The most important event of the late 20th century was the disappearance from the political map of the world of the Eurasian superpower and the geopolitical equivalent of historical Russia-the USSR.

A decade later, Central Asia - an area that has been under direct territorial and political control of Russia for 110 years and belongs to the sphere of its vital interests-is moving to the center of international political struggle and global strategic balance.

Among the main factors determining the new "centrality" of Central Asia are::

a) the" discovery " of the Caspian Sea as the world's third most important (after Saudi Arabia and Western Siberia) area of concentration of oil and gas reserves and the dispute over ways to transport them to the most important markets-Asian, American and European;

b) the formation of the North-South corridor, which is joined by the construction of the Caspian Sea - Persian Gulf shipping channel by Iran, which promises the largest revolution in world trade since the great geographical discoveries in the system of intermodal communications between Northern Europe, the Persian Gulf (via European Russia, the Caspian Sea and Iran) and the countries of South and East Asia (via Afghanistan);

c) the emergence - following the establishment of US military bases in the Balkans-of US forces in the former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus, with their deployment here from such a hyper-sensitive area as Afghanistan.

These and other events are once again actualizing geopolitical interpretations of history, that is, such an understanding of the historical process, which is centered on the change in the forms of territorial and political power within the geography of the planet.

I. COMMUNICATIONS AND THE TERRITORIAL AND POLITICAL DIVISION OF THE WORLD

1. If in the epoch of civilizations the geographical framework of history (location of continents, alternation of climatic zones, relief, circulation of continental waters) can be considered as a relatively constant value, then the framework of territorial-political power, the scale and nature of political control over a territory are variables that take on different values under the influence of migrations, trade, wars, colonization development of transport and communication technology, population growth. There are certain regularities in this change in the scope and scope of territorial and political control over the conditions of human life.

2. All significant steps in the economic development of the natural environment by man, the origin of local civilizations and their growth are associated with the existence and development of transport communications (rivers, caravan routes, land routes, navigation routes, railways, pipelines, etc.). Each major step in the development of communication tools changed the attitude of man to the geographical conditions of his existence.

(c) 2003

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The greatness of civilizations tends towards zones of frequent change of modes of movement on land and water ("river civilizations" of antiquity, even more clearly - the archipelago of the Aegean Sea in its Mediterranean environment). Today, as at the dawn of historical existence, a person makes the most significant steps in his cultural development under the influence of the movement of people, goods, information in space and frequent changes in activities, that is, the most favorable (intensive) relations of communication and exchange.

3. The classic scheme of "two unities" for geopolitics - the unity of the Continent and the unity of the Ocean - was rebuilt (but not canceled) twice in the XX century: with the advent of aviation and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Today, this scheme is being rethought, taking into account the emergence of a new, third unity-the planetary unity of satellite telecommunications and global computer networks.

The emergence of electronic computers (50s of the XX century) and global networks (90s of the XX century) revolutionized the technology of storing, processing and transmitting information, enormously accelerated the circulation in the global financial system, provided qualitatively new opportunities for managing combat operations, but did not change the energy and economic foundation of the dominant civilization exponential growth in energy consumption.

Decades of the" information revolution "have not reduced, but rather increased, the dependence of the transnational economy on communication systems for transporting hydrocarbons - this energy basis of a" post-industrial " society.

4. By the end of the XIX - beginning of the XX century, the development of communications reached a planetary limit. This global geographical limit (usually characterized as the end of the division of the world) marked the beginning of a new," global " (literally globe-spanning) era of international relations. The achievement of maturity by political and geographical thought is organically connected with the" global " status of international relations and international conflicts (before that, there is a reflection on the attitude of a person to the geographical conditions of his existence, but there is no subject of geopolitics).

If in the 19th century and throughout most of the 20th century the role of the main means of organizing the continental geopolitical space was played by the railway, today this role is being transferred to intermodal transport corridors, which combine railway, pipeline, highway, water and other communications.

5. One of the first monuments of geopolitical thought - the article by the Englishman H. D. Mackinder "The Geographical axis of History "(1904), which appeared in the year of the beginning of a major international conflict in the Far East (the Russo-Japanese war), as a starting point contained the thesis that from now on international relations have the form of a "closed political system... global dimensions (a closed political system... of world-wide scope)". In practice, this meant that any significant international conflict now causes an inevitable detonation, including "from the opposite end of the globe."

During the four centuries described by H. D. Mackinder as the "Columbian era" (late XV - late XIX centuries), the regimes of territorial and political power in the world have undergone drastic changes. The subsequent expansion of the territorial and political power of the leading Powers had two vectors - oceanic and continental.

The first of the two vectors of this world-historical movement is the colonial epic of Western Europe undertaken on the world's oceanic routes, with the successive change of the leader of colonial conquests during the European wars

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(Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, English). The second vector is the formation in the Old World of the world's largest Russian state in terms of territory, occupying a middle, geographically "axial", strategically central position on the continent of Eurasia (even before H. D. Mackinder, the "middle" position of Russia in the Old World was described by V. I. Lamansky, D. I. Mendeleev, later-P. N. Savitsky and others).

6. H. D. Mackinder's geopolitical idea of "the Heartland", which means" middle earth "or" continental core of the world " in Russian, contained at least three main points. First, the fact that world history and world politics have a constant "geographical axis", that historical events of different epochs tend to this axis and are located around it. Secondly, the axis passes through the Great Continent, or even more precisely, " the axial space of world politics is a vast area of Eurasia inaccessible to maritime navigation." Third, this "vast area" is characterized by the fact that in the" Columbian era "there is an" axial state - Russia", which, in comparison with other states, has the " strategic advantage of a central position "(also known as the "axial position") and embodies the "continental power of Eurasia" (the Euro-Asiatic land-power).

7. The "axis" state is most vulnerable to aggression by other powers in the direction where its natural access to the World Ocean is cut off. This circumstance has historically determined Russia's struggle for positions on the Baltic-Black Sea bridge, that is, on the geopolitical border between the eastern and western European worlds, where the Eurasian continent is pushed into the North Atlantic by the peninsular tip of the Western European subcontinent. This also determines Russia's long-standing desire to establish reliable communications with Iran and historical India (the South Asian subcontinent).

8. In the historical (not geographical, but actually geopolitical) sense, the oceanic and continental vectors of expanding territorial and political power are most fully represented by the three-hundred-year oncoming movement of two empires - the British and Russian. The completion of the first territorial and political division of the world, which opened up a series - and the prospect-of its violent redistribution, was marked by the exit of both empires to a common border in Asia-in the Western (Russian)region Turkestan and Afghanistan.

II. BORDERS OF THE CENTRAL ASIAN GEOPOLITICAL REGION

1. The final stage of the Russian advance to Central Asia, which began immediately after the Crimean War, is chronologically and meaningfully on a par with such major international events of that time as the "gold rush" in California and Alaska, the English colonization of Australia, the Russian colonization of the Amur, and the "discovery" by Europeans of the ports of China and Japan. Grouping these simultaneous events, L. I. Mechnikov in the 80s of the XIX century described them as the beginning of the" world era", or"the era of universal communications".

2. J. Curzon in his book " Russia in Central Asia in 1889 and the Anglo-Russian question "(1889) and A. E. Snesarev in his essay " India as the main factor in the Central Asian question "(1906), studying the consequences of the "meeting" of the British and Russian empires in Asia, revealed the significance of the " Central Asian question"(the authorship of the term, apparently, belongs to M. D. Skobelev) for world politics. They also delineated the new borders of "central" Asia (the"middle" of which can only be thought of as a geopolitical, not a geographical, value) and showed that the strategic "footbridge"of Central Asia is not a strategic one.

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Central Asia is Afghanistan. More precisely, Afghanistan is an organic and most sensitive part of the" Central Asian " geopolitical organism.

3. The essence of the" Central Asian question "is an international dispute over territorial and political control over the" middle " space, which is formed in the context of an incomplete division (new division) of the world when two or more leading military and political powers are promoted to this space from different geostrategic directions.

Defining the scope of the" Central Asian issue " is quite difficult. This is not least due to the" migrating "position of that part of Asia, which at various stages of the formation of the world community, the latter agreed to consider" Middle "("Central").

4. With the collapse of the USSR, "Central Asia "disappeared from the Russian political vocabulary altogether, and" Central Asia " was moved to a different place from what it always occupied in the world geographical literature. Former Central Asia, as is known, was bounded in the north and west by the state border of Russia / USSR with China and Mongolia, in the east it reached the Great Khingan, Ordos Bend of the Yellow River, Sino-Tibetan Mountains, in the south - to the upper Indus.

The movement of geographical "Central Asia" to the west, from the territory of China and Outer Mongolia to the territory of historical Russia, which took place after the annihilation of the USSR, is highly significant. It is clear that the dismemberment of the Eurasian superpower has in some ways turned part of its former Asian territory east of the Caspian Sea into the center of the international struggle for the redivision of the world.

Accordingly, the transfer of the" center "of Asia to the borders of historical Russia begins to act as a "cancellation" in the Russian historical consciousness of that-classical - "central" Asia, which stretched in latitude from the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea to the Chinese border, and when moving along the meridian served as a transition from the Kyrgyz steppes to the Turkestan plain to the borders of the "country Turks " with Iran, the lands of the Pashtuns beyond the Hindu Kush and the Indian Ocean.

5. On the one hand, the states of the new Central Asia were formed within the borders of the former Soviet republics (Kazakh, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Tajik) as their political and geographical copy. On the other hand, the territory of this Central Asia is twice as large as the territory of the Central Asian Russian Turkestan, or Turkestan General government, which before the First World War included five regions (Transcaspian, Samarkand, Semirechensk, Syr-Darya, Ferghana), the Khanate of Khiva and the Emirate of Bukhara.

Due to the "national-state demarcation" carried out by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s of the last century, the border of the new Central Asia now runs much north of the natural boundary (the Aral-Irtysh watershed), which served as the administrative border of Russian Turkestan and the geographical border of the Central Asian region. The separation of the facts of physical and political geography was made by decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR (for the support of the White Army by Semipalatinsk, Ural and Astrakhan Cossacks on the Cossack lands of the former Astrakhan province. The Kirghiz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (later renamed the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) was formed in 1920 as part of the Ural and Turgai regions, as well as the Steppe General - Governorate as part of the Akmola and Semipalatinsk regions.

6. Today, the forgotten discoveries of Russian geopolitical thought in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries are being returned to us through American geopolitics (America-

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pa of borrowing, which confirms the objective power of large geopolitical ideas). This applies, in particular, to the concept of the "Greater Middle East" put forward in the 1990s as a single geopolitical region that includes, in addition to the traditional Anglo-American Middle East (without North Africa), eight newly independent states of the Caucasus and Central Asia plus India and Pakistan. U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan now report to the U.S. Central Command (Centcom), which has command posts in Kuwait (Army), Bahrain (Navy), and Saudi Arabia (Air Force).

The principles of zoning, similar to those that distinguish the "Greater Middle East", were outlined by the Russian military during the Caucasian War of the XIX century and were first systematized by A. E. Snesarev. With some amendments, Snesarev's "Middle Asia" ("Middle East") of the early 20th century is the Anglo - American "Greater Middle East" today. "Central Asia "("Middle East"), A. E. Snesarev noted in 1919, is "our Turkestan, Khiva, Bukhara, Tibet, Kashgaria, Pamir, Afghanistan, Eastern Persia, Baluchistan, India." In other words, it is a large macroregion, or a kind of expanding geopolitical universe that draws all neighboring states into its main conflict (in terms of modern political geography - the states of the former USSR, China, India, Pakistan and Iran).

In the twentieth century, the phenomenon of "expanding" Central Asia emerged twice, and both times in connection with the destruction of a single "axial" state in the "mainland core of the world" - first in the first years after the fall of the Russian Empire, then after the fall of the Soviet Union.

III. BRITISH "CHALLENGE" AND RUSSIAN "ANSWER"

1. V. P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky, who proposed in 1915 the first classification of systems of territorial and political power in the world literature, identified, on the one hand, a "patch-like system" that establishes "point" control on different continents and many ocean islands (the British Empire), on the other - a "transcontinental system" ("the system from sea to sea"), an example of which was the Russian Empire.

To the extent that the ultimate goal of territorial - political power is to control resources, these two systems are antagonistic, contesting territory, so to speak, on opposite courses. If the "axial" continental state seeks to ensure its security in the continental space adjacent to it, connecting it with communications to the open seas, then the "patch-like system", which is opposite in territorial and political characteristics, expands far beyond the national territory. The most striking example is classical Western European colonialism. Another example is the United States.

Formally, V. P. Semenov-Tian-Shansky referred the North American States to the "sea-to-sea system". But the United States today is a power with global ambitions and a local geostrategic base. Cut off by two oceans from the Great Continent (a storehouse of energy resources and the center of world communications) The United States is doomed either to practice expansionism in the spirit of a" shred-like system " or, having made a revolution in the consciousness of its elite, to overcome the superpower temptation and join the general row of industrial states (the American tradition has significantly fewer prerequisites for choosing the second path).

2. In 1891, Alexander III in his message to the Ural Cossack Army on the occasion of the tercentenary of the "first combat service of the Ural Cossacks" noted their merits

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"during the progressive movement of our troops in Central Asia" and dated the beginning of this movement to the "expedition to the Aral Sea" in 1820, and the end - "occupation of the Turkmen oasis in 1881".

The advance of the Russians to Central Asia can be strictly characterized historically only in the light of two main factors: Russia's historical proximity to the Steppe and the non-stop (from the 10-20-ies of the XIX century), methodical advance of the British from India to the northwest, which was part of their strategy of "opening" Asian markets on the vast mainland border from the Eastern Mediterranean the Chinese seas.

3. Up to the XVIII century, the southern borders of Russia "from the Dniester to the Altai" (S. N. Yuzhakov) were held in awe by the Crimean and Nogai Tatars, the small, middle and large hordes of the Kyrgyz steppes, and the Kalmyks of Dzungaria. Agricultural colonization by the Russians in the 18th century of the European (Black Sea) steppes and security could not be ensured as long as the advance to the Steppe stopped at the conditional border between Europe and Asia.

Beyond the Ural River, the Black Sea steppes merge into the Caspian and Kyrgyz steppes. Here is located founded in the XVIII century. Orenburg, which, just as St. Petersburg was a "window to Europe", has become a "window" to the steppe. Central Asia, Siberia. Today, in the Orenburg region and neighboring Samara region, in accordance with the Concept of Development of the Armed forces of the Russian Federation, the 2nd Russian combined Arms army is stationed, covering the Central Asian direction. Here is the famous "Caspian Gate" (the gap between the southern spurs of the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea), through which Asian conquerors marched to Europe, until Russia tore up the continuous strip of Eurasian steppes in the space between the mouths of the Don and Volga and connected the Caucasus and Kyrgyz steppes into a single geopolitical whole, leading directly to the "middle"part of Russia. Asia.

4. Between the war in the Crimea (1853-1856) and the establishment of the power of the Russian tsar on the banks of the Murghab and Panj, the final conquest of the Caucasus took place. It was impossible to start, much less successfully complete, the movement to Central Asia without establishing itself on the Caucasian Isthmus. The idea of an indissoluble geopolitical unity of the Caucasus and Central Asia was first realized and implemented in the second half of the 50s-early 60s of the XIX century by the efforts of the think tank, which was at that time the headquarters of the Russian Caucasian corps (A. I. Baryatinsky, D. A. Milyutin, R. A. Fadeev).

The situation in the Caspian-Black Sea region "is a vital issue for the entire southern half of Russia, from the Oka River to the Crimea," wrote R.A. Fadeev in " Letters from the Caucasus "(1865), since " this half of the state has been created, so to speak. By the Black Sea." And further: "Russia can only protect its southern basins from the Caucasus isthmus. If the horizon of Russia were closed to the south by the snow-capped peaks of the Caucasus range, the entire western continent of Asia would be completely out of our influence, and with the current impotence of Turkey and Persia, it would not be long before they would have to wait for a master or masters... A series of water basins pushed deep into the Asian mainland, from the Dardanelles to the Aral Sea with its navigable tributary, the Amu Darya, which cuts through Central Asia almost to the Indian border, is too tempting a route for trade... European trade followed this route for thousands of years, but was interrupted by the Turks when they took Constantinople and closed the Black Sea... If relations with the East are a matter of first importance for others, then for Russia they fulfill a historical necessity, which it is not in its power to evade... Through the Caucasus Isthmus and its home basin, the Caspian Sea, Russia is directly connected to the entire mass of Muslim Asia... For Russia, the Caucasus isthmus together and the bridge spanned from the Russian shore to

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the heart of the Asian continent, and the wall that protects Central Asia from hostile influence, and the advanced fortification that protects both the Black and Caspian seas."

5. The historical fact is not that Russia has a "plan" for the conquest of India, but something exactly the opposite: the systematic advance of the British from India through Afghanistan with no speculative threat of the Anglo - Indian army entering Southern Russia to the shores of the Caspian Sea. The British threat to the southern frontiers of Russia existed to the extent that the security of these frontiers, achieved by extending the Cossack lines into the Ili River basin and the Syr-Darya, and then by advancing Russian troops into the Khans of Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand, restricted the" freedom "of English trade, which rested on the "opening" of Asian markets by force weapons.

The dynamics of the Russian and British advance into Central Asia shows that Russia has always taken a defensive position (sometimes it was active defense) in relation to the "lady of the seas". Britain, for its part, in its quest to expand the South Asian foothold, acted in India as the main violator of the European balance (the balance of power between East and West Europe). When you look at the map, you can see that the most dense network of railways built by the British in India by the beginning of the XX century was located not in the south or in the center of the subcontinent, but in the northwest, in the immediate vicinity of the current Afghan-Pakistani border (not, of course, to make it easier for the Russians to reach here, in the north-western border region, the greatest concentration of brigades and divisions of the Anglo-Indian army was created for the offensive.

It is also known that the Volga-Caspian waterway became Russian throughout its entire length in the XVI century, but Russian expansion in the Central Asian direction did not follow. The advance to Central Asia at the final stage of the struggle with the Steppe occurred as a "response" to a direct "challenge" to England, which was launching a planned strategic offensive deep into the Eurasian continent with the transfer of the base of its colonial conquests from North America to South Asia at the end of the XVIII century.

IV. AFGHANISTAN AS PART OF CENTRAL ASIA

1. At one time, A. E. Snesarev described in detail the strategic importance of Afghanistan, due to its location in the area of convergence of four cultural and historical worlds-India, China, Turkic Central Asia and Iran. A. E. Snesarev also showed that the geostrategic significance of a particular area that acts as an object of territorial and political control and / or struggle for territorial and political power, there is a function of history, not geography.

2. History reveals the opposite meaning of Afghanistan in the policy of the "axial" continental and non-continental powers, which are bringing their positions closer in Central Asia. An important confirmation of this is the failure of Attempt F. Lesseps, who in 1873 put forward the idea of building the "Great Central Asian Road" Orenburg-Samarkand-Peshawar through Afghanistan. This route, wrote the Suez Canal builder, will allow to overcome "3740 kilometers separating the last section of the Russian road in Central Asia from the last section of the Anglo-Indian rail track." F. Lesseps emphasized that the appearance of such communication "will lead to the disappearance of Anglo-Russian antagonism caused by the state of affairs in the Central Asian states." Plan F. Lesseps met with support in Russian diplomatic circles and the favor of Alexander II, but was torpedoed by London.

Later, in 1906, Lord A.D. Balfour made a statement that may be less well-known than his declaration on the establishment of a "Jewish national home" in Arab Palestine, but is no less significant for international relations.

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Twenty-first century and clarifies the traditional Anglo-American view of Afghanistan: "Russia's construction of strategic railways in Afghanistan will challenge Britain to war."

3. The consideration of Afghanistan in" Atlantic " geopolitics exclusively from the point of view of military confrontation between the powers is due to the deep-rooted unwillingness of the "thalassocracy" to truly free competition with organized continental trade.

The" trans-mainland system "of a territorial-political organization has a huge natural advantage over the" patch-like system": in world politics and international economic relations, the" axial " state stands on two legs, since it combines the transit potential of the mainland with the support of exits to the World Ocean.

The Trans-Afghan road promised and still promises to become Russia's most important competitive advantage in world trade, and that is why it has not yet been built (the road ends behind the bridge to Amu Darya on the Termez - Hairaton section). There is not a single railway track in Afghanistan, and this communication "hole", at least until the beginning of the new XXI century, continued to play the role of a classic"buffer".

4. The" sudden " appearance of the Taliban on the Afghan scene in 1994 was directly related to their establishment of dominance over the strategic road Quetta-Kandahar - Herat, the significance of which was carefully analyzed by J. N. Curzon, who traveled along the Trans-Caspian railway. Along the line of this road, the American company Unocal planned to build a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline system with the arrival of the Taliban (who, according to the Americans, were supposed to, but failed to unite all of Afghanistan). Modern transport and communication systems make it easy to reverse an intermodal transport corridor. When the Karachi - Quetta-Kandahar-Herat-Kushka strategic highway was connected in parallel with the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline system, it was assumed that cheap goods would flow from South Asia to Central Asia, and Turkmen gas, Kazakh and West Siberian oil would meet them.

5. The partition of historical (former British) India along confessional lines and the formation of the state of Pakistan in 1947 (according to the Anglo-American scheme of encircling Russia from the west and south with the territories of "buffer" pseudo-states), then the coup of 1953 in Iran, which for a quarter of a century turned this country into a springboard of the "transatlantic partnership" in the Middle East They seemed to have locked Russia in a Central Asian "bag", robbing it of the opportunity to solve its own - and all-European-historical task of establishing direct communications between the Eurasian North and the Indian Ocean. The" answer "to this" challenge " was the dramatic breakthrough of the USSR in Afghanistan in 1979.

6. The composition of the motives that guided the Soviet leaders in deciding (after the start of the "Islamic revolution" in Iran and the coup of Hafizullah Amin in Kabul) to send troops to Afghanistan remains a historical mystery.

3. Brzezinski famously spoke of "dragging the Russians into the Afghan trap" and attributed the credit to himself. The Soviet army entered Afghanistan on December 24, 1979, but as early as July 3, 1979, J. Carter signed, according to Brzezinski, a directive on "secret assistance to opponents of the pro-Soviet regime" in Kabul: "On that day, I submitted a note to the president explaining to him that, in my opinion, such a policy was necessary. the aid will have to trigger a Soviet military intervention... This covert operation was a great idea. The result was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap."

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It is clear, however, that no matter what dramatic consequences this might entail for the USSR and the Middle Eastern macro-region, Moscow consistently (and historically naturally) sought to break out of the communication impasse in the South, which continued to serve as the main cause of the geopolitical instability of the "axial" state: A "transcontinental" territorial-political system cannot be stable as long as it reaches only three of the four oceans, and one of its three geopolitical axes (the Volga-Caspian-Central Asian one) is broken at one end and cannot withstand the load.

7. After 2001, Afghanistan was used as a logistics base for the Alliance's" expansion " deep into Eurasia. The geography of the Mediterranean, Black Sea - Azov and Aral-Caspian basins, cutting into the mainland "almost to the Indian border", turns them into one huge communication. Since control over it by the North Atlantic forces is difficult (the transit and communication potential of Russia and other countries allows, in principle, to cut it in several places at once), the next targets of the "anti - terrorist operation", in all likelihood, will be the countries of the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea-Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. The vector of advance of the North Atlantic Allies in Central Asia necessarily repeats the direction of British expansion in this area in the XIX century.

8. Today, when the world economy and trade have three major centers, one in North America, the other two on the Eurasian mainland - in Western Europe and East Asia, the strategic importance of Afghanistan is even more than ever determined by the cross - linking of two types of transcontinental communications on its territory: roads and roads. routes that run from north to south and cross or bypass the Hindu Kush, connecting new Central Asia with Pakistan and India, and routes that stretch mainly in the latitudinal direction, which connect Iran with India, the Middle East with the Far East.

With the conclusion of the Russia-India-Iran trilateral intergovernmental agreement on the extension of the North-South transport corridor, the importance of latitudinal communications through Afghanistan is increasing. In other words, Afghanistan is not only an extremely convenient base for deploying operational offensive operations in the direction of the "new" (former Soviet) and "old" (Kashmir, Xinjiang) Central Asia, but also the most important geo - economic link in the development of European-Russian-Asian trade in the XXI century.

V. THE GLOBAL THREE-CENTER AND "MIDDLE" POSITION OF RUSSIA

1. The West European and East Asian world trade centers are located in close proximity to the world's richest oil and gas reserves. Five geographically contiguous oil and gas provinces - Arabian (on the territory of Saudi Arabia), Mosul (divided by Iraq and Iran), Caspian, Volga-Ural and West Siberian-cross the continent of Eurasia almost strictly along the meridian. They represent a unique concentration of planetary oil and gas resources, containing 80% of the world's proven hydrocarbon reserves.

From the point of view of competitive advantages, the geographical proximity of Western Europe and East Asia to the most important oil and gas fields and their transportation routes not only puts these two centers in a better position compared to North America, but also threatens the latter (due to the rapid depletion of its own oil and gas reserves in the United States) with a rapid-

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the role of a "global" superpower in the position of one of the many industrial states.

The alternative to this is two completely opposite options for the development of international relations.

2. The first option is related to an attempt by the United States to forcibly change the balance of comparative competitive advantages in the world market (primarily the global energy balance) that is being formed not in their favor, in order to divert the main transport flows of hydrocarbons to bypass Russia, and at the same time away from the Western European and East Asian markets. Economically, without relying on a superior military force, this calculation is not feasible.

Betting on the superiority of military power as the main argument in the struggle for Central Asia suggests one of two things: either (a) territorial division (and historical death) of Russia, or (b) rejection of such a creation of Anglo-American geopolitical thought as the "transatlantic link", which was cemented by the conditions of the global military-strategic balance of the 1945 model and a bipolar construction of the world.

3. Another variant of the development of international relations at the beginning of the XXI century directly depends on the activation of the international role of Russia as a classical "pivot" state in Eurasia. So far, Russia remains the only transit power in the world, whose geographical position and economic interests allow it to build transport and communication schemes for exporting its oil and gas, as well as for transit of oil and gas from the CIS countries, simultaneously in the direction of all three main centers of economic power in the modern world. Existing Russian terminals on the Black and Baltic Seas (in Novorossiysk and Primorsk), deep-water Omisalj on the Croatian coast of the Mediterranean Sea (connected to the main lines of the Russian "Transneft" via the Druzhba-Adria pipeline system), developed swap schemes, or Iran's substitution of Caspian oil in the Persian Gulf, and in the near future Nakhodka and/China's Daqing on the Pacific Ocean opens up the possibility of practical solutions to the most complex problems of the global energy economy already in the first decade of the XXI century in the interests of global international economic cooperation.

4. The baggage of the policy aimed at making Russia the main stabilizing force of the global energy balance in the XXI century is its own historical tradition.

In the middle of the 20th century, I. A. Ilyin quoted an article by the Italian historian G. Ferrero in his article "World Politics of the Russian Sovereigns".: "After 1918, we too soon forgot that from 1815 to 1914, for a century, Russia was the great power of balance in Europe... this vast military empire... She was also a guardian of order and peace in Asia."

In another article ("Russia is a living organism"), I. A. Ilyin explains the role of Russia as the most important balancing force in world politics. "Since ancient times," he writes, " Russia has been a geographical organism of large rivers and remote seas. The Central Russian upland is its living center: first "portages", then channels were supposed to connect distant seas with each other, connect Europe with Asia, West with East, North with South. Russia could not and should not have become a travel, trade, and cultural barricade; its global vocation was primarily creative-mediating between peoples and cultures... Russia... I should have... become a great and accessible cultural expanse. And this expanse cannot live only in the upper reaches of rivers, without owning their lower reaches leading out to the sea. That is why any people in the place of the Russian would have to fight for the mouths of the Volga, Don, Dnieper, Dniester, Western Dvina, Narova, Volkhov, Neva, Sviri, Ke-

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mi, Onega, Severnaya Dvina and Pechora". Gustav Adolf's plan to "lock Russia in its hopeless forest-steppe territorial and continental bloc and turn it into an object of pan-European exploitation", which emerged at one stage of this struggle, testified, writes I. A. Ilyin, to the "complete ignorance of Eastern affairs" and the "narrow-minded horizon" of the Swedish monarch, who did not realize that "Europe is only a part of Europe." a small peninsula of the great Asian continent." Therefore, for the policy of the future, I. A. Ilyin continues, it is important to " correctly see the problem of continental size and not stand in the way of world development."

Ultimately, in order to safely (without forcibly redistributing the world) untie the knot of problems of the world economy and international relations that has been tied up in Central Asia, this is all that is needed today: a consciousness that can "correctly see the problem of continental size" and the will to solve this problem without allowing any of the new ones candidates for the role of "global hegemon" should stand "in the way of global development".

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