By Batiushka

Introduction

There are two things that are unchanging in this world: one is human nature, with all its virtues and vices, and the other is geography, with all its land and water. This is why history more or less repeats itself or, as some say, it echoes down the ages. There is no clearer example of this than current events in the Ukraine and the backdrop to them, the geopolitics of the Eurasian ‘heartland’, around which everything else on the planet turns, as Mackinder proclaimed over a century ago (1). At the centre of the heartland is the only Eurasian country, which spreads from east to west and this is also the largest in the world: the Russian Federation.

Two Windows

Having already spread from the Baltic to the Pacific, around 1700 the Russia of Tsar Peter I (1672-1725) opened a window onto Western Europe (2). Seeing the West’s more advanced technology, especially in military and naval matters, the Tsar realised that it was necessary for Russia to catch up in order to defend itself, but also behind his actions there lay the principle of unity. Anyone looking at the map can immediately see that the Eurasian landmass between the Pacific Ocean in the east, the Atlantic Ocean in the west and the Indian Ocean in the south is geographically one. It is ‘the world island’.

Over the two centuries after 1700, it became clear that Russia did indeed have to defend itself, as Western Europe showed itself to be even more aggressive than before Peter I. Then Russia had already been invaded by the Papally-backed Teutonic Knights and the Poles (with the Lithuanians). Already under Peter I, Russia was invaded by Sweden in the Great Northern War, and there followed the invasions of Russia under a coalition of European nations organised by Napoleon in 1812 and then by the French, British and Ottomans in 1854.

Having gradually established stability after 1856 in its window onto the west in Europe, it was under Tsar Nicholas II (1868-1918) that Russia opened a window onto the east in Asia. The greatest visible achievement of this was the world’s longest railway, the Trans-Siberian, built between 1891 and 1904. It was Tsar Nicholas who opened up Siberia for settlement and millions of Russia moved there during his reign, when the population of his Empire soared. Russian influence also spread into China (this was the time of the anti-Western Boxer Insurrection), Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula, which was much coveted by Japan. This spread was checked very abruptly when the West financed and armed its proxy Japan to the teeth. In February 1904 Japan treacherously attacked the Russian Fleet in its harbour without first declaring war, just as it later did in December 1941 at Pearl Harbour.

During this eighteen-month conflict the Japanese, armed with the latest dreadnoughts built in Western Europe which feared Russian potential, trounced the hopelessly backward Russian Navy, but gained little in its land war. The two countries made an American-brokered peace on very unfavourable terms to Japan, which had been bled dry, both physically and financially. However, the Russian Empire also faced grave internal dissent, which had been fomented by the intrigues of Western European countries, with propaganda and arms sent to Western-backed revolutionaries, mainly through Finland.

The Twentieth Century Tragedy

The Russian window onto Asia, involving China, Japan and Korea, had been closed. In less than a decade came a new Western attack, this time from the west, with the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman invasion of the Russian Empire in 1914. Then just as Russia was on the point of victory, there came the British-orchestrated overthrow of the Tsar in Saint Petersburg in 1917. The British even sent the military genius Trotsky from Canada in order to bolster the incompetent Marxist ideologue Lenin, himself sent by Germany to sabotage the Russian war effort. In 1918 came the murder of the Tsar and his family on orders issued from New York, as was pointed out by the contemporary Russian historian Piotr Multatuli (3) over a decade ago.

From that moment on, the Russian Empire, by then renamed the USSR, faced an existential struggle for survival. In 1941, a coalition of countries under Nazi Germany, fully approved of and financed by London and New York, attacked the USSR. Emerging victorious after unheard of bloodshed and losses, the USSR set up a buffer zone in Eastern Europe, so that it would not be attacked from the West again. However, 45 years later that buffer zone collapsed. The Soviet reaction to yet another Western invasion had made the USSR, and Russia especially, intensely unpopular among many Eastern Europeans, as they saw themselves as ruled by tyrannical pro-Soviet puppet regimes.

As we know, in 1991, the USSR collapsed and for nearly ten years Russia became prey to the ruthless asset-stripping of Western capitalism, using its puppet-oligarchs. With its humiliated peoples in the grip of despair, this led to mass poverty, emigration, alcoholism, suicide and a demographic crisis. In this way, destructive Western hostility closed the Russian window onto the West and forced Russia to turn east, to reopen Tsar Nicholas II’s window onto Asia. Thus, it is only in the last twenty years, with the rise of Russian nationalist forces that Russia has been able to protect itself from the West, as at this moment in the Ukraine, and also has once again turned to Asia.

Although US-occupied Japan was forced to reject Russian overtures, China, India and now North Korea too have welcomed them. Korea was the great loser in World War II, when Koreans were brutally exploited by Japanese imperialism. Soon after this Korea was ravaged again, this time by the imperialism of the USA and its allies from 1950 to 1953, leaving 2.5 million Korean dead and the country divided in a ‘frozen conflict’ because the US was unable to win their war. Today, as a result of racist hostility and military aggression on the part of the West, Russia has been thrown eastwards, precisely towards India, China and North Korea. In fact, we have returned to the Great Asian Programme of Tsar Nicholas II, but this time the Asia that interested him has a free India/Bharat, an economically and politically very strong China and a militarily very strong North Korea.

The Fundamental Unity of Eurasia

As we said at the outset, Eurasia is geographically one. Indeed, its links with Africa are such that we can even talk about Afro-Eurasia being one. Off-centre, there are the outliers, the big islands of North America, South America and Australia, together with all their little islands, New Zealand, Polynesia, the Caribbean etc. They all lie outside the central geographical unity of Afro-Eurasia. However, such central unity cannot exist with multipolarity.

In other words, unity can only exist if it takes account of diversity. This is the significance of multipolarity. For Eurasia, more precisely Asia, is highly diverse in its races, cultures and faiths. For example, it is the source of faiths as diverse as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and smaller faiths such as Shintoism, Sikhism and Judaism. None of these faiths came from outside Asia.

For seventy years the West has seen North Korea as a ‘pariah state’, though only because it has had to defend itself through a highly authoritarian government from the US military, and specifically, nuclear threat. Its tyranny was a question of survival. Just as Vietnam was reunited once the US was pushed out, so Korea too will be reunited. Both halves, North and South, need one another. And frankly all the other parts of Eurasia, its peninsulas and its islands, will also be reunited with Eurasia. This means the artificially separated Chinese Taiwan, US Israel and the US-controlled ‘European’ peninsula, composed of ‘the EU’ and its associated countries.

And this also includes the two overpopulated offshore archipelagoes, which mirror one another, east and west. These are Japan and the British Isles and Ireland, whose island peoples are reserved (and also drive on the left). For the moment the leaders of US-occupied Japan have yet to sign a peace treaty with Russia and its relations with North Korea and China are very poor. As for US-occupied Britain, its leaders have yet to show any sense of identity and backbone. Once they have been released from their thralldom to the USA, they too can cease their aggressive isolationism and return to good-neighbourly relations, as integral, if offshore, parts of the Eurasian landmass.

Conclusion

The rise of multipolarity, as seen in the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, BRICS and now BRICS +, which includes Ethiopia, with which the Russia of Tsar Nicholas II was linked, is the sign that Eurasia and Afro-Eurasia have understood that they must work together. This is the old Great Asian Programme vision of Tsar Nicholas II, thwarted by Western Imperialism five generations ago, but revived by the Russian Federation today. It is true that the West, no longer led by the much enfeebled Great Britain, but by the much enfeebling USA, is still trying to thwart this co-operation. However, the West has already lost against the Rest, as is shown every day by the rout of Kiev’s proxy forces in the Ukraine.

17 September 2023

Notes:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_History

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Russia

3. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2012/07/25/order-to-kill-tsars-family-came-from-us-scholar-says-a16523

‘Multatuli cited secret conversations between the head of the Bolshevik Central Executive Committee and one of the executioners as proving that a U.S. financial-industrial organization told Russian officials of ‘the necessity of killing the whole family.

The order was sent to Moscow via a U.S. organization stationed in Vologda, Multatuli said, adding that its members saw the complete destruction of Tsarist Russia as essential to fulfilling their plans to fashion a unipolar world with the United States as the sole power’.