Vilnius, one of the key cities of the old Polish-Lithuanian Land Empire (photo: Pixabay)
From this perspective, Russia’s history becomes a battle for domination versus these regional competitors over who controls the borderlands. Occasionally, when Russia (or Soviet Union) was powerful enough to dominate European continent (or counter German or French pursuit of such domination) Russia was involved in the large-scale continental or world wars in collusion with the world’s leading naval power fearing the consolidation of continental dominance of France or Germany.
People live there of course, in organised societies, with spiritual values, religions, etc., but these areas do not have a geopolitical “weight” or “core” due to the historical lack of a necessary combination of several recurring factors: a convenient river and water network organising and properly connecting the space for governance, thus cohesively organising economic and political life; sound and sustainable political organisation and sufficient political aspirations; a social discipline which translates into the possibility of organising a state that is able to pursue its interests, ideological and ethical consensus as to the existence of state organisation; and the fiscal capabilities associated with sufficient economic potential of space.
All these factors are necessary for the functioning of the core area of any state, such as the Wisła and Warta valleys in Poland – the true heart of Poland, or – in the case of Turkey – the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles together with Constantinople. Areas which we call “buffer areas” simply do not have these qualities, being borderlands, periphery, and as a result, they become the battlefield of the ambitions of other entities, which have their own core areas and are driven by eternal, natural dynamics to incorporate surrounding buffer zones into the core area of their own empires.
In other words, the buffer consists of successive areas remaining at different distances between the two rival centers, building around them their “own civilisation” expanding or collapsing, because there is no possible alternative in landlocked and cruel Eurasia, where people live and everyday human interaction takes place amidst these variable power dynamics. Each center borders directly on its buffer, then beyond this – the so-called indirect buffer and at times even a remote hinterlands buffer which in turn may be the direct buffer of a rival’s center.
In landlocked spaces, a direct buffer determines the vital interests of the center, whereas indirect buffers allow states to maintain a balance of power and influence between competing centers’ ambitions up until the moment when the expansion of one center reaches the last defensive perimeter already at the border of the opponent’s core area, having previously eliminated subsequent buffers which constituted the losing side’s security field. Expansion then creates two de facto borders: the zone incorporated into the core area is already an internal borderland, beyond which there is still an external buffer.
Lviv, one of the main cities of old empire and the main communication hub between the north and south, east and west, the Baltic and the Black Sea trading areas of the old empire (photo: Pixabay)
In the process of expansion, the core area must constantly define its attitude towards the buffer-borderland zones. As for the internal border of the annexed borderland, this quickly becomes a matter of internal empire: whether to assimilate or to leave the autonomy of this area alone. As for the external buffer zone, there is a choice between the so-called “near abroad” or “policy of active intervention.”
The policy towards the buffer area based on the principle of “near abroad” consists almost literally in drawing the proverbial red line on the map of the area, beyond which the forces of another core-area power cannot act; this is a signal: “no entry” into a specific area, which is vital to the signalling power (the power that has drawn the red line). Such a policy aims to create a kind of artificial border separating human interactions in a given buffer space from interventions that are undesirable for the signaling power.
This was very often the case with Russia. This was the case of China in the face of American intervention in Korea in the 1950s. This is the case with modern-day Israel towards Lebanon or Syria.
In terms of the maritime environment, the counterpart of the above policy is the naval “bastion strategy” where the fleet’s task is to defend the empire’s influence line close to its coast and its commercial arteries, but not to project power into distant seas. As a rule, those using it do not intend to forge a way out into the World Ocean – for this purpose having to break through straits which they must then dominate and control – but only block the entry of other ships into their zone to protect it and thus to establish their internal zone as an empire un-influenced by naval powers.
In contrast, the policy of active intervention does not accept the existence of a linear border or red line across entire buffer-borderlands areas. The purpose of such a policy is, at the same time, expansionary dynamics and the neutralisation of all threats from the community inhabiting the buffer area.
For those people of power, this means political, social, and sometimes also economic strength in this particular buffer area (this phenomenon is extremely characteristic of buffer areas). Another operational form of active intervention is to play the role of conciliator and arbitrator in internal matters of the buffer area, or in disputes between buffer areas or between the buffer area and another core area (power). Or they may draw local elites into cohabitation with the outside world, maintaining beneficial powers for certain people in the buffer area of relations with the world, to detach them from undesirable behaviours that harm the interests of the power supervising the buffer area. Or to tie them with a personal interest that overrides the overall interest of their own space.
In the times of Soviet domination over our part of Europe, the policy of active intervention consisted in transferring geopolitical resources from the core to buffer areas to transform the entire buffer area into the external defense line of its own core area, and as a last-resort measure – it involved sending criminal expeditions to show the power of the core area of the empire to all local buffer zone rulers – hence Budapest in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and other Soviet interventions and demonstrations of strength after 1945.
The policy of active intervention in its most offensive setting is traditionally most effective when the empire is expanding. The method used to diversify the periphery or borderland and its fact of interdependence with other areas is to destabilise those areas and incorporate them one by one. This had to lead in practice to a policy of inclusion, accepting social interaction and integration of local elites with the ruling elite of the core area, gradually undermining the independence of the periphery areas, which became first a sphere of influence, then a protectorate, then a satellite, and finally an internal border zone already inside the empire. In this way, previously, the intermediate buffer area became the direct buffer area and so on.
At sea, the policy of active intervention had its counterpart in the policy of “fleet in being”. This consisted of the concentration of the predominant naval forces in the direct buffer zone (around Rimland Eurasia) between the maritime power and the aspiring land-power to always capture the straits and other transitions to the high seas and the World Ocean, preventing the enemy from communicating with the world. In this case, the coastal sea becomes a dynamic buffer zone, and not just the last outermost zone of the land power. It is an extremely offensive strategy and is often used by Anglosphere powers dominating the sea: from the continental blockade against Napoleon’s France, through the blockade of Germany in World War I and II to the containment of the Soviet Union, the blockade of Vietnam, or the current AirSea Battle against China in the Western Pacific.
The Inflant part with the lower reaches of the Daugava River and Riga; Courland; the Smolensk Gate between the upper Daugava River and the upper Dnieper – all these were the farthest or intermediate buffers for the core area of the Commonwealth; Lithuania proper, with the Nieman valley as a direct buffer covering the very core of the state on the Vistula and the Warta. Other buffer areas, located south of the Pripyat swamps are: Wołyń, Podole, Kijowszczyzna – i.e. right-bank Ukraine. The eighth buffer area was left-bank Ukraine – up to the eastern perimeter of the Commonwealth’s security foreground, bordering the direct core area of Russia (literally in the immediate vicinity of the Russian core around the Oki and Moscow river basins). The perimeter was designated between the course of the Vorskla River and the Desna River to the height of the area around Starodub. Even as recently as 1645, all of the above was the eastern part of the territory of the Polish land empire.
Polish Army Chief Commander – Jan Tarnowski – at the siege of Staroduba in 1535 (photo: Wikipedia)
The beginnings of geopolitical competition between Old Poland’s Empire and Moscow began during Moscow’s attempt to double the tribute from Novgorod, which in 1332 came under the protection of neighboring Lithuania, thus initiating the Lithuanian-Muscovite rivalry, later with the participation of the Polish Crown. In the era of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s political independence and at the beginning of its federation with the Polish Crown, the border of Lithuanian rule and the Moscow political zone was the Ugra River east of Smolensk flowing between Vyazma and Kaluga, quite close to Moscow. With time, this river also became the border of Latin, classical Western European culture. On the other hand, at that time, it was not yet possible to define in a civilizational sense – “something was boiling and cooking east and west of the Ugra, but this culture did not yet have a ready face” – as famously summed up by Feliks Koneczny.
There was also a Polish unit among the Lithuanian army above the Ugra, led by Zbigniew from Brzezie; Poles were contract soldiers of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania here. The Lithuanian ambitions of expansion to the east and south ended with the defeat of Witold on the Vorskla river in 1399, which left Moscow a huge space for expansion and development. History could have turned out differently, as in the east several times, if Lithuania had won that particular battle.
Livonia, which is a historical land located on the Daugava River and the Gulf of Riga, became the next hot spot, organising in the Middle Ages within the property of the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, locking the Baltic from Moscow’s influence, and inhabited by the Balts (ancestors of the current Latvians) and the Livonians (ancestors of the current Estonians), which over the centuries was mainly influenced by German culture, as well as to a lesser extent Scandinavian and Polish (especially in the so-called Polish Livonia).
Polish Livonia is the south-eastern part of Livonia, which remained with Poland after the Polish-Swedish battles, the north-west part of all Livonia fell to Sweden (1621), which was confirmed by the Altmar truce (1629) and the next Oliwa peace (1660). In 1721 the Swedes lost their part of Livonia to Russia. After the first partition of Poland in 1772, Polish Livonia was joined to the Russian Empire. All of Livonia came under Russian rule as a result of the Third Partition in 1795.
Former Livonia includes the territories of present-day Estonia and Latvia. Moscow had interests in Livonia for two reasons: to be able to take advantage of the trade routes going west (the closure of which would have come as a blow to Moscow), likewise to build such political influence as to ensure sufficient influence on Livonia that they would not be dominated by Lithuania and that they would not become a war zone for the surrounding powers, drawing the Moscow army into two conflicts at once – both in Livonia and at the Smolensk Gate.
Although Livonia could potentially pose exactly the same problem for Lithuania! Therefore, Livonia was an important factor in the game of domination in Eastern Europe, and was also located on the Baltic Sea linking Moscow, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden. Hence such a long rivalry for influence or control of the whole land.
So, from three directions at the same time: southwest, west and northwest. This would certainly have paralysed Moscow’s aspirations to develop in other directions, for example to Kazan, the Urals or Astrakhan. That is why the Livonian Wars were of such importance. Over time, Livonia became the “playing field” on which all major powers of northern and eastern Europe measured their forces, including even the Baltic maritime power – Denmark, seeking regional dominance – as in today’s buffer zone of Syria and the Levant, where they check in battle their power in the Greater Middle East with the participation of Russia and the naval power of the USA.
From 1569 onwards, in the aftermath of the geopolitically seminal Union of Lublin, the Polish Crown began to border directly with the Tsardom of Moscow. Until then, Poland was limited to the role of the allied major power supporting Lithuania in its wars with Moscow. Over time, due to the growing military advantage of Moscow over Lithuania and the proximity of the Smolensk Gate to the core of Lithuanian statehood – Vilnius and Novgorod lands – the Polish Crown began to support Lithuania’s weakening defensive effort in the most important direction – at the Smolensk Gate.
Located to the south in the lower reaches of the Dnieper – the former Kievan Ruthenia, known as the Kiev region, and later Ukraine, began to be redeveloped from the end of the 16th century after the period of Mongol havoc and the emigration of the active part of the population to the north. The Polish kings made great land grants in this huge, empty area, as a result of which the Ruthenian nobles in the Old Land Empire became the largest land owners that the history of the European continent knows. Settlers were brought in by thousands to develop the land, and tens (if not hundreds) of thousands were needed. Therefore, the Cossacks were frowned upon for lowering the number of hands to the plow. Cossacks lived on the border of the civilisations of the Don and the Dnieper, dividing into “Donians” and “Zaporozhians”. The difference lay in the economic background: Cossacks faithful to Moscow on the Don rather avoided farming at least initially, while Cossacks in the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth shared their lives between agriculture and the Zaporozhian Sich, i.e. fortified camp.
Cossacks did not take women to the Sich, and the married Cossack simply chose a huge piece of land on the huge and still “stray” spaces of the steppe, wherever he wanted and established a farm (homestead). The Cossacks helped each other: some were always war-ready in the Sich, some with families in farmhouses. In this huge country in the sea of grasses and ravines, the dweller on the land could not know that this land formally belonged to someone from the Polish ruling class as with time the settlements and mansions gradually established by the Polish nobility were slowly and slowly settling.
Years later, it turned out that a Cossack was sitting on “someone else’s” land. It is worth adding that the relevant provision of feudal law in force in these lands, i.e. the Lithuanian statutes of 1588 that was valid on the Old Empire , stated that “whoever sits 10 years on the land, becomes a serf to its owner.” For this reason, many settlers abandoned everything in their tenth year and became a free Cossack.
Namely, Russia was given the most important strategic place in Eastern Europe, i.e. the Smolensk Gate along with a major fortress, in exchange Poland was keeping the northern hinges of the Gate – Polotsk, Vitebsk and receiving the return of parts of Polish Livonia. Further south in the lower reaches of the Dnieper, Ukraine was divided along the Dnieper, the left bank fell to Russia with the Russian forces based in Kiev itself, supposedly for only two years. When the Russians entered there – they did not leave. In this way, the Commonwealth Empire lost two extremely important, though further (outer-edge), buffer areas and lost its strategic initiative in its security foreground, losing the ability to check the core area of the Russian state from both directions at once (from the west – Smolensk on the Dnieper – and from the south-west – Starodub on the Desna). This strategic neglect can be justified only by the loss of strength as a result of the war called the Swedish Deluge of 1655-1660, which devastated the heartland of the country and almost ended in its partition.
Things were about to get even worse. The Northern War waged in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between Russia and Sweden ruined the country. The entire Polish-Russian border remained at the mercy of the Russians, which enabled the entry of Russian troops and influence from the east. This ended with the decline and later collapse of the Old Empire in the 18th century, first in terms of vassalisation for Russia, and finally the final accord of the partitions.
At that time, Russia’s policy towards Poland was a policy of active intervention, focusing on the destabilisation of the entire buffer zone between both countries, between the Gulf of Riga – to the lower Dnieper and the Black Sea. This was achieved, for example, by playing the issue of dissidents who received Moscow’s support for their agenda in the country. There were also Polish feudal lords who used the external influence of Russia in their own political games in Warsaw. An alliance of local people of power and local politicians had opened the way for Russian influence. However, while it was possible to dismantle the Swedish rule in Livonia or Finland, this could not be done in Poland’s vast land empire without the participation of other powers, because of its importance of the country for balance of power on the Northern European Plain.
Observing the collapsing statehood, the Russians had a dilemma whether to keep the Commonwealth as a protectorate or to finally partition it together with its Germanic neighbours. Keeping it as a protectorate would mean keeping troops in Poland up to the Vistula line in operational range up to the Oder river, which connected Prussia and Austria, that would give a strong “leverage” on the vital interests of both these countries and, at the same time, full control over the actions of the government in Warsaw. Partition would mean the necessity of moving east from the new border and transforming the vast areas of the eastern part of Commonwealth into the internal border areas of the Russian Empire, with all the consequences. And as history proved – that was not an easy task and was never successful.
On the other hand, this would mean giving up the rich and organised areas of Poland located on the Vistula and the Warta River to Prussia and Austria, and therefore the withdrawal of Russian influence from the Vistula beyond the Niemen river. Hence the Russian hesitation regarding the partitions and at the end the sequence of events surrounding the reforms of the Great Sejm. The Russian dilemma was resolved three times in parts in 1772, 1793 and 1795 as a kind of compromise to mitigate the growing antagonism of the invaders. The entire buffer area of the Commonwealth became part of the Russian Empire, and the core area of Poland fell to Prussia and Austria.
The Napoleonic era and the expedition of the French emperor to Moscow through the Smolensk Gate – called in some corners of Europe – the Polish War – gave hope for the reconstruction of the geopolitical construct of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Intermarium and the restoration of buffer zone giving protection from Russia. Established by Napoleon’s decision and the by efforts of Polish soldiers in the war with Austria, the Duchy of Warsaw recreated almost the entire core of Poland comprising of lands taken from Prussia and Austria, but without any buffer zones behind the Niemen and the Bug rivers towards Russia proper, which remained part of Russia after two emperors signed the peace of Tilsit in 1807.
The fall of Napoleon meant the end of dreams of rebuilding the Intermarium. The Polish core area had become an autonomous (for some time) part of Russia’s land empire as the Kingdom of Poland. As a result, Polish-Russian relations ceased to be a topic of international affairs, and became the relations of the internal border between empire and empire for the next hundred years – until the end of World War I and the War of 1919-1921 with new Bolshevik Russia won by Poland that saved a major part of the Intermarium and gave it a breathing space for the next 20 years.
However, this position of Russia in the Central European Plain did not calm the Russians. The bane of Russian strategy was and remains that east of the Elbląg-Kraków line the physical space of the region forms a triangle, the base of which is expanding as you move deeper into the Russian empire, and the Russian cordon forces for its defense are inevitably thinner and thinner. This gives the opponent of Russia the opportunity to choose the direction of strike and take advantage of the chosen directions. Poles used this opportunity many times.
At the same time, however, for the offensive from the west, there is the issue of ever-longer communication lines throughout the entire area from the Vistula valley to the foreground of Smolensk and Moscow beyond. The power of Napoleon and Hitler collapsed in this area. The Poles came to Moscow on that route in 1605, 1610 and 1812, the Swedes after 1708. The French and Poles in 1812, the Germans pressed there in 1914-1917, Poles in 1919-1920 and Germans gain in 1941-42.
Since the beginning of the Romanov dynasty in XVII century the Russians have fought in the Northern European Plain and crossed the Smolensk Gate every 33 years. One can imagine how Russian strategists and military planners have a well-mastered military geography of the Polish War Theatre.
The first is to use strategic depth, resulting from space and climate, to drag enemy forces in and exploit vastness of the western buffer zone of the Russian empire, and then destroy the fatigued and overstretched foe (Napoleon, Hitler, the Swedes and their Poltava defeat). But then there is a risk that the enemy will be able to defeat Russia, though. Added to this the downside is the total destruction of the western provinces of the empire in war – as can be seen until today from the times of II World War.
The second is to face the enemy with large forces on the border and have the attrition fight. This strategy was tried in 1914-1917 and it seemed like a good idea at the time, given Russia’s more favorable demographics than Germany and Austria-Hungary, but it turned out to be a trap due primarily to the shaky social conditions within the empire, where the weakening of the apparatus of coercion and control may cause the collapse of the regime, as it actually happened with fatal consequences in 1917.
The third option is to push the borders as far west as possible, creating more buffer areas as was done during the Cold War. In this way, after World War II, Poland was limited to its core area without any buffers in the east and with the German territories added to it in the west and north, which made it dependent on the Soviet Union – as the guarantor of vassal security of the PRL. This strategy seemed attractive to the Soviets for a long time because of its great strategic depth and the opportunity to increase the economic resources of the empire from exploitation of the conquered buffer areas.
This ultimately broke the Soviets and ended in the agreement in Białowieża decreeing the collapse of the empire in 1991.
After the brief times of utter decline of Russia after 1991 during the Yeltsin era the new Putin regime has been regaining the imperial posture and imperial footprint. It embarked on the new generation warfare over control of key locations in the eastern buffer zone using the full toolbox of limited and non-linear warfare arsenal so well known in Europe since the Middle Ages. effectively putting hands on Crimea, Donbass, Belarus, Caucasus, Transdniestria.
Poland is a pivot in this game. Due to geography no other power can replace Poland in its role of containing Russia in its expansion west. It is still to be seen whether Poland will take up this role.
Autor
Jacek Bartosiak
CEO and Founder of Strategy&Future, author of bestselling books.
Strategy&Future
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