The Russian Quest for Warm Water Ports
Although Russia is the predominant resident power on the Eurasian Continent, geography has been very "cruel" to her in the sense that it has left her virtually landlocked. In the north, her access to the world is frozen in winter. In the west. Europe blocks her entry into the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. In the south, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan deny her a passage to the Arabian Sea. Lastly, in the east, China and Korea separate her from the South China Sea, while Vladivostok, her sole warm water port, is "neutralized" by South Korean and Japanese domination of the strait of Tsushima. Her problems were uncomfortably accentuated by the fact that her principal adversaries were the world's dominant sea power, first Great Britain, then the United States. Russian strategists have, over the last two hundred years, sought to remedy this through a steady, but relentless drive to the seas. In this respect they seem to have drawn upon the advice and thinking of two of their great strategists, Peter the Great and Prince Gorchakov.
A "warm water port" is a port where the water does not freeze in winter. Because they are available year-round, warm water ports can be of great geopolitical or economic interest, with the ports of Saint Petersburg and Valdez being notable examples. Russia needed a warm water port to have a well rounded economy like China or America. As the Russian empire expanded to the East, it would also push down into Central Asia towards the sea, in a search for warm water ports.
Russia's Czar Ivan III (1462-1505) had warred to unify Russia and to break free of the Mongol yoke. Ivan IV (1533-84) had conquered the Mongols and warred unsuccessfully to acquire a warm water port. In the 17th century, Russia expanded westward at the expense of Poland, acquiring the Ukraine in the process, and then expanded to the Pacific and to the frontiers of China. Following upon all this, Peter's foreign policy may be reduced to three simple goals: (1) reaching the Baltic Sea; (2) reaching the Black Sea; and (3) expanding southward at the expense of Iran. Ultimately, only the first of these thrusts was successful, though it took the 21-year Swedish or Northern War to complete it.
Fifty-one years prior to the birth of the United States Peter the Great died, leaving behind his celebrated will in which he advised his subjects to " ... approach as near as possible to Constantinople and India. Whoever governs there will be the true sovereign of the world. Consequently, excite continual wars, not only in Turkey, but in Persia And, in the decadence of Persia, Penetrate as far as the Persian Gulf advance as far as India." (In today's world, "India" ought to be read as "Pakistan").
St. Petersburg is inexorably linked with the personality of its founder, Tsar Peter I. Peter inherited a Russia that was too backward for his taste. Trade was relatively undeveloped due to the lack of access to a warm-water port (the Baltic belonged to the Swedes and the Black Sea was in Turkish hands) and the populace, even the aristocracy, was for the most part uneducated. Novorossiysk, Russia’s largest warm water port on the Black Sea, was home to USSR President Brezhnev’s favorite winery, Myskhako. Petropavlovsk Kamchatsky is the last warm water port along the Northern Sea Route from Southeast Asia to Europe. Kaliningrad, a Russian region strategically located “within” Europe, has the No.1 rating for social-economic development in the North-West federal region. Kaliningrad’s economy has grown rapidly due to the fishing industry, oil and gas exports, and heavy industry, and has Russia’s only warm water port on the Baltic coast.
Every nation desired above all things access to that highroad to everywhere, which the oldest of poets called thirty centuries ago the Wide-Wayed Sea. Russia was the only great State that found this access through her northern ports closed during the winter by ice, and through her southern ports on the Black Sea liable to be at any time closed by the Power which held the shores of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. She had long sought a warm water harbor on the Atlantic, and thought of buying one from Norway. She had got a sort of haven on the Arctic coast west of the mouth of the White Sea, but eastwards thence along the Siberian and Kamchatkan coasts there was none nearer than Vladivostock on the Sea of Japan, unsurpassed as a naval station, for the long channel of approach is eminently defensible and capable of being kept open throughout winter by an ice breaker.
It had been the adverse fate of Russia on reaching the shores of a sea to discover that it was not an open sea. Each time Russia prepared to set foot on a seaboard, and her soldiers weary but victorious were ready like the Greeks of the Anabasis to utter the joyous cry, "The sea at last!" they met with disappointment. It was not access to a free, open sea that they had conquered for their country, but merely a salt lake controlled by some other Power. The Baltic, to the shores of which Russia came after a struggle of over two centuries against the Poles and Swedes, was closed by the ice of the Finnish Bay and by the Danish Straits. The exit from the Black Sea was found to be a trap door that might any moment be opened or closed against Russia by the Turkish janitor acting in his own interest or, more serious still, in the interests of those who might bribe or intimidate him against Russia. The bleakness of the Siberian coasts and the ardent aspirations of the Japanese neighbor deprived Russia of an egress to the warm waters of the Pacific. But it was the Black Sea that caused Russia many a dark day of her history, turning even her victories into defeat. The Black Sea was even less hospitable to the Russians than to the Greeks, who gave it the euphemistic name of the Hospitable Sea.
Constantinople
The desire for uncontrolled access to the Mediterranean was a strong motive for seeking to possess Constantnople, that mistress of two seas whose position as the meeting point of Europe and Asia gave it a unique international importance. The key to the foreign policies of Russia in the nineteeth and at the beginning of the twentieth century is furnished by her efforts to secure possession of the Straits of Bosporus and Dardanelles, the southern door of the Russian house through which she has been constantly menaced and several times injured, first by the Turks and then by European self-interested friends of the Turks. Not only the diplomatic and military activities of Russia in Europe but also very largely those in Asia are explained by her vital interest in the Straits.
Russia had for a long time cast a longing eye upon Turkey. And, indeed, it was only natural that she should do so. That Turkey must soon fall to pieces was evident at the time of the Crimean War, and she had shown symptoms of dissolution ever since. From the days of Catherine this desire to extend her territories towards the south had become intensified in Russia. And, indeed, Christian Europe owed some debt of gratitude to that country for having kept alive the faint spark of Orthodox belief, which was fast becoming extinct under Mussulman oppression. Had it not been for her protection, the rest of the rayahs would long since, like the Bosnians, have adopted Islamism to avoid persecution.
Nicholas I believed that the time had come to seize Constantinople. He saw that the "sick man" was in a hopeless condition, and he was willing that England should take Egypt, if he were left in possession of the city of the Bosphorus. England drifted into the war, and was eagerly joined by Napoleon III, who wished to divert the attention of his subjects from home affairs, and give a prestige to the new reign. Accordingly England and France declared war against Russia on March 24,1854, but the first hostile encounter between the Russians and Turks had taken place the previous year on Oct. 23rd at Isakcha. On Jan. 4th the Allied fleets had entered the Black Sea, and on March nth the Baltic Fleet sailed from Spithead. Sevastopol was invested by the Allies. During this memorable siege, the Tsar Nicholas died (March 2, 1855) ; he seemed tired of life, and rashly exposed himself to the severe weather of the Russian spring. He would probably never have embarked upon the war had not the wavering conduct of the English encouraged him. Among the old-fashioned Tories the Russians and their Tsar were held in especial honour, and Nicholas had many personal friends among the nobility. At the beginning of the year 1856 (Feb. 25th) the Treaty of Paris was signed, by which Russia for a time lost her right to have ships of war in the Black Sea, and consented to cede a portion of Bessarabia to the newly created state of Roumania. Subsequently Russia regained all that was taken from her.
Recovering with amazing rapidity from her defeat by Japan in 1905, she turned her earnest attention to the expansion of the doctrine of "Pan-Slavism," with hers as the dominant voice in the movement. Out of this grew the Balkan War and the Slavic intrigues, with the resultant dismemberment and weakening of Turkey. Russia had always fished best in troubled waters. Temporarily blocked in the far East by Japan, she determined to lose no further time in securing the port of Constantinople, with its wonderful defensive entrance to the Black Sea and its command of the Suez Canal and the waterborne commerce of the East. For the modern navy which she started to build after the destruction of her fleets by Japan she needed a warm-water port, an advantage which the Baltic denied to her.
Far East
Russia had for a long time been in need of a warm-water port in the Far East. By the late 19th Century Russia had slowly increased its influence in the Far East. The construction of the Trans-Siberian railroad and the acquisition of a warm-water port would enable Russia to consolidate its presence in the region and further expand into Asia and the Pacific. Russia had not expected that Japan would be victorious against China. Port Arthur falling into Japanese hands would undermine its own desperate need for a warm-water port in the East. The head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Count Mikhail Muravyev, began to push for the seizure of Port Arthur, “to prevent that port from being taken by another nation”. He was opposed by representatives of the Navy, who claimed that Russia needed a naval base in the south of the Korean peninsula, which would make it possible to keep the Tsushima Straits under control and defend Korea from a Japanese invasion.Blocked decisively by the Crimean war, and seeing no chance in Europe, she turned to seek advantage in the East. Her coast line in eastern Siberia was very far north, with the result that its harbors were icebound more than half of the year. She sought to extend that line southward. In 1858 she acquired from China, then involved in a war with Great Britain and France, the whole northern bank of the Amur, and two years later she acquired from China more territory farther south, which became the Maritime Province, and at the southern point of this she founded as a naval base Vladivostok, which means the Dominator of the East. Here her development in eastern Asia stopped. In another direction, Russian advance was notable. She conquered Turkestan, a vast region east of the Caspian Sea, and this conquest brought her close to India, and gave great importance to Afghanistan as a buffer between them.
The desire for this warm water port had much to do with Russia's eastward march down the Amur river. Russia sought in the wilderness of Asia to heal wounds repeatedly sustained, physically and psychologically, in pursuit of aspirations to safety and prestige in the region of the Black Sea. If there could possibly be found a consolation for repeated frustration of the principal Russian effort, the penetration into what became the Russian Middle Asiatic Possessions, as well as the consolidation of the Far Eastern domain of Russia, provided such consolation — all the more so because the Russian expansion in Asia was mostly in the nature of peaceful penetration.
The determining consideration which led Russia to cast longing eyes upon Manchuria — apart from that eternal hunger for territory which was one of her strongest characteristics — was the necessity of acquiring a warm water port as a naval base and commercial harbor. The port of Vladivostock — which, by the way, she acquired from China as early as 1860 by a truly Russian piece of bluff — haf proved of little use in this respect, owing to the fact that during the winter months it is almost entirely icebound. A striking illustration of the embarrassment such a state of things must cause was afforded in the course of the Russo-Japanese War by the plight into which the Russian Cruiser Squadron stationed there fell. The ambitions of the Czar's advisers had for years been directed towards the acquisition of the fortress and harbor of Port Arthur (known to the Chinese, as Lu-shun-kau), which situated as it is upon the narrow neck of land at the extreme southernmost point of the Liao-tung Peninsula, should, if properly served by a strong and efficient naval force, dominate the Gulf of Pechili, and prove the most powerful strategic post in Northern China.
As the second object in its Asiatic diversions Russia sought, but unsuccessfully, access to the warm waters of the Yellow Sea or of the Persian Gulf. The third purpose was more complex in nature but it is explained thus. Some of the diplomatic and military actions of Russia in Asia, especially in Afghanistan and Persia, were in the nature of hunting expeditions in quest of goods for diplomatic bartering with the other Great Powers, in particular with England. As Sir Edward Grey expressed it, the exchange of "shop window goods" was the only practicable form of diplomatic negotiation. To be able to practice, with the English, the diplomacy of do ut des, or the dormant donnant (give-and-take) diplomacy, Russia had to seek something that would appeal to the practical sense of the English in the way of arguments in diplomatic bargaining. Hence a number of "faits accomplis" undertaken by Russia and accomplished for the most part peacefully on the uncertain road to the jewel of the British crown, India.
Persia
Since the time of Peter the Great, Russian rulers have longed for a warm-water port on the Persian Gulf. Beginning in the 1700s, the weak and decadent Qajar dynasty of Persia suffered intermittent Czarist pressures and encroachments. A number of humiliating treaties were forced on Persia by the Russians, who were prevented from gaining total control of Iran only by the counter-balancing power of the British Empire. A treaty was signed on 26 February 1921, only five days after an Iranian Army colonel, Reza Khan Pahlavi, overthrew the government in a military coup. Although Iran repeatedly renounced article six of the 1921 agreement, the Soviet Union continued to maintain that its provisions were binding and used the treaty as a pretext for armed intervention.
Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the British eagerly accepted the Soviets as allies. As German successes in Russia mounted, the British were determined to take whatever action was necessary to keep the Soviets in the war. Recognizing Iran's vital geopolitical positionas a potential supply route to the Soviet Union, and concerned over apparent growing German influence in Iran, the British proposed that the Soviets cooperate in a joint occupation of Iran.
With World War II over in 1945, the Soviets refused to leave Iran, as previously agreed to under a 1943 treaty. Instead, relying on sympathizers in the local populace they had worked to cultivate during the war, the Soviets commenced a blatant attempt to annex the northern regions of Iran, coveting both the oil and access to a warm-water port. By the time American and British troops had departed from Iran in spring 1946, the Soviets were firmly ensconced in the province of Azerbaijan and were moving into Iran's Kurdish region.
Afghanistan - Balochistan
While Czar Peter outlined the "Grand Design," Prince Gorchakov seems to have articulated the "operational strategy " by stating: "The position of Russia in Central Asia is that of all civilized states which are brought into contact with half savage nomad populations.... In such cases it always happens that the more civilized state is forced, in the interest of the security of its frontiers ... to exercise a certain ascendancy over those whom their turbulence and unsettled character made most undesirable neighbors ... the tribes on the frontier have to be reduced to the state of more or less perfect submission This result, once obtained, these tribes take to more peaceful habits, but are in turn exposed to attacks of more distant tribes."
This would seem to imply the necessity for yet further conquests to protect their earlier conquests. History shows that Tashkent was conquered in 1865, Samarkand in 1868, Khiva in 1873, Bukhara in 1876, Ashkhabad and Mary in 1886 till finally, subjugation of Panjdeh in 1885 brought Russia onto the borders of Afghanistan. This finally woke up Britain to the potential danger to her Indian Empire and began what Rudyard Kipling romanticized as "The Great Game." The end result, after much conflict, including two disastrous British invasions of Afghanistan, was the institutionalizing of Afghanistan as a buffer between the two empires. By 1880 the Russians had moved upto the Afghan border after taking control of the central Asian Khanates of Khiva, Samarkand and Bokhara.
The British feared that Russian control of Central Asia would create an ideal springboard for an invasion of Britain's territories in the subcontinent, and were especially concerned about Russia gaining a warm water port. They would fight the First and Second Anglo-Afghan Wars in an attempt to establish control over the region, and to counter the slowly creeping expansion of Russia. Losing badly both times, the British signed the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention which divided Afghanistan between the two powers and outlined the framework for all future diplomatic relations.
Since her defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Russian foreign policy concerns had become increasingly focused on the Balkans for two main reasons. Strategically and economically, the guarantee of access to a warm water port through the Dardanelle’s was very important. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire threatened to let these fall into potentially unfriendly hands. For Russia any further Austro-Hungarian encroachment into the Balkans (particularly following the failures of the Bosnian crisis of 1908) potentially threatened both access to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea and also her position of influence in the Balkan area. Russia supported the Pan-Slavic movement. It was motivated by ethnic and religious loyalties and a rivalry with Austria, dating back to the Crimean War, but recent events, such as the failed Russian-Austrian treaty and a century-old dream of a warm water port also motivated St. Petersburg.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 stemmed from Soviet fears of unrest in its Muslim-dominated south and in the Communist regime installed just one year previously in Afghanistan. The Kremlin thought the Afghan Communist leader Hafizullah Amin was about to ‘pull a Sadat’ and expel the Soviets. The US, noting that the shah in Iran had been recently deposed, and fearing the Soviets were planning to capture a warm-water port by invading Afghanistan, responded by issuing diplomatic overtures to Iran, and by arming mujahideen in Pakistan.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 aroused American suspicions of a grand strategy aimed at seizing a warm-water port on the Indian Ocean and the oil of the Persian Gulf. Once the Soviets were in, the US whipped up the West and the Islamic world to strike fear in the Middle East by attempting to show that the Soviet army's real long-term ambition, if it could quell the Afghani resistance, was to reach a warm water port. The Soviet legions would move down through Iran to the Arabian Sea, and from there seize Iran 's oil-laden ships, backbone to the Western economies [needless to say, possibly the last thing the Soviets needed was a detour through the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan].
Rebellious Balochistan lay between Afghanistan and the sea. Since Soviet forces had militarily occupied Afghanistan in late 1979, the possibility had naturally arisen that Soviet leaders might be tempted to realize the long-cherished Russian goal of securing a warm- water port by exploiting lingering separatist grievances in neighboring Pakistan.
Further Afield
The Tsars of Russia had always their eyes on the warm water ports in the south to control the world economy. The Soviets, having naval supremacy in Indian Ocean, had since long enough of naval ships facilities and number of ships in these water. Warm water ports were made available by Ethiopia and South Yemen in the west and Kam Rahn Bay in the east to cherish their long term desired to capture the warm waters with ease. Latest technology, long range nuclear missiles had also reduced the dependance on large distance bases. This historical compulsion of the Russians was, however no longer valid.
