Human Patterns over Time

The core of the entire region has long been European Russia, the large and densely populated homeland of the ethnic Russians. Expanding gradually from this center, the Russians conquered a large area inhabited by a variety of other ethnic groups. These conquered territories remained under Russian control as part of the Soviet Union (1917–1991), which attempted to create an integrated social and economic unit out of the disparate territories. The breakup of the Soviet Union has diminished Russian domination throughout this region, though Russia’s influence is still considerable.

The Rise of the Russian Empire

For thousands of years, the militarily and politically dominant people in the region were nomadic pastoralists who lived on the meat and milk provided by their herds of sheep, horses, and other grazing animals, and used animal fiber to make yurts, rugs, and clothing. As possibly the first people to domesticate horses, their movements followed the changing seasons across the wide grasslands that stretch from the Black Sea to the Central Siberian Plateau. The nomads would often take advantage of their superior horsemanship and hunting skills to plunder settled communities. To defend themselves, permanently settled peoples gathered in fortified towns.

Towns arose in two main areas: the dry lands of greater Central Asia and the forests of Caucasia, Ukraine, and Russia. As early as 5000 years ago, Central Asia had settled communities that were supported by irrigated croplands (see Figure 5.10A). These communities were enriched by their central location for trade along what became known as the Silk Road, that vast, ancient, interwoven ribbon of major and minor trading routes between China and the Mediterranean with lesser connections to other places (Figure 5.9). Many commodities were traded along the route, but the eastern tradition of silk fabric became highly valued in the west, which is why the term Silk Road was applied by later historians.

About 1500 years ago, the Slavs, a group of farmers including those known as the Rus (possibly of Scandinavian origin), emerged in what is now Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. They moved east, founding numerous settlements, including the towns of Kiev in about 480 c.e. and Moscow in 1100. By 600, Slavic trading towns were located along all the rivers west of the Ural Mountains. The Slavs prospered from a lucrative trade route, over land, along the Volga River, and across the Black and Caspian Seas, that connected Scandinavia (North Europe) and Central and Southwest Asia (via Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul). Powerful kingdoms developed in Ukraine and European Russia. In the mid-800s, Greek missionaries introduced both Christianity (now known as “Orthodox Christianity”; see also Figure 5.10B) and the Cyrillic alphabet that we now associate with the Russian language. The Cyrillic alphabet is still used in most of the region’s countries.

In the twelfth century, the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan conquered the forested lands of Ukraine and Russia. The Mongols were a loose confederation of nomadic pastoral people centered in East and Central Asia. Moscow’s rulers became tax gatherers for the Mongols, dominating neighboring kingdoms and eventually growing powerful enough to challenge local Mongol rule. In 1552, the Slavic ruler Ivan IV (“Ivan the Terrible”) conquered the Mongols, marking the beginning of the Russian empire. St. Basil’s Cathedral, a major landmark in Moscow, commemorates the victory (Figure 5.11).

By 1600, Russians centered in Moscow had conquered many former Mongol territories, integrating them into the growing empire and extending it to the east as shown in Figure 5.12. The first major non-Russian area to be annexed was western Siberia (1598–1689). Russian expansion into Siberia (and even into North America, along its Pacific coast) resembled the spread of European colonial powers throughout Asia and the Americas. Russian colonists took land and resources from the Siberian populations and treated the people of those cultures as inferiors. Moreover, migrations of laborers from Russia to Siberia meant that indigenous Siberians were vastly outnumbered by the eighteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, Russia had also expanded its control to the south in order to gain control of Central Asia’s cotton crop, its major export, used in Russian industry.

The Russian empire was ruled by a powerful monarch, the czar, who lived in splendor (along with a tiny aristocracy) while the vast majority of the people lived short brutal lives in poverty (see Figure 5.10C, D). Many Russians were serfs who were legally bound to live on and farm land owned by an aristocrat. If the land was sold, the serfs were transferred with it. Serfdom was legally ended in the mid-nineteenth century. However, the inequalities of Russian society persisted into the twentieth century, fueling opposition to the czar. By the early twentieth century, a number of violent uprisings were underway.

The Communist Revolution and Its Aftermath

Periodic rebellions against the czars and elite classes took place over the centuries. By the mid-nineteenth century, these rebellions were being led not only by serfs, but also by members of the tiny educated and urban middle class. In 1917, at the height of Russian suffering during World War I, Czar Nicholas II was overthrown in a revolution. What followed was a civil war between rival factions with different ideas about how the revolution should proceed. Eventually the revolution brought a complete restructuring of the Russian economy and society, according to what at first promised to be a more egalitarian model—a model that was extended to adjacent countries.

Of the disparate groups that coalesced to launch the Russian revolution, the Bolsheviks succeeded in gaining control during the post-revolution civil war. The Bolsheviks were inspired by the principles of communism as explained by the German revolutionary philosopher Karl Marx. Marx criticized the societies of Europe as inherently flawed because they were dominated by capitalists—the wealthy minority who owned the factories, farms, businesses, and other means of production. Marx pointed out that the wealth of capitalists was actually created in large part by workers, who nonetheless remained poor because the capitalists undervalued their work. Under communism, workers were called upon to unite to overthrow governments that supported the capitalist system, take over the means of production (farms, factories, services), and establish a completely egalitarian society without government or currency. The philosophy held that people would work out of a commitment to the common good, sharing whatever they produced so that each had their basic needs met.

One Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, argued that the people of the former Russian empire needed a transition period in which to realize the ideals of communism. Accordingly, Lenin’s Bolsheviks formed the Communist Party, which set up a powerful government based in Moscow. Lenin believed that the government should run the economy, taking land and resources from the wealthy and using them to benefit the poor majority.

The Stalin Era

After Lenin suffered a series of strokes in 1922, Joseph Stalin stepped in to reorganize the society and economy in a highly authoritarian style. His 31-year rule of the Soviet Union brought a mixture of brutality and revolutionary change that set the course for the rest of the Soviet Union’s history. He sought to increase general prosperity through rapid industrialization made possible by a centrally planned, or socialist, economy. The state owned all real estate and means of production, while government officials in Moscow managed all economic activity. This system became known as the command economy. In this economy, central control was used to determine where all factories, apartment blocks, and transportation infrastructure should be located, and to manage all production, distribution, and pricing of products. The idea was that under a socialist system, the economy would grow more quickly, which would hasten the transition to the idealized communist state in which everyone shared equally. This notion was reflected in the new name chosen for the country: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (“Soviet” means, roughly, “council”).

The centerpiece of Stalin’s vision was massive government investment in gigantic development projects, such as factories, dams, and chemical plants, some of which are still the largest of their kind in the world. To increase agricultural production, he forced farmers to join large government-run collectives.

Stalin’s strategy of government control met many of his expectations. It brought rapid economic development and higher standards of living. Schools were provided for previously uneducated poor and rural children, and contributed to major technological and social advances. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Soviet Union’s industrial productivity grew steadily even while the economies of other countries stagnated, allowing for the development of a large military.

However, Stalin’s economic development model also had deep flaws. With production geared largely toward heavy industry (the manufacture of machines, transportation equipment, military vehicles, and armaments), less attention was paid to the demand for consumer goods and services that could have further improved living standards. Ultimately, communism also proved to be less innovative than capitalism and unable to develop advanced technologies to sustain economic growth over time.

The most destructive aspect of Stalin’s rule, however, was his ruthless use of the secret police and mass executions to silence anyone who opposed him. Those who resisted were forced to work in prison labor camps, the so-called gulags, many of which were located in Siberia. Here prisoners mined for minerals and also built and worked in newly constructed industrial cities. Millions were executed or died from overwork under harsh conditions. Estimates vary greatly, but between 20 and 60 million people were killed as a result of Stalin’s policies.

World War II and the Cold War

During its involvement in World War II in the years 1941–1945, the Soviet Union did more than any other country to defeat the armies of Nazi Germany (see Figure 5.10E). A failed attempt to conquer the Soviet Union had exhausted Hitler’s war machine. In the process of defeating Germany on the Eastern Front, 23 million Soviets were killed, more than all the other European casualties combined. After the war, Stalin was determined to erect a buffer of allied communist states in Central Europe that would be the battleground of any future war with Europe. Because they were unwilling to risk another war, the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom ceded control of much of Central Europe to the Soviet Union while they busied themselves with reconstructing western Europe. However, when Stalin’s intention to utterly dominate Central Europe became clear, the United States and its allies organized to stop the Soviets from extending their power even further into Europe and elsewhere. The result was a politically and economically divided Europe separated by an “Iron Curtain” and the Cold War, a nearly 50-year-long global geopolitical rivalry that pitted the Soviet Union and its allies against the United States and its allies around the world (Figure 5.13).

A wide variety of economic and political problems led to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. Fundamental flaws with Soviet central planning led to innumerable inefficiencies and chronic mismanagement. Many problems also were related to the diversion of scarce resources to the military, including the Soviet space program, and away from much-needed economic and social development (see Figure 5.10F). Soviet efforts to promote communism in less developed countries were also expensive, as was extensive political, economic, and military coercion in Central Europe and Central Asia. As problems multiplied, so did resistance to Soviet control, especially in Central Europe in the late 1980s. Because the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, did not resort to violence to control the countries of Central Europe, they were able to abandon communism and instead establish democracy. Eventually, this dissension spread to the republics that made up the Soviet Union itself, and by 1991, the USSR had formally dissolved.

A war in Afghanistan also helped to stretch the USSR past the breaking point (see Figure 5.17A). In the 1970s in Afghanistan, which lies just to the south of the Central Asian states, there was contention among a small group who favored a Western-style democratic government, those who favored communism, and Muslims who favored a theocratic state based on Islamic law. The Soviets feared that the strongly anti-communist Muslim movement in Afghanistan would influence nearby Central Asian Soviet republics to unite under Islam and rebel against the USSR. In response, the USSR backed an unpopular communist government that allowed Soviet military bases in Afghanistan. This brought strong resistance from the Muslim fundamentalist Mujahedeen movement, and in 1979, Russia launched a war to support the Afghan government. A bloody, decade-long conflict ensued, concluding with the Soviets being defeated by Afghan guerillas who were financed, armed, and trained by the United States. This is an example of the geopolitical struggles that took place during the Cold War. Within 2 years of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the USSR disintegrated. The Soviet–Afghan conflict and the aftermath are discussed further in Chapter 8.