Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
iks easily rationalized their conquests: after all, they had given the blessing of commun-
ism to these peoples, even as they awarded them Soviet republics of their own. 28 Follow-
ing the dictates of geography, however subconsciously, the Bolsheviks moved the capital
back eastward to Moscow from St. Petersburg on the Baltic, restoring the largely Asiatic
reality that was always central to Russia's being. In place of the semi-modernized regime
bestowed by Peter the Great, which ruled Russia from its Baltic “window on the West,”
there now arose a state ruled from the Kremlin, the historic semi-Asiatic seat of medieval
Muscovy. 29 The new Soviet Union consisted of three Union Republics—Russia, Ukraine,
and Belarus—and eleven Autonomous Republics and subregions. But because many of
these republics did not neatly overlap with ethnic borders—for example, there was a large
Tajik minority in Uzbekistan and a larger Uzbek one in Tajikistan—secession was impos-
sible without civil war, and so the Soviet Union became a prison of nations.
This prison of nations was as aggressive as ever in the twentieth century, even as it had
more cause for insecurity than ever before. In 1929 Soviet infantry, cavalry, and aircraft at-
tacked the western edge of Manchuria to seize control of a railroad passing through Chinese
territory. In 1935 the Soviet Union made a virtual satellite out of western China's Xinji-
ang Province, while Outer Mongolia became the Mongolian People's Republic, strongly
aligned with the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, in European Russia, the signing of the 1939
Russo-German pact allowed Stalin to annex eastern Poland, eastern Finland, Bessarabia,
and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Russia, under the guise of the Soviet
Union, now stretched from Central Europe to the Korean Peninsula. And yet, as events
would demonstrate, Russia was still not secure. Geography continued to have a say in the
matter. Hitler's 1941 invasion eastward across the plain of European Russia brought Ger-
man troops to the outskirts of Moscow and within reach of the Caspian Sea, until they were
stopped at Stalingrad in early 1943. At the end of the war, the Soviets exacted their revenge,
giving vent to centuries of geographical insecurity going back to the Mongol depredations
against Kievan Rus.
Following the collapse of Nazi Germany and fascist Japan, the Soviet Union effectively
acquired the entire eastern half of Europe by erecting a system of communist satellite
states, the loyalty of which was guaranteed in most cases by the presence of Soviet troops,
who had surged back across the flat plain westward—back across the Dnieper, the Vis-
tula, and the Danube—as the logistics of Hitler's war machine failed amid the vastness
of European Russia, much as Napoleon's had the century before. This Soviet Eastern
European empire now stretched deeper into the heart of Central Europe than had the Ro-
manov Empire of 1613-1917, and included all of the territory promised Russia in the
Nazi-Soviet pact. 30 At the opposite end of the Soviet Union, Moscow took possession of
Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands north of Japan, adjoining the Russian Far East. The chaot-
ic and weakened state of China following the Japanese occupation and the struggle for
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