Halford Mackinder

"Knowledge, as we have said before, is one. Its division into subjects is but a concession to human weakness."

"The Russian Revolution and Soviet policy were seen by others, both at the time and subsequently, in part in terms of earlier concerns. Sir Halford Mackinder, Britain’s leading geopolitician as well as a politician, was British High Commissioner in South Russia during the Russian Civil War. He pressed the Cabinet in January 1920 on the danger of ‘a new Russian Czardom of the Proletariat’ and of ‘Bolshevism, sweeping forward like a prairie fire’ towards India, the core of Britain’s overseas empire, and ‘lower Asia’. Such accounts presented Communism as giving renewed energy to established geopolitical drives, notably the Russian threat to the British empire in South Asia (the nineteenth century ‘Great Game’), and to British interests and influence in South-West Asia. This theme has been given even longer-term resonance in some recent scholarship. In offering a borderland perspective on the origins of the Cold War, significantly after the latter was over, Alfred Rieber saw the Cold War as ‘a phase in a prolonged struggle over the Eurasian borderlands that stretches back to the early modern period, when the great polyethnic, bureaucratic conquest empires began to reverse a thousand years of nomadic military hegemony over sedentary cultures’. More of the literature looked for continuity between the Soviet Union and Romanov Russia, and notably with the expansionism of both, for example the search for warm-water ports."