Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
sure that helped oust Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev from power in 2010, for the
crime of hosting an American air base.
In many of these places, from Chechnya in the north Caucasus to Tajikistan next door to
China, Russia must deal with a resurgent Islam over a vast southern frontier that is histor-
ically part of a Greater Persian cultural and linguistic realm. Therefore, Russia's recovery
of its lost republics, by the establishment of a sphere of influence over them, definitely re-
quires a friendly Iran that does not compete with Russia in these areas, and does not export
Islamic radicalism. Russia, for reasons rooted in geography, can only offer meager help in
America's campaign against the Iranian regime.
Yet despite all these advantages, history will likely not repeat itself in the sense of another
Russian empire emerging in the early twenty-first century. This is because of particular his-
torical and geographical circumstances that adhere in Central Asia.
Russia began to solidify control in Central Asia in the early nineteenth century, when
Russian trade in the area increased, even as on the Kazakh steppe, for example, anarchy
Soviets in the early twentieth century created individual states out of the vast Central Asian
steppe and tableland that did not cohere with ethnic borders, so that if any tried to se-
cede from the Soviet Union it would have been impossible—leading to interethnic war.
The Soviets were afraid of pan-Turkism, pan-Persianism, and pan-Islamism, for which the
splitting up of ethnic groups was a partial panacea. This created a plethora of anomalies.
The Syr Darya valley begins in an Uzbek-populated part of Kyrgyzstan and passes through
Uzbekistan, then through Tajikistan before returning to Uzbekistan and ending up in Kaza-
khstan. The road linking the Uzbek capital of Tashkent to the Uzbek province of Ferghana
must pass through Tajikistan. To get from Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, to the ethnic-
Tajik areas of Khojent and Khorog one must pass through Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
The town of Chimkent, close to Uzbekistan, is predominantly Uzbek, but is “attached” to
Kazakhstan. The predominantly Tajik-populated city of Samarkand is in Uzbekistan, and
so forth. What emerged in Central Asia, therefore, was less ethnic nationalism than “Sovi-
etism” as a technique of control and power. But while Sovietism survives, even after the
breakup of the Soviet Union, the ethnic Russians in the region have been marginalized, and
in some places there exists strong hostility against them. Nevertheless, pan-Turkism and
pan-Persianism remain relatively weak. Iran has been Shiite since the sixteenth century,
whereas Tajiks and the other Persianized Muslims of Central Asia are mainly Sunni. As for
the Turks, only recently has modern Turkey sought to become a focal point of the Muslim
world.
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