I was glancing over a piece I wrote a few years back, about “Is Russia European or Asian.” In it, I pointed out that the western border of Russia gets pushed as far west as possible whenever Russia has a strong ruler. Why? Geography plays a role, much as geography helped China for so long, then turned into a terrible limit (at least as far as the Chinese were concerned.) Geography is not destiny, but in the days before modern transportation and communication, it certainly played a role in cultural development.
Russia’s natural borders are . . . the Ural Mountains, perhaps the Caucasus Mountains, the Arctic Ocean, and, well, now there’s a problem. The Pripet Marshes are not all that great as a defensive barrier, especially when they freeze over in winter. The Carpathians are taken by people who Do Not Like the Russians, and they’re not all that effective any way. North of the marshes is nothing until the English Channel, almost. Asian horse nomads went around the Urals, as they had done for as far back in prehistory as anthropologists and archaeologists have been able to trace.
Some historians argue that you can look at the history of Russia (say, 1350-present) as a long struggle to create and defend borders far enough from the Moscow core region that the capitol was protected. Which leads to the difficulty that a buffer is needed to protect the border, which leads to the border expanding, which ticks off people on the other side, which leads to strife on the border, which reconfirms Russia’s sense that everyone’s out to get them, so they need deeper borders . . .
My thought is that while this certainly plays a role in Russian history, there’s a lot of other things including religion, chronic underpopulation, and the like that are as important. Geography is not destiny, nor does the environment determine everything in a culture. It is very important, and you’re not going to have, oh, outdoor snow-skiing become a major tourist activity in eastern Brazil so long as the continents and tilt of the Earth remain as they are. Coastal areas are always going to have an advantage in trade, as are places with lots of navigable rivers for cheap bulk transport and communications. What people do from there, however, is a lot more variable.
China, unlike Russia, had excellent natural borders aside from the long steppe frontier. China didn’t have to worry about being invaded from South Asia (the Himalaya) or Southeast Asia (tropical rain forests, mountains, enormous wetlands) or Japan. So the steppe nomads became the focus of almost all fears and precautions, and their presence or absence determined a lot of China’s defensive attention and expense. Aside from the steppe nomads (Hsung Nu, Mongols, Manchu, and others), civil wars caused most of China’s political woes until the late 1600s. China invented gunpowder and some artillery, but didn’t go farther because they didn’t need to. China had large ships and a big navy, then shut everything down and stopped development because it didn’t need a big navy, and because the political philosophy dominating the court opposed exploration and seeking trade. Trade came to the Middle Kingdom, brought by barbarians who knew their proper place in the world.
However, those protective borders also formed a hard ecological limit to expanding and finding new lands and food sources for growing populations. Environmental historians are pretty certain that China hit its ecological limit first in the late Ming Dynasty (1600). To the west? The Taklamakan Desert. The south? Malaria, to which the local tribes had a far greater resistance than did Han Chinese. The east? Tokugawa Japan. The north? Steppe nomads again. In part because of reaching the limits to expansion of agriculture, China got hammered by the climate minimum that struck between 1590-1700. As in thirty percent average population loss, as much as one hundred percent in some marginal areas.* It took access to the foods from the Americas, plus much improved weather and political stability for China to recover, and by the end of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1948, they had hit the ecological limit again. China didn’t get nitrogen fertilizer until the 1970s, and that’s what has made a lot of the difference since then in terms of food production and stability. China’s defensive walls helped protect the country, but they also served as serious barriers expansion and food supply until modern technology kicked in.
South Asia also had some good natural borders, except those have major passes through them, and there’s always the sea. The Americas? A giant moat on both sides, and anyone who thinks a land invasion over the Bering Strait into what is now Alaska and the Yukon will be easy . . . has never seen a topographic map. Or radar images of the mosquito swarms in summer.
Geography isn’t destiny, but it plays a big role in what challenges cultures face. Mountain peoples tend to be insular, “primitive,” and hardscrabble, often seen as sort of uncanny and always hostile by the lowland farmers. Isolated languages develop far more complicated structures than do languages in areas with lots of trade and population movement, because the complexities get “worn off” the latter. Geography sets the stage for culture. How culture responds to geography? That’s free will, not destiny.
*Russia also suffered terribly, including three back-to-back years without a single crop surviving in Ruthenia (Ukraine) and Muscovy. This fed into the Time of Troubles, and the civil war that remains to this day a low point in Russian history.
Cat Rotator's Quarterly 
The worst thing about our popular treatment of history is that we’ve forgotten the =story= in it. Instead, we cook it until it is dry and tasteless, serve it up as pablum in the schools, and take the student response as proof that ordinary people are too dumb to learn history … or run their own lives.
Nah, the current year approach is just to lie about history altogether. Or ignore it.
That way, it’s easy to leave things out.
Plus, it helps with Year Zero if the populace is uninterested in its past.
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But narratives are pushed. They’re just false. See also: Zinn.
What do you mean? Of course there’s a story to history: Columbus came to the Americas because he was evil and wanted to give the Native Americans smallpox. Then the British came and brought slavery. And when slavery disappeared, the whites created Jim Crow laws to bring slavery back in all but name. And then Martin Luther King came along and beat up every white guy he could find until the whites killed him so they could keep oppressing the Noble People of Color who invented everything that the whites exploit.
At least, I’m pretty sure that’s how the narrative goes. I might be wrong on one or two details…
Yes – the current educational establishment (both primary and college) have managed to make history and geography deeply boring to students for decades. It’s sad, because as somewhat of an autodidact and my daughter almost completely so (having dropped out of junior college because of … deeply boring) we have alike found such topics amazingly interesting. Thank the deity for the internet…
Historically, things only improve in Russia so that more disasters can beat them down again. There’s a discernible pattern.
Is it possible for an entire nation to be manic-depressive? Because that’s how Russia often seems to me. Brief bursts of energetic nationalism separated by long periods of gloom and slow, passive deterioration. Even as far north as it is, Russia could be a good place to live, but the Russian people just can’t get their act together long enough to accomplish anything.
The restored “Alexander Nevsky” with the improved soundtrack gives a nice peasant-level view of Russian history, in the style of John Ford. They are of two state of mind about invasions: steppes people and Germans. They are of two minds about leaders. A vigorous tsar improves the land, saves food, controls the great nobles, and rolls borders and defense area out from Rodina. A poor tsar lets the great nobles abuse the people and land, loses control of the far areas, and lets borders collapse and invaders come in. Their transport network is still run by two gruff men: General Winter and Marshal Mud.
Hmmm … wonder if such is the case, a sort of national state of manic-depressive…certainly would explain a lot about Russian history and culture…
Nah, it’s Seasonal Affective Disease. Everybody gets out and enjoys the sunny days, even if it’s in the dead of winter and they’re going out for ice cream to an outdoor stand. Everybody feels cruddy on the dark winter days, and everybody enjoys the brief spring and summer.
But having SAD during a far northern midsummer is like being manic, from all accounts. And SAD in the winter is all about the depression.
“China didn’t get nitrogen fertilizer until the 1970s”….what was the reason for that?…was it some Marxist theory?
Mao wanted China to be completely self-sustaining, and balked at buying the equipment needed to make nitrogen fertilizer. The Soviets wouldn’t sell it once Mao broke away from them (plus China owed the USSR a lot of money for nuclear weapons et cetera.) The Great Leap Forward included a huge amount of virgin soil farming, in attempts to force fertility from the land and open up sub-marginal areas for farming. The “reeducation farms” of the Cultural Revolution continued that, although in a much lesser degree. What we think of as soil conservation and re-forestation only started in the late 1980s, which was also when the Communist Party admitted that there are some things even the Revolutionary Vanguard can’t do.
c4c
One other point on Russia. They desperately want a warm water, year round port… Which is why they took back the Crimea. Sevastopol is the only year round warm water port, even though it is hemmed in, in the Black Sea. Petropavlovsk and Murmansk are the only ports with ‘direct’ access to open ocean without passing through straits of some kind, but both freeze over in winter.
I sense A. T. Mahan’s ghost nodding.
Which just goes to show that Mahon was Onto Something, howevermuch people argue about his conclusions.
I wonder how much living in that giant, unrelieved landmass affects the Russian national character. The winter is nearly arctic over much of the land, and there are no waterways really good for commerce. No paddlewheelers on the Mississipi, no Ohio River or Potomac or Hudson.
We in the US take waters for granted, though maybe less so in the High Plains. I read somewhere that the USA has more usable shoreline, between coasts, rivers, and intracoastal waterways, than the rest of the world combined. If I’ve got that right, it’s an astonishing fact, and one whose affects we take far too much for granted.
There are some pretty big canals in Russia, but it’s not exactly a web of commerce. Ditto Russian highways.