The First Anti-Communist: Halford Mackinder in South Russia 1920

Halford Mackinder, though best known as one of the founders of geopolitics as a method of analyzing and understanding international relations, was the first active Western anti-communist. In 1904, he delivered an address to London’s Royal Geographical Society entitled “The Geographical Pivot of History,” which he expanded on in 1919 in Democratic Ideals and Reality, and further revised in 1943 in “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace” in Foreign Affairs. In those writings, Mackinder explained his famous “Heartland” theory which identified the northern-central core of Eurasia as the “Heartland” or “pivot region” from which a sufficiently organized and armed great power or alliance of powers could contend for global hegemony.

Between 1910-22, Mackinder served in the British Parliament, and in 1919 he was appointed High Commissioner to South Russia, a region from where General Anton Denikin and his “White” forces were attempting to overthrow Lenin’s Bolshevik regime that had seized power in Russia in October-November 1917. Russia was in the midst of a civil war, the outcome of which affected the fate of the world for the rest of the 20th century. One hundred years ago, Halford Mackinder sought to defeat communism before it had a chance to spread its deadly embrace on other parts of the world.

Professor Brian Blouet in Halford Mackinder: A Biography, notes that in early 1919, British forces in South Russia — that were originally dispatched to protect military supplies that had been sent to the Tsarist government during World War I — began supplying arms to Denikin’s forces. In the spring of 1919, Denikin’s troops launched an offensive that captured Orel, located a few hundred miles south of Moscow. Some in Britain’s government, including Winston Churchill, who was then Secretary of State for Air and War, believed that the “Whites” had a chance to topple the Bolshevik regime.

Mackinder has a plan to stop communism

Blouet in his biography of Mackinder, and University of Reading Professor Geoffrey Sloan who writes about Mackinder’s mission to Russia in a chapter in his most recent book Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History, explain that Mackinder consulted with East European statesmen and exiled opponents of the Bolsheviks, and that while in Warsaw, Mackinder formulated a plan to encourage an anti-Bolshevik alliance of East European armies, forces in the Caucasus region, and Denikin’s South Russian army to overthrow Lenin’s regime. Mackinder traveled to Constantinople, Bucharest, and Sofia, then sailed across the Black Sea to Novorossiysk.

On Jan. 10, 1920, Mackinder met with General Denikin for five hours at Tikhoretskaya Junction, where the two men discussed both the military and political situation. Mackinder reported to London that “the Denikin Government alone cannot defeat Bolshevism.” By then, Deninkin’s army had been forced to retreat. If the Bolsheviks could not be overthrown, at least they could be contained. Six days later, Mackinder began his journey home to London. “He had assembled a picture of the situation from Poland to South Russia,” writes Blouet, “and had laid the foundation of what amounted to an anti-Bolshevik alliance.”

Back in London, Mackinder addressed the Cabinet and advocated the creation of, and British support for, a grouping of buffer states, including Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, White Russia, Azerbaijan, Daghestan, Poland, and Denikin’s South Russia. He called it a “Polish-Denikinite League of Governments” that would effectively be a "cordon sanitaire" to contain Bolshevik power.

Mackinder feared communism in India, South Asia

Mackinder wrote a report in which he expressed fears that Lenin’s proletarian Party could sweep forward “like a prairie fire,” threatening India and all of South Asia and consolidate its control of the Heartland, thereby making the world an “unsafe place for democracies.” He recommended that “immediate steps must be taken if a constructive and truly remedial policy is contemplated.” Britain must make a “firm declaration . . . that she will not make peace with Bolshevism.” Mackinder further recommended that “[t]imely assistance should be given in naval and technical ways for the holding of the Isthmus of Perikop [a strip of land that connects the Crimea with Ukraine] and the defended areas of Odessa and Novorossisk.” The Poles should be provided with financial loans, he wrote, but only if “they ally themselves with Denikin.” Such a policy, he argued, “would . . . send a thrill through all the east of Europe, which in a month would wholly alter the moral of the people in that part of the world.” British policy, he concluded, should be “coherent and energetic” and should be “carried through without hesitation.”

On May 20, 1920, Mackinder outlined his ideas in a speech in the House of Commons. He ridiculed those in Parliament and the government who were sanguine about events in Russia. “What is it that you expect is going to happen in Russia?,” he asked. “Do you expect a democracy to evolve . . .?” Russia under the Bolsheviks, he predicted, would become again a “centralized and military power . . ., [a] despotism.”

War-weary Britain did not act

By then, however, there was no support in war-weary Britain for continuing to supply the White forces in Russia. Cabinet Secretary Maurice Hankey noted that “Mackinder’s report did not meet with any support” in the Cabinet (not even from Churchill). British troops were withdrawn. South Russia fell to the Bolsheviks.

The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies’ Senior Fellow David J. Smith notes that “[t]he geopolitical effect” of Britain’s failure to follow Mackinder’s recommendations “was to cede control of the Eurasian Heartland to the Soviet Union for seven decades.” For 70 years, the Soviet Union waged war against the Russian people and other nationalities within the empire, conspired with Hitler to launch the Second World War in Europe, and sought to expand communism throughout the world.

Mackinder to his everlasting credit not only foresaw in 1920 the threat to the world posed by communism, he also urged Britain to pursue policies that would either strangle the new Bolshevik regime in its cradle or at the very least contain it to such an extent that it would not threaten the world’s democracies.