Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
“from Pushkin to pop music,” is still in demand. A Russian-language television station
could, in the event of an intellectually revitalized Russia, “become a sort of al Jazeera for
Russophones.” In this way of thinking, liberal democracy is the only ideal that could allow
tails with Solzhenitsyn's remark in 1991 that “the time has come for an uncompromising
choice
between an empire of which we ourselves are the primary victims, and the spiritual
and physical salvation of our own people.”
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In fact, there is a geographic side to Trenin's analysis. He argues that Russia should put
more emphasis on its extremities—Europe and the Pacific—than on its Eurasian heartland.
A stress on cooperation with Europe would move Russia attitudinally westward. The pop-
ulation map of Russia shows that despite a territory that occupies eleven time zones, the
overwhelming majority of Russians live in the extreme west adjacent to Europe. Thus, true
political and economic reform merged with demographics could make Russia an authen-
tic European country. As far as the Pacific is concerned, “Russia would do well to think
of Vladivostok as its twenty-first-century capital,” Trenin writes. Vladivostok is a cosmo-
politan seaport, in close proximity to Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, and Tokyo,
regarded its Far East as an area to exploit for raw materials rather than as a gateway to
the Pacific Rim, the economic rise of East Asia that began in the 1970s and has continued
that—for Russia is suffering as a result. China, which, rather than Russia, followed the lead
of its fellow Pacific Rim countries Japan and South Korea in adopting market capitalism,
is now emerging as the great power in Eurasia. Beijing has given $10 billion in loans to
Central Asia, helped Belarus with a currency swap, gave a billion dollars in aid to Moldova
at the other end of the continent, and is developing an area of influence in the Russian Far
East. For Russia, a corresponding strategy would be to politically attach itself to Europe
and economically attach itself to East Asia. Thus would Russia solve its problems in the
Caucasus and Central Asia—by becoming truly attractive to those former Soviet republics,
whose peoples are themselves desirous of the freedoms and living standards that obtain at
the western and eastern edges of Eurasia.
Russia actually had a chance for a similar destiny a century ago. Had power in Russia
at a particularly fragile moment in 1917 not been wrested by the Bolsheviks, it is entirely
possible, likely even, that Russia would have evolved in the course of the twentieth century
into a poorer and slightly more corrupt and unstable version of France and Germany,
anchored nevertheless to Europe, rather than becoming the Stalinist monster that it did.
After all, the ancien régime, with its heavily German czardom, its French-speaking nobles,
and bourgeois parliament in the European capital of St. Petersburg, was oriented westward,