RUSSIA AND THE INDEPENDENT HEARTLAND - The Revenge of Geography - page 129

the world's time zones from the Gulf of Finland to the Bering Sea. And yet this vast and
naked expanse—no longer guarded by mountains and steppes at its fringes—now had to be
protected by a population that was only a little over half that of the former Soviet Union. 32
(Russia's population was smaller than that of Bangladesh, in fact.)
Perhaps never before in peacetime was Russia so geographically vulnerable. In all of
Siberia and the Far East there were only 27 million people. 33 Russia's leaders lost no time
in assessing the dire situation. Less than a month after the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev told Rossiyskaya Gazeta that “we rapidly came to
understand that geopolitics is replacing ideology.” 34 “Geopolitics, persistently demonized
during the days of the Soviet Union,” writes University of Edinburgh professor emeritus
John Erickson, “has returned with a vengeance to haunt post-Soviet Russia.” Gone were the
denunciations of geopolitics as the tool of capitalist militarism: not only was geopolitics as
a discipline rehabilitated in Russia, but so were the reputations of Mackinder, Mahan, and
Karl Haushofer even. In “unabashed neo-Mackinderian style,” the old-guard communist
leader Gennady Zyuganov declared that Russia had to restore control of the “Heartland.” 35
Given the ups and downs of Russian history, in addition to its new geographical vulnerabil-
ities, Russia had no choice but to become a revisionist power, intent on regaining—in some
subtle or not so subtle form—its near-abroad in Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, the Caucasus,
and Central Asia, where 26 million ethnic Russians still lived. During the lost decade of
the 1990s, when Russia teetered on the brink of economic collapse and was consequently
weak and humiliated, a new cycle of expansion was nevertheless being nurtured. The Rus-
sian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky suggested that the southern Caucasus as well
as Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan now all had to come under Russian domination. While
Zhirinovsky's extremism was not shared by the majority of Russians, he still tapped into
a vital undercurrent of Russian thinking. Truly, Russia's present weakness in Eurasia has
made geography itself a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Russian obsession.
Of course, the Soviet Union would never be reconstituted. However, a looser form of
union reaching to the borders of the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent might still
be attainable. But what would be the uplifting rallying cry behind it? What would be the
idea with which the Russians could morally justify the next wave of expansion? Zbigniew
Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives
writes that in the 1990s Russians began to resurrect the nineteenth-century doctrine of Eur-
asianism as an alternative to communism, in order to lure back the non-Russian peoples of
the former Soviet Union. 36 Eurasianism fits nicely with Russia's historical and geographic-
al personality. Sprawling from Europe to the Far East, and yet anchored in neither, Russia,
in the way of no other country, epitomizes Eurasia. Moreover, a closed geography featuring
a crisis of room in the twenty-first century—one that erodes the divisions of Cold War area
specialists—makes more palpable the very idea of Eurasia as a continental, organic whole.