### History and Geography

Like its neighbor, the Black Sea to the west, the Caspian Sea stands at a crossroads of economic, political, and environmental interests. The environmental issues in particular are amplified because the landlocked “lake” nature of the Caspian offers no chance of dilution through mixing with other water sources. It is fed by the Volga and numerous other rivers, but no water flows out of the Caspian Sea. Stretching seven hundred miles top to bottom and one hundred and seventy miles across and approximately the size of California (or more than twice the size of all of the five U.S. Great Lakes combined) the Caspian is surrounded on all sides.

“Central Asia” bounds it to the east, a vast semi-desert region of land that is also bordered by the Hindu Kush mountains to the south, the Kazakh steppe to the north, the Tien Shan mountains in the direction of China. This area includes five states: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, though only the first two are of interest due to their oil supplies. As the geography demonstrates, bordered by the mountains or the sea on all sides, the most cost-effective routes for any Kazakh or Turkmen energy exports must all cross through either Russia or Iran’s lowlands. Naturally this makes them vulnerable to pressure from their neighbors (Russia and Iran).

Meanwhile, the three Caucasian states of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia bound the Caspian to the west, straddling the only non-Russian and non-Iranian access routes connecting Central Asia to the Black Sea. Such routes (Baku-Supsa, Baku-Ceyhan) currently provide the US-favored means of access to the multi-billion dollar quantities of Caspian oil and natural gas. However, the geography of the area once again leaves any possible pipeline from Azerbaijan (or a Trans-Caspian pipeline from Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan) no choice, if the owners wish to avoid the ethnic and separatist conflicts raging in the Caucasus, but to go through either Russia or Iran; the two states that bound the Caspian to the north and the south, respectively.

Historically, Central Asia and the Transcaucasus have both traditionally served as the meeting places of numerous civilizations. Central Asia marked the crossroads of the ancient silk routes linking China, India, and Iran with the West, and the Transcaucasus still marks the line between Muslim and Christian civilizations – the site of continuing conflict between the two religions, as amply demonstrated by the examples of Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, and Dagestan.

Map of Ethnic Groups in the Caucasas

The Persians and the Turks fought over both of these regions for centuries, and while the Turks eventually came to dominate the Transcaucasus, Persia came to exert a virtually undisputed cultural and economic hegemony over Central Asia up to the 19th century. The historical influences of these two nations around the Caspian are still evident today, with Turkey exerting the most influence on the West side of the Caspian, and Iran having far more impact to the East.

Russia’s involvement with the above two regions also stretches back for nearly a thousand years. Central Asia has always been the soft underbelly of the Russia. For centuries, mass migrations of warlike tribes from Asia pushed though the deserts of Central Asia to move on into Eastern Europe and the Slavic heartlands. In the 16th century, following Ivan the Terrible’s defeat of the Tartars, Russia finally began to push back. By the second half of the 19th century Russian forts encompassed the Kazakh steppe and by the late 1860’s Russian troops had taken the Khanates of Bukhara, Khivam, and Khokand, effectively giving Russia control over of Central Asia. Meanwhile, Georgia and Azerbaijan had also fallen under the Russian sway, with Iran being forced out of Azerbaijan in 1828, and Turkey out of Georgia a little later.

The 1848 discovery of oil in Baku, began a struggle for power over the region, primarily between Russia and Britain, that the world would soon come to call the "Great Game". Great game actors, from the late 19th century to the second world war, viewed oil as a strategic raw material, the control over which had to be monopolized at any cost. Though most other nations have redefined their approach since then, Russia has not. To current military/security and nationalist interests in Moscow, the competition for oil still presents a “zero sum game”. Consequently, to many players in Russia, if not to others, such competition in the Caspian is viewed as round II of the Great Game.

After the 1895 treaty with Britain demarcating the border with Afghanistan, Russia went on to effectively control Central Asia and the Transcaucasus for the next hundred years (first under the Tsars, and then under the Bolsheviks) until the sudden and unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union. Throughout that time, Central Asian boundaries, like those of most African states that gained independence during the 1960’s, were imposed by colonialism. Their borders were artificially drawn by distant Party Secretaries in Moscow, and everywhere people with the same ethnicity, language, and religion were left living on both sides of the border.

As a result, the 1991 emergence of eight newly independent states along Russia’s southern rim, where before only the Iron Curtain presented its opaque and impenetrable visage to the world, opened up the door to immense and virtually unprecedented levels of ethnic strife. Deep ethnic divisions have left each of these new states sitting on the equivalent of a separatist timebomb.

Due to the lack of any stability in the region and the resulting permeability and fluctuation of the borders, one of the consequences of Russia’s withdrawal was to open up the area to any interested international actor. The stage was once again set for a new round of the Great Game, with the United States, Turkey, Iran, and any company or state that was able, all scrambling for influence and power over the castoff portions of the outer Soviet empire.

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