Russian
Far East and Chinese Manchuria. This frontier region, known as Amuria to the north of the
Chinese border and Ussuria to the east of it, has been fought over between czarist Russia
and Qing (Manchu) China since the mid-seventeenth century, when Russian freebooters
entered the region, to be followed by Muscovite soldiers, and later by diplomats at a time
