Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
military options are somewhat constrained, Russia can still move troops around Central
Asia in a way that no other power can, and Central Asians do harbor a certain nostalgia in
these politically volatile times for the peace and security that was the old Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center could well be right: Rus-
sia's best real hope in the long run is to liberalize its economy and politics, in order to make
Russia attractive to the Kazakhs and other former subject peoples. For the Heartland, with
the collapse of communism and the onset of globalization, has become a power in its own
right. Kazakhstan, which is more than double the land area of the other Central Asian states
combined, demonstrates it. Mackinder, who feared the horizontal separation of the world
into classes and ideologies, believed that along with the balance of power, it was provin-
cialism—the vertical separation of the world into small groups and states—that helps guar-
antee freedom.
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