Abstract

Framed within a critical overview of the development by Halford Mackinder and others of influential propositions concerning the geopolitics of Russia and Eurasia, the chapter explores the geopolitical drivers of the Russian Empire’s relations with its European Great Power neighbours to 1917, Soviet-German relations to 1945, and Washington’s Cold War containment of the Soviet Union to 1992. The chapter concludes with an examination of the post-Cold War renaissance of geopolitics and the efforts of the Yeltsin and Putin administrations to establish the geopolitical place and identity of the Russian Federation as a multinational Eurasian Great Power