RUSSIA AND THE INDEPENDENT HEARTLAND - The Revenge of Geography - page 135

Sovietism and the lack of complete identification of each state with a single ethnic
group has ironically led to a modest stability in Central Asia, occasional unrest in the
Ferghana valley and elsewhere notwithstanding. (Though, I must say, the region remains
a potential tinderbox.) This dynamic, buttressed by extreme wealth in natural resources,
has given some of these states significant bargaining power with the principal Eurasian
states—Moscow and Beijing—who can be played off one against the other. (Russia needs
Central Asian gas to transport to European markets, which gives Russia leverage over
Europe; but Russia's position is being threatened by China's own purchase of Central Asian
gas.) 49 Central Asia's bounty is immense. Kazakhstan's Tengiz oil fields alone are thought
to contain twice as much oil as the Alaskan North Slope. 50 Turkmenistan's annual natural
gas output is the third highest in the world. Kyrgyzstan was the largest producer of mer-
cury and antimony in the Soviet Union, and has large deposits of gold, platinum, palladium,
and silver. 51 This wealth in natural resources, as well as lingering resentment over Soviet
occupation, has led, for instance, to Uzbekistan opening its railway bridge to Afghanistan
to NATO traffic without at least initially consulting Russia; to Turkmenistan diversifying
its energy routes rather than relying completely on Russia; and to Kazakhstan turning to
European rather than Russian engineers to exploit its geologically “tricky” petroleum re-
serves in the Caspian Sea shelf. 52
Thus, a Russian sphere of influence will be challenging to preserve, and will be held
hostage in some degree to the fickleness of global energy prices, given how Russia's own
economy essentially runs on natural resources, just like the Central Asian ones. Russia's
new empire, if it does emerge, will likely be a weak reincarnation of previous ones, limited
not just by flinty states in Central Asia but by the rising influence in Central Asia of China,
and to a lesser extent of India and Iran. China has invested over $25 billion in Central Asia.
It is paying for a two-thousand-mile highway across Kazakhstan. There are daily flights
between the Kazakh city of Almaty and the western Chinese city of Urumqui, and Chinese
goods fill Central Asian markets. 53
Kazakhstan may be the ultimate register of Russian fortunes in Eurasia. Kazakhstan is
a prosperous middle-income state by Central Asian standards that is geographically the
size of Western Europe, with a GDP larger than all the other Central Asian states com-
bined. Kazakhstan's new capital, Astana, is located in the ethnic Russian north of the coun-
try, which hothead Russian nationalists wanted to annex after the fall of the Soviet Union:
at that time, of nine oblasts along Kazakhstan's three-thousand-mile northern border with
Russia, in eight of them, in their northern parts, the population was almost 90 percent non-
Kazakh. 54 The ceremonial buildings of Astana, designed by Sir Norman Foster, constitute
a Kazakh rebuke to Russian ambitions regarding their country. The reinvention of Astana
cost $10 billion. It is linked to the south of the country by high-speed trains. 55 Kazakhstan