In other words, the very flatness of Russia, extending from Europe to the Far East, with few natural borders anywhere and the tendency for scattered settlements as opposed to urban concentrations, has for long periods made for a landscape of anarchy, in which every group was permanently insecure.
Clustered in the forest with their enemies lurking on the steppe, the Russians took refuge in both animism and religion. The springtime festival of Orthodox Easter “acquired a special intensity in the Russian north,” writes Billington. The traditional Easter greeting “was not the bland ‘Happy Easter’ of the modern West, but a direct affirmation of the central fact of sacred history, ‘Christ is risen!’ ” And the reply was, “In truth, risen!” This spoke not only to the ascended Christ but to nature as well. For the long and dark winter was nearly over, with the trees shedding snow and putting out their leaves. Eastern Orthodox Christianity contains more than a hint of paganism. And Russian communism with its Bolshevik emphasis on totality was another form of Russian religion—the secular equivalent of Orthodoxy, according to the early-twentieth-century Russian intellectual Nicolas Berdyaev. As the title of Billington’s book shows, the icon was a vivid reminder to the harassed frontiersmen of the power of their Orthodox faith, and the security and higher purpose it brought, while the axe “was the basic implement of Great Russia: the indispensable means of subordinating the forest” to their own purposes.9
Russia’s religious and communist totality, in other words, harked back to this feeling of defenselessness in the forest close to the steppe, which inculcated in Russians, in turn, the need for conquest. But because the land was flat, and integrally connected in its immensity to Asia and the Greater Middle East, Russia was itself conquered. While other empires rise, expand, and collapse—and are never heard from again, the Russian Empire has expanded, collapsed, and revived several times.10 Geography and history demonstrate that we can never discount Russia. Russia’s partial resurgence in our own age following the dissolution of the Soviet Empire is part of an old story.
Russia’s first great empire, and really the first great polity of Eastern Europe, was Kievan Rus, which emerged in the middle of the ninth century in Kiev, the most southerly of the historic cities along the Dnieper River. This allowed Kievan Rus to be in regular contact with the Byzantine Empire to the south, facilitating the conversion of Russians to Orthodox Christianity, which, as we know, would be enriched with the particular intensity that Russians gave to it, on account of their own encounter with a wintry landscape. Geography also decreed that Kievan Rus would demographically constitute a joining of Scandinavian Vikings (traveling down rivers from the north) and the indigenous eastern Slavs. The poor soils in the area meant that large tracts of land had to be conquered for the sake of a food supply, and thus an empire began to form, which brought together two dynamic regional forces, those of the Vikings and of the Byzantines. Russia, as a geographic and cultural concept, was the result.
Kievan Rus perennially struggled against steppe nomads. In the mid-thirteenth century it was finally destroyed by the Mongols under Batu Khan, Genghis’s grandson. Successive years of drought in their traditional grazing lands had driven the Mongols westward in search of new pastures for their horses, which were the source of both their food and mobility. And so, the first great attempt at Russian imperial expansion over the Eurasian heartland was overrun.
The result was that, through innumerable movements and countermovements, as well as political dramas that were the stuff of human agency, Russian history shifted gradually north to cities like Smolensk, Novgorod, Vladimir, and Moscow, with Moscow emerging strongest in the later medieval centuries: these medieval centuries were in turn characterized by, as we have seen, autocracy and paranoia, which were partly the consequence of Mongol pressure. Moscow’s rise to prominence was helped by its advantageous position for commerce, on the portage routes between the rivers in the basin of the mid- and upper Volga. Bruce Lincoln writes: “Moscow stood at the center of the upland in which the great rivers of European Russia had their beginnings … it was a hub from which Russia’s river highways zigged and zagged outward like the irregularly shaped spokes of a lopsided wheel.”11 Yet because in this phase of their history the Russians avoided the steppe where the Tatars roamed, they concentrated on further developing the impenetrable forest tracts, where a state could better cohere.12 Medieval Muscovy was surrounded and virtually landlocked. To the east was only taiga, steppe, and Mongol. To the south, the Turks and Mongols on the steppe denied Muscovy access to the Black Sea. To the west and northwest the Swedes, Poles, and Lithuanians denied it access to the Baltic Sea. Ivan IV, “the Terrible” (1553–1584), had access to only one seaboard, barely usable, in the far north: the White Sea, an inlet of the Arctic Ocean. Threatened on all sides of the infinite plain, the Russians had no choice but to try to break out, which they did under Ivan IV.
Ivan the Terrible is a historical figure of controversy, both a monster and folk hero, whose sobriquet is a misleading translation of Groznyi, the Dread, given to him by supporters for his punishment of the guilty. Ivan showed that in his time and place the only antidote to chaos was absolutism. Ivan was Russia’s first great imperialist, a role that was partially thrust on him by history and geography. For in 1453, Greek Byzantium was overrun by the Ottoman Turks, and Greek refugees filtered north from Constantinople into Moscow, bringing with them political, military, and administrative expertise vital to empire building. Ivan, upon becoming czar, defeated the Kazan Tatars, which gave him access to the Urals; while later in his reign he took a major step toward the conquest of Siberia by defeating the Mongol khanate of Sibir near the Irtysh River, northwest of present-day Mongolia. Ivan’s cruelty and cunning summarized what his people had learned from generations of “patient and supple dealings” with the Asiatics.13 The speed of the Russian irruption over this vast landscape was such that less than six decades later, in the early seventeenth century, Russians were at the Sea of Okhotsk, on the margins of the Pacific Ocean.
Ivan also eyed the south and southeast, specifically the Muslim khanate of Astrakhan, an offshoot of the Golden Horde which oversaw the estuary of the Volga and the roads to the Caucasus, Persia, and Central Asia. Here was the land of the Nogai Horde, Turkic nomads who spoke a form of Kypchak. Even as the Nogais were political enemies of Muscovy, they traded with the principality, and welcomed Ivan’s soldiery to keep the main roads safe. The sea of grasslands was a complex enormity in which Mongols and Tatars, with their armies sometimes overlapping, made war—and also had commerce—with the Russians. And remember, as hard and complicated as the flatlands were, the Caucasus range was more so, and thus more exotic to Russian eyes, accounting for the Russian obsession with them.
Ivan was indefatigable. On the heels of his victory in the south, he made war in the region of present-day Estonia and Latvia in order to secure a perch on the Baltic, but was defeated by a combination of the Hanseatic League and the German Order of Livonia. This crucially cut Russia off from the West, even as it was being influenced by its newly taken lands in the Middle East and Asia.
Russia’s first thrust at a continental empire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries established the reputation of the Cossacks, employed by the Russian state to firm up its position in the Caucasus. Though the word “Cossack,” or kazak, originally referred to a freelance Tatar warrior, the Cossacks came to be individual Russians, Lithuanians, and Poles, who, despairing of the harsh conditions on the estates of their homelands, migrated to the Ukrainian steppes. Here amid the chaotic conditions of a former Mongol frontier, they made their livings as thieves, traders, colonists, and mercenaries, gradually coalescing into irregular units of Ivan’s army because they were tough and came cheap. Cossack settlements emerged in the river valleys, principally those of the Don and the Dnieper.14 As it happens, Nikolai Gogol’s classic Taras Bulba, published initially in 1835 with a final version a decade later, is a story of the Dnieper Cossacks. Gogol was a Russian n
ationalist but he saw the real, primordial Russia in the Ukraine (a word meaning “borderland”), whose unremitting and unimpeded steppes—lacking natural boundaries and drained by relatively few navigable rivers—had made its colliding peoples warlike. Although Gogol used the words “Russian,” “Ukrainian,” and “Cossack” to denote specific identities, he also recognized that these identities overlapped (as local identities still do).15 Gogol’s story is dark with unredemptive violence. While the utter lack of humanity portrayed in these pages is the work of individuals making their own awful choices, it is also true that the violence of Taras Bulba is at least partly an expression of the geography of the Russian and Ukrainian steppes, where flatness, continentality, and migration routes lead to conflict and swift changes of fortune.
Ivan IV’s empire continued to expand under Boris Godunov (1598–1605), particularly in the southeasterly direction of Stalingrad, the Urals, and the Kazakh steppe. But then medieval Muscovy collapsed, as Kievan Rus had before it, this time with Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, and Cossacks carving pieces out of the carcass. Medieval Muscovy had fashioned itself as the “Third Rome,” the rightful successor of both Rome itself and Constantinople. Hence Muscovy’s undoing, known as the Time of Troubles—the result of factionalism in the capital—made it appear that an entire world and civilization were ending. And yet Russia was not finished, in spite of how it seemed at the time. Within a few short years, in 1613, Michael Romanov was installed as the czar, and a new dynasty as well as a new chapter in Russian history commenced.
It was the Romanov dynasty that came to define modern Russia, to give mechanization and further administrative organization to Russian imperialism, an improvement over the somewhat romantic, ad hoc forays of medieval Muscovy. Under the three-hundred-year rule of the Romanovs, Russia subdued Poland and Lithuania, destroyed Sweden, humbled Napoleonic France, took back the Ukraine, expanded into the Crimea and the Balkans at the expense of the Ottoman Turks, and both extended and formalized its hold on the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia unto China and the Pacific. Russia recovered from reverses in the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). And in keeping with the grand theme of Russian history, that of momentous expansions and equally momentous retreats against the backdrop of a vast, unimpeded geography, the Romanovs lost both Poland and western Russia to Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812, only to recover within a few weeks and hasten a French withdrawal back to Central Europe that reduced Napoleon’s forces to ashes.
Peter the Great, who ruled Russia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was to the Romanov dynasty what Ivan IV had been to medieval Muscovy: an extraordinary individual whose actions demonstrate that geography is only part of the story. Of course, Peter is most well known to history for his building of St. Petersburg on the shores of the Baltic, which he began in 1703, and which entailed a grueling war against the Swedish Empire: with Sweden invading across the Masurian Marshes in the area of Belarus, and the Russians burning crops as part of a scorched earth policy in the dry areas, a tactic that they would later use against both Napoleon and Hitler. And yet Peter’s grand achievement of consolidating Russia’s Baltic coast, establishing a new capital there that faced toward Europe, in an effort to change Russia’s political and cultural identity, would ultimately fail. For with conquests in every other direction, too, Russia remained more properly a Eurasian country, arguably the archetypal one, the only one in fact, straining to be European even as geography and the history of invasions exemplified by the Mongols denied it that status. Alexander Herzen, the great nineteenth-century literary intellectual of Russia, remarked:
To this day we look upon Europeans and upon Europe in the same way as provincials look upon those who live in the capital, with deference and a feeling of our own inferiority, knuckling under and imitating them, taking everything in which we are different for a defect.16
Though Russians should have had nothing to be ashamed of, for they could only be what they were: a people that had wrested an empire from an impossible continental landscape, and were consequently knocking at the gates of the Levant and India, thus threatening the empires of France and Britain. For at about the same time that Herzen wrote those words above, Russian forces took Tashkent and Samarkand on the ancient silk route to China, close to the borders of the Indian Subcontinent.
Whereas the maritime empires of France and Britain faced implacable enemies overseas, the Russians faced them on their own territory, so that the Russians learned from early on in their history to be anxious and vigilant. They were a nation that in one form or another was always at war. Again, the Caucasus provide a telling example in the form of the Muslim Chechens of the north Caucasus, against whom the armies of Catherine the Great fought in the late eighteenth century, and continued fighting under succeeding czars throughout the nineteenth, to say nothing of the struggles in our own time. This was long after more pliable regions of the Caucasus further south, such as Georgia, had already come under czarist control. Chechen belligerency stemmed from the difficulty of earning a living from the stony mountain soil, and from the need to bear arms to protect sheep and goats from wild animals. Because trade routes traversed the Caucasus, the Chechens were at once guides and robbers.17 And though converts to Sufi Islam—often less fanatical than other branches of the faith—they were zealous in defense of their homeland from the Orthodox Christian Russians. In the Caucasus, writes the geographer Denis J. B. Shaw, “the Russian, Ukrainian and cossack settlement of the ‘settler empire’ came into conflict with the stout resistance of the mountain peoples. Most of these peoples, apart from the majority of the Osetians, are Islamic in culture, and this reinforced their determination to fight the Russian intruder.” Because of their fear of the independent spirit of the people of the north Caucasus, the Bolsheviks refused to incorporate them into a single republic and split them up, only to rejoin them into artificial units that did not conform to their linguistic and ethnic patterns. Thus, Shaw goes on, “the Karbardians were grouped with the Balkars, despite the fact that the former have more in common with the Cherkessians and the latter with the Karachay.” Stalin, moreover, exiled the Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, and others to Central Asia in 1944, for their alleged collaboration with the Germans.18
The Caucasus have contributed mightily to making the face of Russian imperialism hard. Such, as we’ve said, is often the destiny of land powers, who have often the need to conquer.
So the Russians pressed on, inspiring Mackinder to formulate his pivot theory by a surge of Russian railway building in the second half of the nineteenth century: fifteen thousand miles of lines between 1857 and 1882, so that Moscow was connected with the Prussian frontier to the west and with Nizhniy-Novgorod to the east, as well as with the Crimea on the shore of the Black Sea to the south. Moreover, between 1879 and 1886, Russian engineers built a rail line from Krasnovodsk, on the eastern shore of the Caspian, to Merv, more than five hundred miles to the east, close to the borders of Persia and Afghanistan; by 1888 that line reached another three hundred miles northeastward to Samarkand. (And a spur was built from Merv south to near the Afghan border.) These new arteries of empire followed Russian military advances in the Kara Kum (Black Sand) and Kyzyl Kum (Red Sand) deserts south of the Central Asian steppe, in the area of present-day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Because of the proximity of the Indian Subcontinent, where British power was then at its zenith, this bout of Russian imperial activity joined the “Great Game” between Russia and Britain for the control of Asia. Meanwhile, a line was built to connect Baku, on the western shore of the Caspian, with Batumi, on the Black Sea, so as to span the Caucasus. And in 1891, the Russians began a railway from the Urals to the Pacific, four thousand miles away, through Siberia and the Far East, and all the forests, mountains, swamplands, and permafrost in between. By 1904 there were 38,000 miles of railways in Russia, a fact that gave St. Petersburg access to eleven time zones, all the way to the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska. Mot
ivating this latest Russian version of Manifest Destiny was, once again, insecurity: the insecurity of a land power that had to keep attacking and exploring in all directions or itself be vanquished.
On a relief map of Eurasia a great fact stands out—one that explains the story of Russia. From the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Central Siberian plateau in the east there is nothing but lowland plains, with the Urals in between as but a small eruption on this flat, continent-sized landscape. This plain, which includes Mackinder’s Heartland, extends from the Arctic Ocean inlets of the White and Kara seas to the Caucasus, and to the Hindu Kush and Zagros mountains in Afghanistan and Iran, so that Russian imperialism has always been tempted by the vague hope of a warm water outlet on the close-by Indian Ocean. But it wasn’t only in the cases of the Caucasus and Afghanistan where Russians ventured beyond the core region of this great plain and deep into the mountains. From the early seventeenth century into the twentieth, Russians—Cossacks, fur trappers, and traders—bravely reached beyond the Yenesei River, from western into eastern Siberia and the Far East, a frigid immensity of seven major mountain ranges 2,500 miles across where the frost can last nine months of the year. While the conquest of Belarus and the Ukraine was natural because of the close affinity and common, intertwined history of these lands with Russia, in Siberia the Russians carved out an entirely new “boreal riverine empire.”19 As W. Bruce Lincoln writes in his magesterial history, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians, “the conquest that has defined her [Russian] greatness has been in Asia,” not Europe.20 The drama that played out in eastern Siberia and beyond summed up the Russian historical experience in its most intense form. Philip Longworth writes:
The Revenge of Geography Page 18
