Note 239 — Chapter V · —Geographical Location

The location of a country or people is always the supreme geographical fact in its history. It outweighs every other single geographic force. All that has been said of Russia's vast area, of her steppes and tundra wastes, of her impotent seaboard on land-locked basins or ice-bound coasts, of her poverty of mountains and wealth of rivers, fades into the background before her location on the border of Asia. From her defeat by the Tartar hordes in 1224 to her attack upon the Mongolian rulers of the Bosporus in 1877, and her recent struggle with Japan, most of her wars have been waged against Asiatics. Location made her the bulwark of Central Europe against Asiatic invasion and the apostle of Western civilization to the heart of Asia. If this position on the outskirts of Europe, remote from its great centers of development, has made Russia only partially accessible to European culture and, furthermore, has subjected her to the retarding ethnic and social influences emanating from her Asiatic neighbors,239 and if the rough tasks imposed by her frontier situation have hampered her progress, these are all the limitations of her geographical location, limitations which not even the advantage of her vast area has been able to outweigh.