Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism

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Map of Eurasia, first outlined by Sir Halford Mackinder in his ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, and reproduced in Russian by Alexander Dugin in The Foundations of Geopolitics (1997).

This book grew out of a meeting I had in 1998, soon after I arrived in Ukraine as a rookie stringer for the Financial Times. After a few months of reporting from Kiev, the Foreign Ministry finally acceded to a request for an interview, putting forward their courtly, if rather severe, first deputy foreign minister, Anton Buteiko, to gently lobby me on some of my more persistent errors (‘it’s Lviv, not Lvov anymore’) and to give me a bit of a steer politically.

Much of what he said was standard boilerplate about Ukraine’s ‘partnership’ with Russia and its desire for ‘integration’ with ‘Euro-Atlantic structures’ – two objectives that at the time did not seem incompatible. But towards the end of the meeting, he mentioned an interesting tidbit.

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