Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
power between Mao Zedong's communists and Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists allowed for
a large Russian troop presence in Manchuria, the consolidation of a pro-Soviet Outer Mon-
golia, and a friendly communist regime in the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. In the
Korean Peninsula the great land power of the Soviet Union—and that of soon-to-be-com-
munist China—would encounter the sea power of the United States, helping to facilitate the
Korean War five years after World War II. For the upshot of World War II was the creation
of Mackinder's Heartland power in the form of Soviet Russia, juxtaposed with Mahan's
and Spykman's great sea power in the form of the United States. The destinies of Europe
and China would both be affected by the very spread of Soviet power over the Heartland,
even as the Greater Middle East and Southeast Asia in the Eurasian rimland would feel the
pressure of American sea and air power. This was the ultimate geographical truth of the
Cold War, which the ideology of communism coming from Moscow and the ideal of demo-
cracy coming from Washington obscured.
But the Cold War, which seemed interminable to those like myself who had grown up dur-
ing the period, proved to be merely another phase of Russian history that ended accord-
ing to the familiar dictates of Russian geography. Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt to reform
Soviet communism in the 1980s revealed the system for what it actually was: an inflexible
empire of subject peoples, inhabiting in many cases the steppe-land and mountainous peri-
pheries of the Russian forests and plains. Once Gorbachev himself, in effect, announced
that the ideological precepts on which the empire rested were deeply flawed, the whole
system began to fall apart with the marginal pieces breaking off from the Russian center
much as they had following the failure of Kievan Rus in the middle of the thirteenth cen-
tury, medieval Muscovy in the early seventeenth, and the Romanov Empire in the early
twentieth. This is why historian Philip Longworth notes that repeated expansion and col-
lapse over a generally flat topography has been a principal feature of Russian history. In
fact, as geographer and Russian specialist Denis Shaw explains, while the open frontier
and the military burden which that engendered “fostered the centralization of the Russian
state”—indeed, the power of the czars was legendary—Russia was, nevertheless, a weak
state, because the czars did not develop sturdy administrative institutions in the far-flung
provinces. This made Russia even more open to invasion.
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In 1991, when the Soviet Union officially disbanded, Russia was reduced to its smallest
size since before the reign of Catherine the Great. It had lost even Ukraine, the original
heartland of Kievan Rus. But despite the loss of Ukraine and the Baltic states, the Cau-
casus, and Central Asia, despite the military uncertainties of Chechnya, Dagestan, and
Tatarstan, and despite the emergence of Outer Mongolia as an independent state free of
Moscow's tutelage, Russia's territory still surpassed that of any other nation on earth, cov-
ering over a third of mainland Asia, with land borders still stretching over almost half of
