New Borderlands

The signing by V. Putin and N. Nazarbayev, the recently, to continue the use of internal passports by citizens of Russia and Kazakhstan, at the border crossing, actually created a new Russian humanitarian and geographical reality . However, it was this aspect of signing that remained almost unnoticed. Let's try to open it ...

Railways and borders

In the comments on this event, having overshadowed everything else, the actualization in the mass consciousness of the idea of ​​the complexity of the borders and railway networks of Russia and Kazakhstan came out.

Indeed, the Railway network of the CIS countries, by and large, is the Heritage of the Soviet. Over the past fifteen years, in some countries - especially in Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan - new railway branches have been built at times up to several hundred kilometers, but they did not play the key role in the development of the railways common for all countries. Often these branches “corrected” the flaws of the old Soviet network, laid without looking at the grid of the administrative borders of the Union republics. Sometimes they simply led to new deposits or to the borders of new friendly neighboring states.

Be that as it may, and the extensive network of railways in various sections of the Russian-Kazakh border remained practically unchanged, especially from the Russian side. In Kazakhstan, during this time, several projects for the construction of railway branches connected the sections of the highways of Kazakhstan were partially implemented - and several projects for the construction of railway branches.

Nevertheless, today a number of railway lines connecting various corners of Kazakhstan passes through Russia, and vice versa. Often these areas are operated by a railway company of a foreign state.

Thus, the Trans -Siberian Railways is not served by Russian Railways for its entire length, despite the fact that the site "Utyak - Petropavlovsk - Isilkul" is passing through the territory of Kazakhstan. The same can be said about the areas "Red Kut - Astrakhan" (directly, without the arrival in Volgograd, connecting Astrakhan with the Saratov and the Middle Volga); several sections of the "understudy" of the Trans -Siberian Autonomous Okrug ("Kzyilt - Irtysh", "Cartaly - Tobol"); A separate branch "Orsk - Nickeltau".

The opposite situation has developed with several sections of railway tracks in Russia belonging to the "Kazakstan Temir Zhola." Among them, the section of "Gengirlau - Iletsk - Iletsk - in the Orenburg region, on the road connecting the regional centers of Western Kazakhstan, Uralsk and Aktobinsk; And a small section of the “elbow - protection” in the Altai Territory, which helps to connect the two East Kazakhstani regional centers - Ust -Kamyenrsk and Semipalatinsk (the latter, however, has already lost this status).

It was these inconveniences and the original conflicts of the organizational structure of railroad networks that have been associated with them that entailed an agreement inevitable from the point of view of ensuring the convenience of citizens of the two countries on the mentioned above the simplified crossing of the border.
However, we will be interested in another fact: articulated, but not fully meaningful. These agreements were signed by two presidents in Chelyabinsk ...

Ural border?

The Chelyabinsk region is one of those regions that overnight with the collapse of the USSR became borderline . Accordingly, this is one of those regions that would be most affected without signed these agreements.

The state border of Russia and Kazakhstan is the southern half of the eastern border of the Chelyabinsk region. However, it is more important that this state game means a break in traditional economic ties. For example, when the metallurgical base of the Urals began to be exhausted, new sources of iron ore and coals cooked were found on the territory of Kazakhstan - respectively in Temirtau and the Karaganda basin. It was they who "revived" the old traditional black metallurgy of the Urals.

In fact, we are used to seeing the Urals by the old -industrial district of Russia; Old -based and - deep . Here, in a deep rear , they evacuated during the Great Patriotic War ... "There, in the Urals" - is already far away. There is a well -known limit of a loved one and the beginning of a distant space. Moreover, relevant on both sides - "beyond the Urals" - Siberians say about Europeans. Perhaps only this border between Europe and Asia justifies the roots of the Ural border . Be that as it may, this border has always been marked on the mental map as an internal one .

Now, the new borderline of the Urals is already external, associated with access to the state border. In this context of the agreement of Russia and Kazakhstan, signed in Chelyabinsk, there is a serious impetus to the consolidation of this borderland on the mental map of the Russian layman.

Announcing at the very beginning of the article a conversation about the new humanitarian and geographical reality , we had in mind not only this particular case, but its common grain - the reality of the new Russian borderlands .

The design of the border guards

If you understand the “border” as a concept wide, not only as a line of the border (and not only as a specific strip of two (not) belonging around this line), but as a special meaning of the place (“border-kak-idea”), then two things are necessary : ​​the construction and representation of the borderlands.

A traditional geographical technique - a description of a particular place, the lighting of its features and elements - is associated with the representation of a place in advance as a border.

The mechanisms of creating spatial myths and their use in various fields of public life allow us to talk about the construction of a border, i.e. On the endowment of all (in theory of any) place by borderline features as the main places for this place, dominant.

With these two instruments of border studios, it intersects into a bizarre pattern and an idea of ​​the two types of border guards - “above” and “from below” .

As a result, it turns out that the border guards designed "from above" (during the collapse of the USSR), for example, in the Chelyabinsk region, was never represented . So, it did not become a “border-like-Ide” on the mental map, it was not meaningful and understood, in other words, everything continued to seem alien, absurd, temporary, unintelligible ...

This applies not only to the Chelyabinsk region. In our opinion, this is a typical feature of a whole huge area , not a continuous, explosive, cloud, heterogeneous and so complicated, but united by one idea, this is a new Russian borderland ; Those subjects of the Russian Federation that suddenly suddenly became border in 1991.

New region

In Soviet times, the RSFSR, mainly in the east, had access to the land state borders of the USSR: starting with the Horno-Altai Autonomous Region, the border with China and Mongolia stretched along the southern region of the RSFSR. Another, this time small, a section of the state border in the RSFSR was northwest - on the border of Karelia and Murmanshchina with Finland and Norway.

The internal boundaries of the RSFSR with other Soviet republics were to a very large extent along traditionally deep, "original Russian" regions, the Middle - the traditional province of cradle of Russian statehood, and Pskov, for example.

It was these regions sharply with the beginning of the 1990s changed the color on the humanitarian-geographical map. Suddenly, traditionally median, calm and patriarchal regions sharply became borderline, and therefore, following the logic of the spaces of mass consciousness, intense, suspicious, ambiguous .

However, on the mental map of mass consciousness, the idea of ​​such areas as border guards has not taken root. In fact, we are already accustomed to some parts of the new borderland: a characteristic example of the Republic of the North Caucasus and partly other southern regions - the Rostov and Astrakhan regions and the Krasnodar Territory. But is it possible about Pskov and Smolensk, Bryansk and Kursk, Voronezh and Belgorod? Is it possible to assume the borderline of the more eastern regions, traditionally rear - Samara and Saratov, Orenburg and Chelyabinsk, Kurgan and Tyumen, Omsk and Novosibirsk, two Altai constituent entities of the Russian Federation?

The new border region in most of its part was not represented . The gaze suddenly pushes into the state border between Smolensk and Vitebsk, Astrakhan and Guryev, Omsk and Petropavlovsky, Belgorod and Kharkov ... Border guards, not “overgrown” with spatial myths, remains only covered by temporary protective films -for example, having already named television reports about the Russian-Ukrainian border somewhere under Lugansk or Belgorod, cutting gardens and villages. However, this cannot be said about the eastern half of the new border, still remaining outlandish .

The emergence of a new border region also gave rise to several interesting plots from a statistical point of view. So, in Russia two subjects appeared immediately to three foreign states - the only question is whether these borderline conflicts are known outside these two regions. For reference: the first is the Pskov region, bordering sequentially from north to south with Estonia, Latvia and Belarus; The second is the Altai Republic, whose southern border from west to east is alternately in contact with Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia. If in the second case we are talking about the addition of the border region with a new border, then in the case of Pskov we must talk about a very sharp change in the situation to the border.

On a new round of understanding

Such an interpretation of the Chelyabinsk case allows him to connect him with another event of the past week - by signing the border agreement with Estonia and - in contrast - with the next surge of the border conflict with Latvia . Fortunately, both of these events affect precisely the Pskov region, a striking example of a sharp dynamics in the mythogeography of the borderlands.

It is not known what will be with these border incidents further, but one thing is clear - the new border of modern Russia one day will lose the definition of "new", remaining simply very obvious and natural border guards. The point here is not to endlessly talk about the possibilities and obvious benefits of the reverse transformation of many such border regions into internal ones, but to benefit from such borderline. To do this, it must be understood not only as a “neighborhood with” - by definition of a dangerous (in the mind) line of the border - but as an idea , as a filling of a geographical object by a special meaning, representing a particular place that makes it recognizable .