The Western Frontiers of Russia

Extract

Russian foreign policy is characterized by matchless simplicity of conception and persistence of effort. By comparison the foreign policies of the Great Powers of modern times appear vacillating and ambiguous. There is in the history of Russian foreign policy no counterpart for that Hamlet-like indecision which gripped German expansionism confronted by the fateful choice between a western and eastern “orientation,” of the pull and counter-pull of British Empire commitments and continental interests, and of the contradictions between French colonial aspirations and French European policies.

Russian foreign policy is dominated by the strategic factor; its objectives, under the direction of the Czars and Soviet leaders, have remained the same: attainment of strategic frontiers and, wherever racial affinities re-enforce strategic geography, ethnographic frontiers. The principal theatre of operations is now, as it has been for nearly three centuries, eastern and southeastern Europe, and Russian policy in the Middle and Far East has been largely derivative. Only when Russia was blocked in Europe, on the Baltic and Moldavian Plains, only then did she turn to Asia. Russia exercised pressure on the Asiatic rimlands, especially on Britain's positions in southwestern Asia, in order to obtain concessions in Europe. Russian expansionism, although it harvested rich territorial gains in central and eastern Asia, did not let itself be deflected from its primary goals, to wit, Russia's strategic frontiers in the West. Indeed, it was the Russian advance upon Europe, the diplomatic set-backs of the Congresses of Vienna and Berlin and the military defeats in the Crimean War and World War I, which diverted Russia towards such secondary objectives as the Persian Gulf and the Yellow Sea.