the border – a journey around russia – erica fatland

A good book to understand Russian and Baltic history and geopolitics.

Excerpts:

The sound between Big Diomede and Little Diomede, which is part of Alaska, is barely five kilometres across, but the International Date Line runs down the middle. In winter, when the sound is frozen, it is in theory possible, though of course strictly forbidden, to walk from the U.S.A. to Russia, from yesterday to tomorrow.

The Russian border is not just long; at 60,932 kilometres it is the longest in the world. By way of comparison, the circumference of the earth measures 40,075 kilometres.

More than three-quarters of Russia’s enormous landmass lies in the east, in Asia. The greater part of this vast territory was not conquered by the tsar’s army but by fur trappers, hungry for profit.

Over the centuries, Russians had got used to numerous peoples and nations dancing to Russia’s tune, but now the tune had changed, and all that was left was a final exhausted wheeze.

Being Russia’s neighbour has never been easy. Norway is the only one of its fourteen neighbours that has not been invaded or at war with Russia in the past five hundred years. While other great European powers such as France and Great Britain had overseas colonies, Russia just continued to expand its boundaries.

Huge tracts of Russia are covered by tundra, taiga and forest: hard to defend, easy to invade. Russia’s size and enormous distances have been its best defense over the centuries.

Bering is remembered as Russia’s Columbus, the man who discovered America from the west. His name was immortalized in 1776 when Captain James Cook named the strait between Russia and America the Bering Strait.

Alaska was an anomaly in Russian history: it was the only mainland territory that was not attached to the rest of the empire.

In 1867, Tsar Alexander II sold Alaska to America for 7.2 million dollars. The person driving the deal on the American side was the then Secretary of State, William H. Seward. The sale was a bargain, and without a doubt could be described as the best real estate deal in history, yet the American press called Alaska “Seward’s folly” or “Seward’s icebox”.

The word “Arctic” is derived from the Greek ἀρκτικός, arktikos, which means “near the bear” and refers to the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear, which is clearly visible in the northern hemisphere.

Once we saw more than two hundred polar bears in a single day, which is one per cent of the total population. From on board the ship they looked like sheep in the distance.

I … had not expected so much rubbish. I have never seen so many rusty oil drums as I did in the Arctic,

These days, if you have the money, you can go on a cruise to the North Pole, eat caviar, drink champagne and take selfies in the frozen wilderness before getting back on the icebreaker and treating yourself to a drink at the bar to celebrate your accomplishment…The situation was very different a hundred years ago.

The dramatic consequences of climate change open up a potential gold mine for the Russian authorities. Not only will it be easier to access the reserves that lie hidden in the seabed, they will also have jurisdiction over the fastest route between Asia and Northern Europe. Even if future traffic along the Northeast Passage is only a fraction of the traffic through the Suez Canal, it will still make the northern regions so important that the traditional view of geography will be turned on its head. Russia’s hopelessly remote ports, which until now have lain inactive through much of winter, could soon be busy and lucrative. As a result of global warming, a new northern era is freeing itself from the ice.

Since I left school, I have been drawn to Russia, to its culture, literature, history and language, and, not least, to the people, the so-called Russian dusha, the Russian soul, and I have spent many years of my life trying to understand the vast country and the people who live there. This time I had taken a different approach: is it possible to understand a country and its people from the outside, from the perspective of its neighbours, or, as now, from on board a ship?

In the middle lay Kim Jong-il, who, unlike his father, looked frighteningly alive; his face had a healthy brown hue, and in many ways the lame dictator who suffered from diabetes looked better in death than in life. The art of embalmment had clearly developed and improved from when Kim Il-sung died in 1994 to when his son was laid to rest in 2011.

Pyongyang means “flat country” or “peaceful country”,

Even though egalitarianism is at the heart of communism, the North Korean authorities have never been particularly concerned about equality. On the contrary. At the end of the 1950s, Kim Il-sung devised songbun, an ingenious hierarchy or caste system that places everyone in the country in one of three main categories: “the core” or the loyal class, reserved for those who supported him actively during the fight for liberation, took part in the resistance against the Japanese imperialists or distinguished themselves during the Korean War. The greater part of the population belong to “the wavering” class and have to be watched carefully; lastly, there is “the hostile” class. These three main classes are then divided into more than fifty subcategories. Seven thousand bureaucrats and party members were given the task of investigating every citizen’s family background in order to determine their songbun. This work was completed in 1965, and, since then, the individual’s songbun has been inherited through the father’s line. A person’s songbun determines what kind of house they live in, their food rations, which schools and jobs he or she can access, and their access to medical treatment and even shops.

Turkmenistan, which is sometimes called the North Korea of Central Asia…

In 2009, Kim Jong-il made an abortive attempt to break the parallel economy once and for all. On November 30, it was announced that two zeros would be struck from all banknotes: with a stroke of a brush, 10,000 won became 100 won. Many people lost all their savings overnight and the country was thrown into financial crisis. To make the chaos complete, it was decided that pay for employees in state factories and institutions would remain the same, so a worker who previously earned 4,000 won should still be paid 4,000 won, but food prices would be adjusted to the new won. A kilo of rice that had previously cost about 2,000 won would now cost 22 won. In practice, this meant that the country’s millions of state employees got a ten thousand per cent pay rise. The result was galloping inflation, and very soon the new won was worth as little as the old. The regime has not attempted any currency revaluations since, and the illegal market economy is now tacitly accepted.

Shortly after Japan’s capitulation, it was divided in two along the 38th parallel. Soviet forces kept control of the north, and the Americans were given control of the south. Stalin needed a lackey to run his half, and his choice was the thirty-three-year-old Kim Il-sung. Kim was selected because he spoke good Russian and because he had had no contact with the somewhat nationalistic communists in Korea, as he had lived elsewhere for most of his life. But given all those years abroad, his mother tongue was now rusty. Before Kim Il-sung could deliver his first speech to the people in October 1945, Soviet envoys had to give their protégé Korean lessons. Three years later, on September 9, 1948, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was officially established in Pyongyang, with Kim Il-sung as leader. Kim Il-sung remained in power until he died in 1994, almost half a century later. Not only did he outlive six Soviet general secretaries, but also the Soviet Union itself.

The border between North and South Korea is 250 kilometres long and protected on both sides by a two-kilometre buffer that constitutes the demilitarised zone. Access to the zone is highly regulated and there are only a few, very small settlements there. The absence of human activity has made the area a haven for many threatened animal species. Several hundred species of birds live there, including the extremely rare Japanese crane. The amur leopard, Asian black bear and almost extinct Siberian tiger have also taken sanctuary in the buffer zone. Some people say that the Korean tiger, one of the rarest tigers on the planet, is to be found in the demilitarised zone.

Juche can be translated as “self-reliance” and is a mixture of Marxism–Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Confucianism and traditional Korean social systems.

We were prisoners of the sightseeing programme.

What surprised me most about North Korea was how beautiful it was. Not the towns, which were every bit as ghastly as I had imagined they would be, but the countryside. When I had tried to imagine what North Korea would be like, I had subconsciously pictured it in black and white, as if the regime had stolen all the sunsets and chlorophyll. Whereas, in reality, the beaches were just as beautiful as those in Vietnam.

“We Koreans are very disciplined,” Mr Nam said. “But perhaps,” he then added, “perhaps tourists will be able to walk around freely after the reunification of Korea.”

As a step towards self-reliance, Kim Jong-il introduced the “Military First” doctrine in 1994. North Korea currently has the largest army in the world with more than 1.3 million soldiers. Ten years is standard for compulsory military service,

Even though more than two thirds of Russia’s border is maritime, the country has very few deepwater ports. This desire for warm-water ports has been the cause of several wars in Russian history:

Unlike China and the Soviet Union, North Korea has become a hereditary dictatorship.

The key to Pyongyang’s future no longer lies in Moscow, but in Beijing. But as long as it is in China’s interest to avoid a mass immigration of poor North Koreans, the regime is likely to survive.

Dalian. The name is derived from the Russians’ name for the town – Дальний, dalny – which means “remote” and stems from the brief period when the town was under Russian rule towards the end of the 1800s. Dalian is now one of the fastest-growing cities in China, with about seven million inhabitants, and it was recently heralded by China Daily as the best city to live in in China.

From the time that the Romanovs came to power in 1613, the Russian Empire grew by an average of one hundred square kilometres every day.

First Opium War. The Chinese lost and had to cede Hong Kong to the British and open five ports for trade.

Second Opium War started in 1856 and, this time, the French fought with the British, as they too wanted greater access to the lucrative Chinese market.

Russians realised that their moment had come. In 1858, while Emperor Xianfeng was struggling to deal with the French and British in the south, Russia gathered its troops along China’s northern border and forced China to accept the Treaty of Aigun, a border agreement that was extremely favourable for the Russians. At a penstroke, Russia acquired the region to the north of the Amur River and increased its empire by 600,000 square kilometres.

The Russians forced the considerably compromised Chinese emperor to sign yet another border agreement, the Convention of Peking. This time the Chinese had to cede the area to the east of the Ussuri River to Russia. Thus, Russia gained not only a further 400,000 square kilometers of Chinese territory, but also a coastal border with the Sea of Japan. Nikolay Muravyov, the chief negotiator for Russia, had not originally intended to confiscate the Chinese coastline down to Korea, but justified this later decision as follows: “If the area were to remain in Chinese hands, the British would take it.”6 That very year, the foundations were laid for the port town of Vladivostok, which means “Ruler of the East”. The name left little doubt as to their ambitions.

Great Britain and France withdrew from Chinese territory a long time ago, but the Sino-Russian border remains more or less the same as the one decided by the agreements of 1858 and 1860.

The taking of Vladivostok meant that the Russians finally had access to a port on the Sea of Japan, but as it froze over in the winter months, it was still far from ideal. Port Arthur, on the other hand, named after a British naval officer from the Second Opium War, was on the end of the Liaodong Peninsula and ice-free all year round.

The Boxer Rebellion broke out. This was a Chinese rebellion led by boxers from “the Righteous and Harmonious Fists” movement. The rebellion was initially targeted at Chinese Christians and foreign missionaries, but subsequently was against any imperial Western influence.

In autumn 1901, China was coerced into signing the Boxer Protocol, in which they agreed to pay more than 300 million dollars in war reparations, and to allow foreign troops to be stationed throughout the country.

Forcing the Chinese to surrender Manchuria to Tsar Nicholas II and Russia. This antagonized the Japanese, but they made an offer: Russia could keep Manchuria if they got Korea.

1904, Japanese torpedo boats launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Port Arthur while the tsar enjoyed an opera. The empire was by then so vast that it was no longer able to defend itself effectively. Tsar Nicholas II had been caught off guard.

1905, a few weeks after the Japanese had taken control of 203 Hill, Port Arthur fell.

At the start of May 1905, seven months after they had set sail from the Baltic, the Russian fleet reached the Indian Ocean. And on May 27, they clashed with the Japanese fleet in the Tsushima Straits between Korea and Japan in the biggest naval battle since Trafalgar… First time in history that a European country had lost a war to an Asian country. Russia got off remarkably lightly: they did have to relinquish Port Arthur, the Liaodong Peninsula and the southern half of Sakhalin Island to the Japanese, and withdraw from Manchuria, but they did not need to pay war reparations and were allowed to keep the northern part of Sakhalin Island.

The Second World War did not end with Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945. Three days after the atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, on August 9, one and a half million Soviet soldiers marched into China to drive out the Japanese occupiers, who had been in Manchuria since 1931. The Japanese ended up losing everything they had gained in 1905, including South Sakhalin Island and the Kuril islands, which were given to Russia at the Yalta Conference. They also lost control of the Korean peninsula, which was divided by the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. Russia and Japan are still squabbling about the three small islands of Iturup, Kunashir and Shikotan, as well as the islets of Habomai. Japan claims that these do not belong to the Kurils, whereas Russia maintains that they are included in the spoils of war that legally fell to them at the end of the Second World War. The disagreement about these small islands, with some ten thousand inhabitants, is the reason why Japan and Russia still have not formally signed a peace treaty to mark the end of the war.

I had been warned that China was like India, minus the stomach upsets.

Harbin is a curiosity indeed, a Chinese city with character.

In the 1920s, Harbin was called the Paris of the Far East and was China’s undisputed capital of fashion.

During the Russian Revolution and bloody civil war that followed, hundreds of thousands of political refugees fled to Harbin, making it a largely Russian city again. Since many of the Russians who sought refuge here were Jews, it had the largest Jewish population in the Far East in the 1920s.

The Japanese invasion of Manchuria and establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932 marked the beginning of the end for China’s Paris, or the Orient’s Moscow, as the city was also known.

The Japanese quickly realized that they would not win a war against the Western superpowers with conventional weapons, so they started intensive research into biological warfare towards the end of the 1930s. In Unit 731, which was the largest research facility in Manchukuo, experiments were carried out with all manner of things, from salmonella to dysentery, and anthrax to tuberculosis. They used rats, hamsters and horses to host bacteria colonies, which they then tested on prisoners of war and the local population.

Before the Japanese withdrew from Manchuria in late summer 1945, they destroyed all the buildings where these grotesque experiments had taken place. But instead of killing the plague-infected rats, they released them. The epidemic that ensued killed more than twenty thousand people.

Harbin is the only place in China where it is usual to eat bread every day.

The relationship between China and the Soviet Union deteriorated dramatically in the 1950s owing to disagreements over ideology and which country should be the leading superpower in the communist world.

The most serious confrontation took place in the vicinity of Damansky Island, an uninhabited border island in the Ussuri River in 1969.

In the 1960s, many people feared that the conflict between the Soviet Union and China would lead to outright war. The Chinese feared that the Russians would then use nuclear weapons. The network of streets under Harbin was built with this in mind – the inhabitants needed a refuge.

There was no nuclear war, and the bomb shelter is now an enormous, underground shopping centre, one of the largest of its kind in the world.

And it is no doubt very practical in winter, when temperatures can fall to minus thirty degrees Celsius. Harbin is the coldest city in China.

Russia has agricultural land and energy. And China needs both things, so our leaders maintain a good relationship with the Russians. It is as simple as that.

The Chinese are masters at recreating European towns.

All that remains of the Orient’s Moscow is a theme park with hired Russians, a street of souvenir shops, a couple of churches that serve as historical museums, and a thin, rectangular park named after the worst despot of the last century. As well as bread, kvass and ice cream.

Heihe means “black river”. It is a small provincial town, with roughly two hundred thousand inhabitants, on the banks of the Amur River by the Russian border. On the opposite side of the river is a mirror image of the Chinese town, the Russian town of Blagoveshchensk.

In an attempt to please the Russian daytrippers, the local council in Heihe had put out matryoshka-shaped rubbish bins. It was a huge mistake. The Russians were furious. How dare the Chinese equate their culture with rubbish? The new bins were quickly left on the scrapheap, and, instead, statues of dancing bears now line the street along the river.

Only slightly more than six million people, about a third of the population of Moscow, live in the whole of the Russian Far East region, an enormous area that lies to the east of Siberia and shares borders with China, the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic Ocean. This sparsely populated area covers a third of Russia’s total territory. By way of contrast, about 40 million people live in the Heilongjiang district, on the Chinese side of the border, an area that is ten times smaller than the Russian Far East region. And so it has been since the seventeenth century: Russia has more land, China has more people.

One initiative has been to offer all Russians who move there a hectare of free land.

It was only in 2008 that Russia and China finally signed an agreement that delineated their 4,300-kilometre border, and thus put an end to the dispute.

Blagoveshchensk has one of the largest Chinese populations of any Russian town, thanks to the 1994 duty-free trade agreement with Heihe.

China and the Netherlands are Russia’s most important trading partners.

China is significantly more important to Russia than Russia is to China. China’s trade with the E.U. and the U.S.A. is still ten times greater than its trade with Russia.

“Moscow and St Petersburg!” Victor snorted. “That is not Russia, that is Europe!”

Mongolia is the eighth largest country in the world in terms of area, twice the size of Turkey, but only about three million people live there.

Avoid Russian trains at all cost.

The guidebook had warned that Ulan Bator was notorious for pickpockets, but I was still in a bubble having spent weeks in North Korea and China, where there is practically no crime against Western tourists.

Every five years or so, Mongolia is afflicted by what the Mongols call dzud: an unusually hard winter in which a significant proportion of the livestock dies. In winter, when temperatures can fall to minus forty Celsius, Ulan Bator is not only the world’s coldest capital, it is also the most polluted. Scientists estimate that at least ten per cent of deaths in the city are the direct result of air pollution.

More than a million people live in the ger district, a third of Mongolia’s total population, but they lack almost any infrastructure.

Andrews concluded that the Mongol “lives like an untaught child of nature”.

The capital, Urga, was renamed Ulan Bator, which means “red hero”, in honour of Sükhbaatar, the young nation’s revolutionary father, who had recently died.

Every single one voted for independence from China.

It was in this landscape that Genghis Khan’s army was raised and cultivated, an army so powerful, efficient and well organised that it conquered a seventh of the world’s surface. On horseback.

But this enormous army needed something to do. As no Mongols paid tax, the soldiers lived off the spoils of war. It was therefore only natural that they should turn their attention to their wealthy neighbours in what is now northern China.

At its biggest, the Mongolian Empire stretched from Korea in the east to Poland in the west and as far south as Vietnam.

The Mongols were pragmatic: although they subjugated people, plundered their towns and cities, and collected tax from them, they did little to interfere in the daily lives of their subjects. The Mongols were skilled warriors and became efficient tax collectors, but it was never their desire that the conquered populations should be like them or believe in the same god. On the contrary, they were tolerant of other cultures and religions, and often assimilated into the local culture themselves.

The Mongols perceived themselves to be chosen by the eternal God to rule over the entire world, and that they believed that Genghis Khan was God’s son. Perhaps this belief was why their thirst for ever more conquests was never quenched.

But everything is transitory, even empires. Allegiances shift, God changes sides, new rulers appear, external borders disintegrate, and internal conflict eats the empire from within.

Today, cows and goats graze on the slopes that for a short period were home to the capital of the world.

“I cannot think of a single thing I do not like about my life,” he said. “If there was anything I did not like, it has now become habit, so I don’t think about it anymore.”

About a hundred thousand Mongols make their living, either wholly or partially, as “ninja miners”, or illegal gold diggers. According to the Mongolian authorities, these unauthorised gold miners dig up as much as five tons of gold a year.

Kazakhstan. I found the people there colder and less approachable than in the other Central Asian republics.

The Kazakh landscape had nothing on the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Kazakhstan is more or less flat as a pancake – Denmark is positively dramatic in comparison.

Arasan Baths, the largest and best spa in Central Asia.

Since taking power, Nazarbayev, a qualified engineer, has run the country as an enlightened autocracy.

His popularity is not real, because he will not tolerate competition. Our main problem is that we have never really been de-colonised, or de-Sovietised. We have not come to terms with our past.

The geography, however, remains the same. No other country has a longer border with Russia: the Russian–Kazakh border is 6,467 kilometres long – the second longest in the world, beaten only by that between Canada and the U.S.A.

Ulan Bator is the only capital in the world that is colder than Astana.

Eurasian Economic Union, which is sometimes also called the customs union – or the “Anti-European Union” by its critics.

The centre of Astana is almost exclusively composed of signature buildings, and several of the most famous were designed by the stellar British architect Sir Norman Foster. These include the Khan Shatyr shopping mall, which is shaped like a glass tent and is the largest structure of its kind in the world, and the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, a 77-metre-high glass pyramid that houses an opera house with fifteen hundred seats. When Astana Opera opened its doors in 2013, it was the third largest opera house in the world, and was apparently designed in part by Nazarbayev himself.

As it was dangerous to criticize Stalin by name, they called him the Moustache. ‘When the Moustache dies, they will let us back,’ they would say.” The Ingush and the Chechens were not rehabilitated until 1956, three years after Stalin’s death.

The Caspian Sea is, of course, not strictly a sea, but rather a saline lake, albeit the largest in the world.

To what extent can one rely on one’s own impressions and memories? Not only are we subjective creatures, we are also capricious. Everything we experience is filtered by our form and mood at the time, our expectations, what we may have just experienced, what we yearn for at that moment.

Which prompts the small, but rather unnerving question: is travel literature to be trusted, or any literature that is based on memory, for that matter?

The area that is now Azerbaijan has been known for its oil and gas reserves for a long, long time. The Persians called Azerbaijan Atropates, which can be roughly translated as “protected by fire”, a name presumably inspired by the many Zoroastrian fire temples in the region. The Zoroastrian priests used oil from natural sources to keep the temples’ eternal flame alive. The name Azerbaijan, a modern variant of Atropates, came into use at the start of the twentieth century, and means more or less the same thing; azar is Persian for “fire”.

Like the Iranians, the Azerbaijanis are predominantly Shi’a Muslims, and there are in fact more Azerbaijanis in Iran than there are in Azerbaijan. When the territory that is now Azerbaijan fell to the Russians, following their victories in the Russo-Persian Wars at the start of the nineteenth century, the Azerbaijanis were effectively split in two.

In the mid-nineteenth century, oil was discovered outside Baku. When the tsar opened the territory to foreign investors in the 1870s, the Swedish Nobel brothers grasped the opportunity and laid the foundations for what was to become not only their family fortune, but Baku’s oil boom. They were joined by the Rothschilds and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company in the 1880s. By 1900, Baku was the world’s largest exporter of oil.

Most Kazakhs look like Mongols, with high cheekbones and slanting eyes. Here the people looked more like Turks, with thin faces and darker skin. Many of them had brown, curly hair, like Rena. When they spoke to each other, it sounded like they were singing soft laments.

Yanar Dag, the burning mountain, where flames of up to three metres burn night and day, thanks to an underground gas reserve.

No country has as many mud volcanoes as Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan is one of the countries with the highest number of displaced inhabitants in the world.

The Shaki khans managed to build a small but beautifully designed summer palace, with stained glass and colorful rooms in which every centimeter of wall is covered with paintings of flowers and animals. The summer palace in Shaki is still one of the most magnificent buildings in Azerbaijan.

The Caucasus countries lie pretty much in between everything: between Europe and Asia, between East and West, between Christianity and Islam, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, between the Russians, Persians and Turks. The old Arabs called the Caucasus djabal al-alsun: “mountain of languages”. There is no other place in the world where so many languages are spoken in such a small area, especially if you include those who live on the north side of the mountains.

Soviet monument builders made up for what they lacked in elegance and grace with location. The Russia–Georgia Friendship Monument was superbly situated on the edge of a mountain plateau, with an open aspect and a steep drop down to a deep and uninhabited valley, surrounded by craggy, snow-capped mountains.

Georgia is one of my favourite countries. It is a country that has absolutely everything: some of the highest mountains in Europe in the north, you can swim in the Black Sea in the west and in the east you will find world-class vineyards. Add old, almost untouched architecture (everything from medieval villages where stone towers stand side by side, to some of the oldest churches in the world), a cuisine that can compete with Italian, and people who not only are open and hospitable, but always ready to party and have another drink, and you have Georgia. Were it not for their neighbours, the Georgians would probably be the world’s happiest people. In terms of topography, Georgia has been very fortunate, but in terms of geopolitics, not quite so lucky. The small country lies squeezed between the Persians and the Turks to the south, and the Russians to the north, so has forever been forced to walk an impossible tightrope.

The republics that had the greatest autonomy were the union republics, or Soviet Socialist Republics as they were also known (S.S.R.s).I There were fifteen: Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia, Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Russia. The autonomous Soviet republics and autonomous oblasts were all part of a union republic. For example, South Ossetia was under the control of the Georgian Union Republic. The union republics, with the exception of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (R.S.F.S.R.), all had their own Communist Party and, at least in theory, the right to leave the Soviet Union should they wish (in practice, this only really became possible in Gorbachev’s final year as president). The autonomous Soviet republics and autonomous oblasts did not.

Gergeti Monastery, which is perhaps the most famous monastery in Georgia.

“Traditionally, there should be twenty-one toasts during a celebratory meal,” she told me. “And always in the same order. It is not a problem if you don’t finish the food, you are not supposed to eat it all, but you do have to drink all the alcohol!”

The Ossetians were also the first ethnic group in the Caucasus to work with the Russians, and the capital of North Ossetia, Vladikavkaz, was built as a fortified city in 1784. It was from here that the Russians conquered the rest of the Caucasus. And just as Vladivostok means “Ruler of the East”, Vladikavkaz can be translated as “Ruler of the Caucasus”.

Georgia is a small country, no more than 69,700 square kilometres, which is about the size of Ireland. If one excludes Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the two republics that broke away in the early 1990s, over which the Georgian government has no influence anymore, another twenty per cent can be subtracted.

Rose Revolution. In March 2003, demonstrators, led by Saakashvili, marched into the national assembly with roses in their hands and forced the sitting president, Shevardnadze, who was in the middle of a speech, to flee.

The territory of South Ossetia is expanding silently, metre by metre, under cover of darkness. The phenomenon is called borderisation, whereby a territory or country is expanded by moving physical entities, such as fences, barbed wire and signage, without permission. Here and there, the South Ossetian border has been pushed several hundred metres into Georgia, with the Georgian authorities as helpless onlookers. Once again, it is ordinary citizens who are sacrificed on the geopolitical altar.

“Abkhazia was a paradise,”

If it had not been for the war, Abkhazia would be like Monaco or Monte Carlo today!”

Abkhazia may have cut all ties with Georgia, but it has strengthened its bonds with Russia. Without military support from Russia during the fight for independence, the republic would quite simply not exist, and without Russia’s financial and practical support after the war, it would not have survived its infancy. Like Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia, Abkhazia is an international pariah. Only Russia, Nicaragua and Venezuela have recognised the breakaway republic, and the crisis-stricken Pacific island of Nauru, which was paid 50 million dollars by Russia for doing so. To the rest of the world, Abkhazia is still part of Georgia, despite the fact that the Georgian government has had no control there for more than twenty years. This pariah status means that Abkhazia is at the mercy of its neighbour to the north. An Abkhazian passport, for example, is worthless, so most Abkhazians have Russian citizenship and passports.

The Institute for Experimental Pathology and Therapy in Sukhumi first opened its doors in 1927. It was the first centre in the world to carry out experiments on primates. For decades it was the world leader in its field. The first trials of vaccines for polio and other major diseases were carried out here, but Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov also carried out far more controversial tests. Stalin allegedly dreamed of creating a whole new race, a strong and hard-working man-ape hybrid that would help the Soviet Union to beat the West. The experiment was not successful, even though there was no shortage of willing participants of both sexes.

The Black Sea is deep; at its deepest, it is 2,200 metres to the seabed. Fish swim around in the top layers of water, about one to two hundred metres below the surface, as saline levels are low and oxygen levels are high, but at the bottom it is dead. Ninety per cent of the water in the Black Sea contains no oxygen or life, making the Black Sea the largest body of dead water in the world. Dead plants and animals that flow into the Black Sea with the Danube, Dniester, Dnieper and Don sink to the bottom to become part of the wet, organic blanket that covers the seabed, along with tens of thousands of mummified shipwrecks. Wood does not disintegrate and iron does not rust, so even wrecks that have been there for thousands of years are perfectly preserved, caught in a time capsule of lifeless water. The considerable amount of organic matter, combined with a complete absence of oxygen, means that bacteria on the seabed produce record amounts of hydrogen sulphide. Hydrogen sulphide, H2S, is one of the world’s most poisonous gases. One inhalation of the malodorous gas is enough to kill a person. The Black Sea holds the world’s largest reserve of hydrogen sulphide. The Black Sea was once a big freshwater lake, far smaller and shallower than today’s sea. According to recent studies, large volumes of water from the Sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean spilled into the Black Sea about eleven thousand years ago. As the glaciers from the last ice age melted, the water level in the Mediterranean rose over time, until it breached a thin spit of land in the Bosporus Strait and flowed into the Black Sea. The water level may have risen by as much as a hundred metres in ten years, transforming the lake into a sea. And the sea may have encroached on the land at a rate of about one and a half kilometres a day, swallowing Stone Age villages with ruthless efficiency. The marine life also changed swiftly. Eighty per cent of the fish that live in the Black Sea originate in the Mediterranean. Some people believe that the deluge of the Black Sea could be the basis of the Noah’s flood story in the Old Testament. The sea is now known as the Black Sea in most languages, even though the water is no blacker than any other. Perhaps the name stems from the mist that often lies dark and heavy over the water, or the winter storms that can be dramatic, hence all the shipwrecks on the dead seabed.

One of the things that I loved most about the Russians and Ukrainians was their deep respect for literature.

Odessa is one of the most attractive cities in Ukraine.

Odessa was conquered by the Russians during Catherine the Great’s second war with the Ottoman Empire.

In gaining the Crimean Peninsula, the Russians had secured a port on the Black Sea, but transporting goods over the mountains to Sevastopol was laborious, and they were keen to establish a new port. Their choice fell on the small, dusty Tatar village of Khadjibey, just north of the Dniester River. It was conquered in 1789, in just under half an hour, by José de Ribas, a Spanish-Neapolitan admiral who served in the tsar’s army. De Ribas was given the task of building the new town, which was named after the Ancient Greek colony of Odessos, which had lain some distance further south.

The city architects were mostly Italian, which explains in part why Odessa is unlike any other Ukrainian town and is more reminiscent of a Mediterranean St Petersburg, which was also designed by Italians.

“We were in Siberia for two years. Sometimes the temperature dropped to minus fifty. We would throw a bucket of water up in the air and if it froze, we did not need to go to school that day. We ate mice, until, eventually, there were no mice left in the village. We ate dogs. We boiled grass. We ate anything that could be eaten.”

“I was scared of airplanes and did not want to fly,” Maria said. “During the war, we always lay down flat whenever the airplanes came. It was instinctive. So we took the boat.

Ukraine is a buffer between Russia and Europe. If we do not stop them, they will soon be in Berlin!

Crimea had everything: exotic Tatar palaces, old stone churches, dramatic cliffs, Latvian beer on tap, Greek ruins, evergreen conifers, long sandy beaches and warm seas.

The Crimean Peninsula was originally part of the Russian Soviet Republic, but in 1954 Nikita Khrushchev transferred the peninsula to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. To this day, no-one knows why he did it.

The relationship between the Crimean Tatars and Slav people goes back a long way and has been strained more often than not.

When the Golden Horde finally crumbled in the fifteenth century, some of the clans gave up their nomadic life and settled on the Crimean Peninsula. These clans were the predecessors of the Crimean Khanate,

The khanate became a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire in 1478. The Ottomans chased the Greeks and Genoese away from the Black Sea coast, and in practice closed the Black Sea to European vessels for two hundred years. The Crimean Khanate and lawless steppes in the south turned out to be a real headache for Russia. One of the khanate’s most important sources of income was the slave trade,

One of the main reasons that the Russian tsars were so keen to conquer these regions by the Black Sea was that they wanted to put a stop to the slave trade and raids once and for all. Another, equally important reason was their dream of making Russia a maritime superpower. In 1689, when Peter the Great came to the throne, Russia, despite its size, still had only one port, in Archangel. This was frozen over for the greater part of the year and was in the far north. Peter the Great managed to secure Russia’s access to the Baltic Sea and built a new capital, St Petersburg, there. But all attempts to conquer the Black Sea coast failed. It was only at the end of the eighteenth century, under Catherine the Great, that ships flying the Russian flag finally sailed on the Black Sea. Like her predecessor, Catherine the Great was ambitious. Her big dream was to conquer Istanbul, cradle of orthodox Christianity. She was not successful in that, but in the course of two long wars with the Ottoman Empire, she did manage to ac-quire large parts of what is now South Ukraine, from Odessa in the south to Dnepropetrovsk (now known as Dnipro) in the north, including Crimea.

In Crimea, which Potemkin called “the wart on Russia’s nose”, he established Simferopol and Sevastopol, home to the Russian Black Sea fleet.

Sevastopol holds a unique place in Russian and Ukrainian history, because it was here in Chersonesos, as it was then called, that Vladimir I, Grand Prince of Kievan Rus, was christened in 988.II According to the Primary Chronicle, the choice was between Islam and Christianity, and he chose the latter because he could not bear the thought of a life without alcohol. In reality, it was probably more to do with diplomacy: Vladimir I wanted to marry the Byzantine emperor’s sister, Anna, in order to strengthen the relationship with the Byzantine Empire, their most powerful neigh- bour to the east.

Kievan Rus, the forerunner of modern-day Russia, remained Christian. Following a schism between the Eastern Church and the Western Church in 1054, the grand princes of Kiev were loyal to the Byzantine Empire and eastern Orthodox Christianity, a choice that was upheld after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. By then, Moscow had become a more important centre of power than Kiev, in terms of religion also. Russians believed that Moscow was the third Rome – and that there would never be a fourth. The idea that Moscow is the successor of Rome and Constantinople is the reason why the two-headed eagle, originally a Byzantine symbol, is included in the Russian coat of arms.

In other words, Christian Russia was born in Crimea, in Chersonesos. Sevastopol was built on the ruins of Chersonesos, and since then has been destroyed and rebuilt twice.

The first time Sevastopol was destroyed was during the Crimean War, which raged from 1853 to 1856. The Ottoman Empire, which was often called “the sick man of Europe”, was weak, and Russia and the Western powers bided their time, waiting for it to wither away completely so that they could pick up the pieces and share them out among themselves. Tensions in Europe were running high at the time. In France, Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, had recently seized power and was keen to make his mark. He demanded that the Ottomans recognise the Roman Catholic Church as the highest religious authority in Palestine. Under considerable pressure, the sultan conceded, which in turn upset Tsar Nicholas I, who felt that the Orthodox Church had been demeaned. In revenge, the Russians attacked the principalities of Moldova and Wallachia, south of Odessa, which were then under Turkish rule. Later the same year, the Russians destroyed the Turkish Black Sea fleet. It was the tenth time that the Russians had gone to war with the Turks, so in many ways it was nothing new, but unusual this time was the fact that the Western powers of France, Great Britain and later Sardinia joined the war on the Ottoman side. They believed that Russia’s aggressive expansionism threatened their interests, and feared that the Russians would try to make the Black Sea Russian and thereby gain free access to the Mediterranean.

In September 1854, French and British soldiers landed in Crimea, and a few weeks later there began the siege of Sevastopol, the main base of the Russian Black Sea fleet.

The Crimean War was one of the first wars to make such extensive use of trench warfare, and the losses were appalling. It was not firearms or cannons that killed most of the soldiers, however, but epidemics and infections.

Florence Nightingale, served at one of the field hospitals in Istanbul during the war and implemented a number of systematic measures to improve hygiene, including proper latrines, clean kitchens, clean bedclothes, and the regular airing of wards. These simple but effective measures resulted in a dramatic fall in the number of deaths and revolutionised nursing.

For Russia, the Crimean War was a catastrophe, in both human and economic terms. The empire’s position in Europe was greatly weakened and it became obvious to everyone just how backward Russia was with regard to its army and industry. One direct consequence of the war was Alexander II’s decision to abolish serfdom, despite enormous protest from the nobility. More than a third of the population at the time were serfs. Not only did the system cause considerable human suffering, it hindered military and industrial development as well. The state coffers were empty and Alexander II realised that Russia would not be able to defend Alaska against an attack. Alaska was therefore sold to the U.S.A. in 1867.

On May 9, 1944, after two years of German occupation, Sevastopol was liberated by the Red Army. Nine days later, Stalin started the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, whom he accused of collaborating with the Germans. There were of course those who had worked for the German occupying forces – some through force and some voluntarily – but there were more who had fought against the Germans as part of the Red Army. In the course of a couple of hectic days, an entire people was declared responsible, and without trial hounded from their homes and pressed into dirty, overcrowded rail carriages. “It took no more than two days for all the Crimean Tatars to be deported,” Gyulnara Bekirova told me. “More than 230,000 people. They were transported in carriages that were normally used for animals; anyone who resisted was shot.

In terms of military strategy, one cannot overestimate the significance of Russia’s control of the Crimean Peninsula,

Russians are building a bridge over the Kerch Strait, to link the peninsula with mainland Russia. Hitler and Stalin tried unsuccessfully to build a bridge over the Kerch Strait. The strait is vulnerable to earthquakes and storms, and often freezes in winter. In other words, the odds are against the bridge, but it is a prestige project for Putin and crucial to the survival of Crimea.

Before the war, Donetsk was one of the wealthiest and best-maintained cities in Ukraine, and a host city for the 2012 Euros. The city was upgraded for the occasion with the most modern airport in the country and a shiny new football stadium. The same year, Forbes Magazine hailed President Viktor Yanukovych’s hometown as the best city in Ukraine in which to do business.

March 8 is not a day that goes unnoticed in former Soviet republics. First thing in the morning there were already long queues of men outside the flower shops. Failing to give your wife a gift on International Women’s Day is worse than forgetting your wedding anniversary.

“Lots of people only support the People’s Republic because they cannot stand Poroshenko and the Ukrainian government,” Sasha explained. “All the propaganda and arms come from Russia. But Russia does not need Donetsk. So why are they helping us? Let me tell you: Russia needs a bleeding arm. They need Ukraine to bleed.”

No-one smuggles anything out of Donetsk.

It is strange to think that today’s neutral and democratic Sweden was once a military power that killed and plundered its way through Europe with plans of marching on Moscow. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the Swedes conquered the greater part of the Baltic region and Gulf of Finland to become the strongest power in the Baltic. By the mid-seventeenth century, Sweden had the most territory in Europe, second only to Russia. The Swedish Empire stretched from Trøndelag in the middle of Norway to St Petersburg, and included parts of northern Germany as well as Finland and the Baltic provinces. Yet only one and a half million people lived in this large empire. By comparison, the Russian Empire had a population of fourteen million, and France twenty. But Sweden did have the most modern and efficient army in Europe.

The Swedes were mown down before they were close enough to shoot.” On the Swedish memorial outside the city museum, it simply says: Time heals all wounds.

Unless one likes Stalinist architecture, the Ukrainian capital is not the sort of city that inspires love at first sight.

Kiev’s golden age was in part thanks to the Swedes. According to the Primary Chronicle, the Varangians – a name given to people from the north – were initially driven back across the sea by local tribes, who refused to pay tribute to them. They decided on self-rule instead, but that did not go too well. “… tribe turned against tribe. Disagreements arose between them and they started to fight. They said to one another: ‘Let us find a prince who may rule over us, and judge us according to the law!’ ”22 In 862, envoys from the Slav tribes sailed across the sea in search of the Varangians, who were also known as “Rus”. The word is probably derived from Ruotsi, the Finnish word for Swedes, which in turn is derived from the Norse word rodr, to row, the root of which is found in the place name Roslagen in Swedish, but also in the name of Russia itself. Rurik the Rus accepted the invitation and sailed back over the Baltic to settle in Novgorod for good, and rule over the Slav tribes. In 882, after Rurik’s death, his successor, Oleg,II sailed down the Dnieper and established himself in Kiev. Oleg chased away the Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic people from Central Asia to whom the Slavs had been forced to pay tribute. Under Oleg and his descendants, the Kiev Empire grew into a power to be reckoned with in Eastern Europe. In the eleventh century, under Prince Vladimir the Great and Yaroslav the Wise, the Kiev Empire, or Kievan Rus as it was otherwise known, stretched from the Gulf of Finland and Moscow in the north, to the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea in the south. Following Yaroslav’s death in 1054, the empire was divided between his sons, and Kiev’s position as a centre of power for the Slav tribes started to diminish. Then, in 1240, Kiev was invaded by the Mongols, and left in ruins. At the time, the city was home to fifty thousand people, of whom only two thousand survived. The Kiev Empire had very definitely had its heyday, but Rurik’s descendants continued to rule over the eastern Slav principalities for hundreds of years. Vasily IV, tsar of Russia from 1606 to 1610, was the last ruler in the Rurik dynasty. He died a prisoner outside Warsaw in 1612, a year before the first Romanov, Michael I, was chosen as tsar.

The cathedral was built in the same Byzantine style as Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, after which the Kiev cathedral is also named. The interior walls are decorated with gold mosaics and frescos from floor to ceiling, many of which are far better preserved than in its twin in Istanbul.

The organisation of agriculture into collective farms resulted in a terrible famine in the Soviet Republic of the Ukraine, just as it had in Kazakhstan, where more than a quarter of the population starved to death.

Scholars have estimated that somewhere between three and four million people died as a result of the Soviet Union’s inhuman agricultural policy in Ukraine. The famine is called “Holodomor” today, a shortening of moryty holodom, which means to starve someone to death. The Ukrainian authorities equate the Holodomor with genocide.

The propaganda is so powerful that I’ve almost started to believe it myself.

“Peace depends on the politicians, not the soldiers,” Sergey said. “We just survive. We decide nothing.”

Time heals all wounds. Independent Ukraine’s wounds are still bleeding, and every day more are inflicted. When the Cossack leader Khmelnitsky swore loyalty to the Russian tsar in 1654, the territories that fell under the tsar’s protection were called Little Russia. This name was used until the nineteenth century and says a lot about how the Russians saw, and indeed probably still see, Ukraine. The existence of a distinct Ukrainian language was denied for a long time, and until as recently as the 1917 revolution there were severe restrictions in place regarding the use of Ukrainian as a written language. Currently, about seventeen per cent of the population in Ukraine are ethnic Russians, and a third have Russian as their mother tongue; the Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians generally live in Eastern Ukraine.

Great Russia has shown the world that it will stop at nothing to put Little Russia in its place.

The speed of decay was visible. Three decades, and everything falls apart.

The Chernobyl nuclear power station was the first to be built on Ukrainian soil, and was an R.B.M.K. type: a water-cooled, graphite-moderated, second-generation reactor. This type of reactor had been developed in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and was not approved for use in the West, as the construction was deemed to be unstable. There was, among other things, a constant danger that the graphite would ignite, which is precisely what happened in Chernobyl.

In the evening of April 25, 1986, the nuclear physicists at the plant turned off a number of security functions in Reactor No. 4, including the cooling system. They planned to carry out a risky test the following day to establish how long the generators would continue to produce electricity for the cooling pumps in the event of a system shutdown. The test went terribly wrong. At 1.23 a.m. on April 26, the energy level in the reactor rose to 120 times its normal level and the pumps failed. A few seconds later, the reactor exploded. The protective lid, which weighed more than a thousand metric tons, was blown to pieces, releasing large amounts of radioactive dust into the atmosphere, which spread over a vast area. The radiation and fallout were estimated to be two hundred times greater than that released by the atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Chernobyl was one of the main factors underlying the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even though the government got help from the international community, the evacuation, damage and clean-up cost an extraordinary amount of money. And everyone knew that the government had been caught in the most devastating lie; they cared nothing about ordinary people.”

Przewalski horses – rare wild horses were introduced to the area around Chernobyl at the end of the 1990s, as an experiment. They have since mated so successfully that they have become a pest and a threat to the environment.

Lviv was one of the few cities in the region that escaped the relentless bombing of the Second World War, and the historical centre is a U.N.E.S.C.O. World Heritage site.

In contrast to Kiev or Odessa, everyone in Lviv spoke Ukrainian. Everywhere I went, I was surrounded by the melodic, melancholy Ukrainian language, which here in the west, so close to the Polish border, sounded almost Polish.

The history of Eastern Europe can make your head spin. Borders have moved back and forth through the centuries; countries have disappeared, only to reappear later. Others have been created. In terms of etymology, the word Ukraine is derived from the preposition u, which means “by” or “near”, and kraina, which means “land”, which in turn comes from kray, which means “edge”, “end” or “border”. In other words, the country on the border.

The streets in Brest were wide, and, as is often the case in dictatorships, immaculately clean.

There is much discussion about who the Belarusians actually are. Scholars do not even agree on the origins of the name Belarus, or White Russia. Some believe the name refers to the regions that were not conquered by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. Historically, there has never been a kingdom of White Russia. The independent Duchy of Polotsk, which now lies in the north of Belarus, was established in the ninth century, but soon became part of the Kingdom of Kiev. In the fourteenth century, large parts of what are now Belarus and Ukraine were incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and a couple of centuries later these then became part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. When Poland was carved up between Russia, Prussia and Austria at the end of the eighteenth century, the territory that is now Belarus became part of the Russian Empire.

“We have a joke here that after the election, the president’s closest adviser went to Lukashenko and said: ‘Mr President, I have some good news and some bad news.’ ‘Tell me,’ Lukashenko said. ‘Well, the bad news is that no-one voted for you. The good news is that you have been re-elected.’ ”

Winter came early that year, as it often does when foreign armies try to invade Russia, and it was unusually severe, as it often is when Russia is under attack. Roughly six hundred thousand men took part in the march on Moscow, and only thirty thousand returned to France.

The Belavezha Accords consigned the Soviet Union to history with three pen strokes.

Russia, the leading country in the union, lost about twenty per cent of its territory and half its population when fifteen independent states were born.

The Soviet Union has been resurrected in Belarus like some Latin American banana republic, but with gas pipes instead of bananas.

“Putin does not see Belarus as an independent country,

Lithuanian is a fascinating language. It has retained grammatical elements and features of Proto-Indo-European that otherwise are found only in Sanskrit and Ancient Greek.

Vilnius’ history stretches back to the Middle Ages when it was the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Remarkably, Lithuania was the largest state in Europe in the fourteenth century, and covered the area from the Baltic Sea down to the Black Sea. At the end of the 1300s, the Lithuanian grand duke, Jogaila, who was a pagan, converted to Catholicism so he could marry the Polish princess Jadwiga, who was heir to the Polish throne. The majority of Lithuanians are now Catholic. A continued personal union with Poland eventually became a real union in 1569, with the establishment of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Lithuanian aristocracy gradually started to speak Polish, but the farmers continued to speak Lithuanian. The Commonwealth was eventually swallowed by its expanding neighbours, Prussia, Austria and Russia, towards the end of the eighteenth century. The territory that is now Lithuania fell to Russia, with the exception of a small strip by the coast, which became part of Prussia. Lithuania and Poland did not emerge again as independent countries until after the First World War.

Close to two hundred thousand Jews, more than ninety per cent of the Jewish population in Lithuania, were murdered during the war.

In south-west Lithuania, the Curonian Spit runs along the Baltic coast for a hundred kilometres. At its narrowest point, it is only four hundred metres wide.

“A window to the world” was what Pastor Tomas Šernas had called the Baltic coastline.

The German author Thomas Mann visited Nida, one of the prettiest villages on the spit, for the first time in 1929. The Nobel Prize laureate was so taken with the place that he immediately built a summer house there. The brown timber house, with blue window frames and a thatched roof, still stands on a small hill, with a view to the lagoon.

Back then, Kaliningrad bordered the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania and was a natural southern outpost for the Soviet Union on the Baltic coast. Kaliningrad is now a Russian exclave, surrounded by Poland and Lithuania, which are both N.A.T.O. countries. It is currently the most militarised area in Europe, and an important naval base for Russia, which lost the greater part of the Baltic coast when the Soviet Union fell apart. The exclave is a constant reminder to its neighbours of Russia’s military muscle. The Iskander missiles that are positioned there can reach Warsaw within two minutes and twenty-two seconds.

In this corner of the world, borders have moved like shifting sand dunes.

On the night of September 1, 1939, Hitler started his Polish campaign by attacking the small garrison at Westerplatte, just outside the centre of Gdańsk.

The significance of the Spanish Civil War in the build-up to the Second World War,

History is a political battlefield in Poland. But there are also many very real battles in Polish history. The greater part of the country is as flat as Belarus, without any natural boundaries, so an easy target for invading armies. In the thirteenth century, the Teutonic Order left their mark, and then the Mongols, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Swedish army destroyed much of the country. But Poland was also a major power in its own right. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was the mightiest power in eastern Central Europe, and from 1610 to 1612 the Poles even occupied Moscow.

In 1772, Russia, Prussia and Austria each helped themselves to a piece of Poland–Lithuania, in what is known as the First Partition of Poland.

Russia and Prussia took more Polish territory, in the Second Partition of Poland.

The Third Partition of Poland took place in 1795, when the remaining territory was divided up between Russia, Prussia and Austria. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth ceased to exist,

Like the Baltic states, Poland did not regain its independence until the end of the First World War. But unlike the others, Poland retained its independence after the Second World War, on paper at least. The Polish government was kept on a short leash by Moscow until the end of the 1980s, when the Poles, emboldened by Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity, once again rose up.

This long and complicated history of oppression, war and betrayal means that Poland’s relationship with Russia can quickly become inflamed,

Even though Poland now has only a short border with the exclave and military base in Kaliningrad, and none with the rest of Russia, the long historical border with the Russian Empire lives on in the Polish psyche.

the number of inhabitants in most Latvian towns has fallen dramatically in recent years, and population growth is negative.

Daugavpils was a miniature Russian society stranded in the E.U.

More than a quarter of Latvia’s current population, that is to say, more than half a million people, are ethnic Russians. Following independence in 1991, the Latvian authorities refused to provide automatic citizenship for Russians who had moved there during the Soviet era. In order to become Latvian citizens, they first had to pass an exam in Latvian. Consequently, about three hundred thousand Russians in Latvia still do not have a Latvian passport.

The Latvians and Estonians had special status in the eyes of the Nazis. Ever since the Teutonic Order invaded the region in the twelfth century, the Balts and Germans have lived side by side. For example, Riga was primarily a German town for hundreds of years. The Latvian capital was founded in the middle of the twelfth century by German merchants and became a member of the Hanseatic League in 1282. And even though Riga was ruled by Russia from 1710, following Sweden’s defeat at the Battle of Poltava, German was the only official language until 1891.When the First World War broke out, about sixteen per cent of the inhabitants of Riga were Baltic Germans.

In one single day, more than forty-two thousand Latvians were deported to Siberia. About thirty thousand Lithuanians and twenty thousand Estonians shared the same fate. The deportations were part of the forced collectivisation of agriculture in the Baltic states, and those who were deported were accused either of being kulaks, that is to say, wealthy farmers, or nationalists. The intent was to remove all “anti-Soviet elements” from the Baltic Soviet republics,

“Why do we need houses? Why do we need to get married? We need houses to have something to come back to. A house should be warm, it should be a place where you are not cold. Siberia was cold and draughty, and I was always freezing. I never want to experience that again, I want a warm house. And we get married so there is someone waiting, even if you go far, far away, even if you go to prison.”

One of the telephones had only one button – the direct line to Moscow.

Past paranoia has become present-day entertainment.

The border between Latvia and Estonia runs through the middle of a town.

Unlike Latvian and Russian, Estonian is not an Indo-European language – it belongs to the Uralic family, and is related to Finnish and the Sámi languages.

On June 24, 1987, everyone was waiting for something that could not be summarised in a letter. There were unusually long queues into the city from early morning. According to the television listings in Kansan Uutiset, that evening the Finnish state channel was going to show Emmanuelle, the erotic French film from 1974. The film is about a French diplomat’s wife in Thailand. She is bored at home, as her husband is always at work, and to distract herself, she has a number of sexual relationships with both men and women (with the blessing of her tolerant husband). The husband eventually orchestrates a meeting between Emmanuelle and the older, experienced Mario, who takes her under his wing and introduces her to the more advanced mysteries of eroticism. There was not a parking space to be found in Tallinn that Wednesday evening, and the streets were quiet and deserted. A blue, flickering light emanated from all the apartment windows. In living rooms across the capital, grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbours and schoolchildren sat glued to their television screens in order not miss this rare insight into the lives of French diplomats’ wives. A remarkable number of children were born nine months later in the Soviet Republic of Estonia.

Tartu, Estonia’s intellectual and cultural centre. The German legacy here is substantial.

One of the most important demands that emerged was that Moscow should recognise that the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact had provided the basis for the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries. Gorbachev resisted. On August 23, 1989, fifty years to the day since the pact had been signed, two million Balts held hands to make a human chain that stretched from Vilnius to Tallinn, in a silent protest against Moscow.

Social democracy is the only realistic solution, in my opinion.

There have also been several major N.A.T.O. exercises in the Baltic region in recent years. The message to Putin is clear: thus far, but no further. The Baltic countries are once again under the wing of the West.

Estonia is one of the E.U. countries that takes in fewest refugees and asylum seekers from non-Western countries. This is not due to reluctance on the part of the Estonian government, but because not many asylum seekers freely choose Estonia.

Metal and stone can arouse great passion.

“There is a tendency to focus on the material here in Estonia,” he said eventually. “Our wages are higher than in Russia. It is easy to forget that spirituality is also very important for many Russians. Estonian culture, literature and history do not appeal to them. How many Estonian authors can you name? Russia has Lermontov, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, world-class ballet, world-class film, a thousand years of history. The Estonians have pain and depression. They were occupied by the Germans for seven hundred years and the Soviet Union for fifty. Their history is full of trauma and paradox; the Estonians are a schizophrenic people. They are proud of their SS past – Estonia was the first country to be judenfrei! On the islands in the west, all the signs are in Swedish and Estonian, but no Swedes live there anymore. They have gone. That is why we love them.” The Estonians’ relationship with the Russians, who show no signs of leaving, is more complicated.

The Russian Empire stretched from the Kamchatka Peninsula on the Pacific Ocean to Åland in the Baltic Sea. With every victory, there was more to look after and more to protect. As a rule, the solution was to take even more land to safeguard previous victories. St Petersburg, which had previously been exposed, given that it was only a few hundred kilometres from Swedish cannons, was now well protected by the newly acquired Finnish territory.

They only let go at the weekend, for a few fleeting hours on Friday and Saturday nights; bottles clinked, things became hazy, and the night reverberated with hoarse screams and shouts before they once again turned inwards and hid behind their stony Nordic stoicism.

Close to 18 million people are estimated to have lost their lives in the four years that followed, when the Allies – Russia, France and Great Britain – fought against the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy.

the two parties agreed that the Finns could buy arms from Germany if Germany was allowed to move troops through Finland. Finland was pulled deeper and deeper into the partnership with Germany.

In the summer of 1942, Hitler paid an unexpected visit to Finland, to celebrate Mannerheim’s seventy-fifth birthday. It was his only trip abroad during the war, other than his triumphant visit to Paris in June 1940.

Mannerheim wrote a polite letter to Hitler and thanked him for a good working relationship, then went on to say that if Finland was to survive as a nation, it had to cut its ties with Germany. Hitler did not answer the letter, but he told a Japanese diplomat a few days later that he did not see it as betrayal, because the Finns had only given up when they were losing bargaining power. By April 27, 1945, Finland had lost twelve per cent of its territory to the Soviet Union. More than four hundred thousand people, primarily from Karelia, had been evacuated to other parts of Finland. Ninety-five thousand soldiers had lost their lives, but civilian deaths were surprisingly low at only two thousand, and, unlike many countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Finland had not been left in ruins. The fighting had largely been along the Eastern Front, some of it in the Soviet Union itself, and far from the cities. But perhaps most important of all: the Finns’ willingness to fight had convinced Stalin that another invasion of Finland was more than he could afford. Thus Finland escaped the fate of the Baltic countries, and never became a Czechoslovakia. The Soviet army did not try to cross the Finnish border again.

During the Cold War, Finland had to tread carefully and not provoke its neighbour to the east. At the exhortation of the Soviet authorities, Finland declined help from the Marshall Plan, and instead signed an agreement of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance with the Soviet Union. This obliged Finland to resist attacks against the Soviet Union from Finnish territory. Unlike Hungary and Romania, however, Finland was not obliged to consult the Kremlin about foreign policy questions or to participate in military operations outside its own territory.

Kekkonen remained in post as Finland’s president until he stepped down for health reasons in 1981, at the age of eighty-one. He continued the active neutrality policy to the end. The Finno-Soviet Treaty remained a cornerstone of Finnish foreign policy until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Finland did not become a member of the E.U. until 1995. And though Finland now cooperates extensively with N.A.T.O., just as Sweden does, it has never been asked to join. Thus Finland, which has the longest border with Russia in Europe, will not be drawn into any future war between N.A.T.O. and Russia.

The Cold War was a difficult time for the Finns in terms of politics, but having the Soviet Union as a neighbour was a financial benefit. Approximately fifteen per cent of Finland’s exports went to the Soviet Union, and several Soviet statement buildings, such as Hotel Viru in Tallinn, were designed and built by the Finns. While the Soviet Union was dedicated to socialism and a planned economy, the Finnish market economy was steadily growing. When Finland first gained its independence in 1917, it was one of the poorest countries in Europe. Now it has one of the most developed welfare states in the world. A Finnish pensioner receives on average 1,600 euro a month and can expect to live to about eighty. By way of comparison, most Russian pensioners have to manage on less than 200 euro and statistically can expect to live to only seventy.

Rovaniemi was rebuilt in haste after it was burnt down by the Germans during the war, and it was not a particularly attractive town. The new town was designed by Alvar Aalto and from above resembles a reindeer.

There is a reason for the absence of a Russian Santa Claus: even though Nicholas is a very popular saint with Orthodox Christians in Russia, the children there do not believe in Santa Claus, but rather in Ded Moroz: Grandfather Frost. And he does not come with gifts at Christmas, but on New Year’s Eve.

“You can walk right up to the borderline, but if you then lean forward to look at your toes, you will have violated the border. Do not throw anything over the border – that too is a violation and punishable by law. The borderline does not necessarily run down the middle of the river, so keep an eye on the markers, and make sure you don’t accidently end up on the wrong side. You are not allowed to talk to the Russian guards on the other side. That also is considered a violation. Is that clear?”

Then we went in search of midge repellent – the people who live in Finnmark do not call the midges there “grey terror” for nothing.

Approximately fifty thousand people now have this and can travel freely in the border zone without a visa. People from Kirkenes flock to Nikel, the closest town on the Russian side, to buy vodka, cigarettes and petrol. The Russians used to come in hordes to buy sports clothes and equipment, instant coffee, which they think is better quality in Norway, and nappies, which are cheaper in Norway than in Russia.

In Oslo, 1,400 kilometres further south, any talk of Russia is often crass, coloured by fear, prejudice, international politics and the general mood, but in the north, the relationship between the Norwegians and the Russians is largely one of mutual respect and understanding, precisely because they live as neighbours. After all, Russia is only a shopping trip away.

In the eighteenth century, Russian merchant ships started to appear in the fjords and at trading posts in northern Norway. The merchants came from the White Sea and Kola Peninsula. The area was called Pomorye, which means “land by the sea” or “coast land”, and the people who lived there were called Pomors. The pomor trade, as it became known, was an important source of income and business for both parties. The Pomors’ main wares were corn and flour, but they also had salt, meat, peas, iron, tar, timber, soap and other useful products. They traded these for fish, as the Russian church’s frequent fasting days meant there was an enormous demand for fish. Bartering was eventually replaced by money and the rouble was valid currency in many places in northern Norway. A pidgin language developed that was used by the Russians and Norwegians, which was called russenorsk by the Norwegians and moya-po-tvoya, “mine in yours”, in Russian. There is a body of about four hundred words, primarily Russian and Norwegian based, but also words that are derived from Sámi, English, German and Dutch.

With the exception of a few minor feuds in the Middle Ages, Norway and Russia have never been at war. Consequently, Norway is the country, among its fourteen neighbours, that has had the most peaceful relationship with Russia.

The area of Russia that borders with Norway is the most polluted place in the world, though not just because of the nickel refinery. Andreev Bay lies on the Kola Peninsula, some fifty-five kilometres from the Norwegian border, and was the Soviet Northern Fleet’s service base during the Cold War. Nuclear fuel rods for a hundred nuclear submarines were stored and changed here. There are currently spent rods equivalent to five thousand Hiroshima bombs stored in Andreev Bay. The waste is haphazardly stored, at best, and poorly secured – and this led to an accident in 1982, when 700,000 metric tons of radioactive water leaked out into the Arctic Ocean. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, maintenance of the base was minimal, and it is reckoned to be one of the largest and most dangerous radioactive sites in the world. Over the past two decades, several Western countries, led by the U.S.A., U.K., Italy and Norway, have invested enormous amounts in cleaning up the radioactive waste on the Kola Peninsula. During Putin’s current term in office, the Russian military budget has increased considerably – in 2015, Russia spent about 52 billion dollars (taking into account the fall in the value of the rouble) on defence – but the Russian authorities are quite happy to let N.A.T.O. countries pay the lion’s share of the cost of cleaning up their nuclear waste.

The first Norwegian to settle in Svanvik, in the 1850s, was Hans Kirkgaard, a vet who originally came from the south. His fate is described in a 1902 travel book by the district doctor, A.B. Wessel. Under the heading “A Martyr of Colonisation”, Wessel wrote: “What fate had driven a man in his position to the extraordinary lengths that he would settle here in the wildest isolation is a mystery; he remained utterly silent on the matter.” Things did not go very well for the vet from the south, because “a practical man, he was not. […] He was the kind of idealist who is slow to learn from the hardships of reality, and, as with so many others like him, in the end buckles under as a martyr to his cause.”

Prior to 1826, there was no border between Norway and Russia. Instead, there was a marchland where the two countries each held the right to tax their people. This pragmatic arrangement was in part due to the peripheral nature of the region, so far to the north and away from the capitals, but also took into consideration the migration of the Sámi with their reindeer herds from East Finnmark to Petsamo throughout the year. The Swedish government wanted to negotiate an official border. They feared that the Russians might decide to colonise Finnmark and they therefore wanted the border to be formalised as swiftly as possible. The work started in 1825. Based on the principle of natural borders, it was initially thought that the border would run along the Pasvik River. However, this gave rise to problems for both parties. The Norwegian border commissioner, Johan Henrik Spørck, wanted to secure compensation for the Sámi who would lose grazing grounds on the east side of the river, whereas the Russian commissioner, Valerian Galyamin, was concerned that the Skolt Sámi might lose the Boris Gleb church, which was on the west bank. Spørck suggested that they move the church over to the Russian side of the river, but that was not an option, as it was not only the building that was holy, but also the ground on which it stood. The parties finally agreed that the Russians would keep Boris Gleb on the west side of the Pasvik River, on condition that the border did not follow the Pasvik after the holy church, but rather the next river, the Jakobselv, some thirty kilometres further east. The inhabitants of the marchland would be given three years to decide whether they wanted to be Norwegian or Russian.

Boris Gleb on the “Norwegian” side was incorporated into Russia, and as compensation for those 3.6 square kilometres, Norway received several hundred square kilometres of land between the Pasvik and Jakobselv rivers. In addition to several hundred square kilometres of land, the small timber church in Boris Gleb also cost Russia several hundred square kilometres of ocean and access to the deepwater port at Kirkenes – which is ironic for a country that has always been obsessed with ports.

A year before, the cyclists at Storskog had been headline news day after day. The first refugees arrived by bike in September. Crossing the border on foot is not allowed, but riding a bicycle is seen as driving. Over the next few months, more than 5,500 refugees cycled across the Norwegian border, which is perhaps a small number in the bigger picture, but a huge number in the small Sør-Varanger district. The route via Murmansk to Storskog became known as the “Arctic asylum route”, and the word spread quickly on social media. Bicycle sellers in Russia had a heyday. But the bikes piled up into a mountain of metal and rubber on the Norwegian side of the border. At the peak, three tons of bicycles were taken away and destroyed daily. The refugees came from many countries, but mainly from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Egypt. Some had been living in Russia, others had only a short, single-entry visa. At the end of November, the Norwegian parliament decided that it would not process asylum applications from those with Russian residency permits, as they did not have a valid visa for Schengen. The stream of refugees dried up from one day to the next. Not long after, asylum seekers instead started to flood over the Finnish–Russian border at Salla in Lapland, in old bangers – in Finland, cycling across the border is also prohibited. Nearly eight hundred asylum seekers managed to do this before a law was passed at the start of 2016 that only Finnish and Russian citizens were allowed to cross at the northernmost border stations. The Norwegian government decided the same year to build a 250-metre-long fence at Storskog, to improve control at the border crossing. The barrier cost four million Norwegian kroner (a little more than £300,000). Some weeks before the fence was completed, the border commissioner discovered that about fifty metres of the fence were a few centimetres too close to the Russian border, and therefore had to be moved.

Perhaps the refugee crisis at Storskog was a tiny part of this new type of warfare, a reminder of the chaos that Russia can cause if it so wishes. In all likelihood, both chance and opportunism played a role, as is so often the case with Russian foreign policy.

Nations have no collective memory; nations have no healed wounds. It is the individuals, millions of them, who carry the scars.

The world’s biggest country is low on self-esteem; the economy is failing and the population shrinking. Thus the need to assert itself is even greater. My main impression is of a lack of direction and of opportunism. The Russian Empire grew to the size it did because tsar after tsar seized any opportunity to expand the empire’s borders, using violence, trickery and war if necessary. And one group of people after another, from the nomadic tribes of Siberia to the Muslim khanates of Central Asia and Russia’s Slav neighbours, was encompassed by the great empire, willingly and unwillingly. In the borderlands and on the periphery, freedom came and went. History teaches us that those who were once part of the Russian Empire are most at risk of falling under its yoke in the future.

Throughout history, the very size of Russia has been its greatest defense. The distances are so vast that no foreign army has ever managed to gain control of the enormous land mass. But its size is also its greatest weakness. The Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Umayyad Caliphate and the Mongolian Empire all fell because they had grown too big. The centre could no longer control the periphery or protect it from invading armies. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, it was because the people on the periphery revolted, and so, stitch by stitch, republic by republic, from Lithuania to Georgia, the empire was undone. Russia lost about twenty per cent of its territory and more than half its population. And yet, it is still a gigantic country – four times as large as the E.U., nearly twice as big as the U.S.A. or China. Russia’s border, as it is described here, will no doubt soon be history. Perhaps it will first become longer, only then to become shorter, like the convulsions of a dying snake; because it is hard to imagine how, in the long term, Russia can continue to exist as one country for another generation, another hundred years, another two hundred years, with almost two hundred ethnic groups and nationalities, an area of 17 million square kilometres and a 60,000-kilometre border.