Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Asia, Russia's population map favors Europe.
The Bolshevik Revolution was a total rejection of this quasi-Western orientation. Like-
wise, the low-dose authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin since 2000, both as president and
later as prime minister, is a rejection of the cold turkey experiment with Western democracy
and market capitalism that brought a chaotic Russia to its knees in the 1990s, following
the collapse of communism. Putin and Russian president Dimitri Medvedev in recent years
have not been quite orienting Russia toward Europe and the Pacific, and consequently have
not been reforming Russia in order to make it more of an attractive power to its former
subject peoples. (Indeed, in trade, foreign investment, technology, infrastructure, and edu-
is not strictly speaking an imperialist, Russia's latest empire-in-the-making is being built
on the wealth of Russia's immense natural resources which are desperately needed at the
European periphery and in China, with the profits and coercion that go along with that.
Putin and Medvedev have had no uplifting ideas to offer, no ideology of any kind, in fact:
what they do have in their favor is only geography. And that is not enough.
Russia boasts the world's largest natural gas reserves, the second largest coal reserves,
and the eighth largest oil reserves, much of which lie in western Siberia between the Urals
and the Central Siberian plateau. This is in addition to vast reserves of hydropower in the
mountains, rivers, and lakes of eastern Siberia at a time in history when water shortages
are critical for many nations, especially China. Putin has used energy revenues for a quad-
rupling of the military budget, the air force in particular, during his first seven years in
office. And the military budget has gone up ever since. Because of geography—Russia,
as I've said, has no clear-cut topographical borders save for the Arctic and Pacific
oceans—Russians appear to accept “the deep-seated militarization” of their society and
the “endless search for security through the creation of a land-based empire,” which Putin
its soft power potential throughout the former Soviet Union and the adjacent Eurasian rim-
land, Putin has opted for neo-czarist expansionism, which his country's abundant natural
resources make possible for the short term.
Yet even Putin has not altogether given up on the European dimension of Russian geo-
graphy. To the contrary, his concentration on Ukraine as part of a larger effort to re-create a
sphere of influence in the near-abroad is proof of his desire to anchor Russia in Europe, al-
beit on nondemocratic terms. Ukraine is the pivot state that in and of itself transforms Rus-
sia. Abutting the Black Sea in the south and former Eastern European satellites to the west,
Ukraine's very independence keeps Russia to a large extent out of Europe. With Greek and
Roman Catholics in the western part of Ukraine and Eastern Orthodox in the east, west-
ern Ukraine is a breeding ground for Ukrainian nationalism while the east favors closer
