Moscow nights, Eurasian dreams.

• Author: Gvosdev, Nikolas

IN 1918, sitting amid the ruins of the Russian Empire, the poet Alexander Blok symbolically expelled Russia from the Western community of nations, renouncing Russia's claim to be the heir and successor to Rome:

We shall abandon Europe and her charm.

We shall resort to Scythian craft and guile.

Swift to the woods and forests we shall swarm,

And then look back, and smile our slit-eyed smile.

Away to the Urals, all!

Blok must have struck a chord, for three years later, a group of emigre intellectuals urged an "Exodus to the East." They had in mind lands between the Vistula and the Amur that to them were neither Europe nor Asia, but a distinct

"Ocean-Continent" they called Eurasia. Genghis Khan, the unifier of the steppes, was their hero; Peter the Great, the man who tried to "open a window onto Europe", they despised.

The so-called "Eurasianists", however, never found a receptive audience among ordinary Russians. When Charles de Gaulle visited the Soviet Union in 1966 to proclaim a Europe stretching "from the Atlantic to the Urals", most Russians were more than happy to think of themselves as belonging within a common European home. The lands beyond the Urals (Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus) were instead dragged symbolically toward the west, becoming "European" through their association with Russia--especially so after the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975.

With the disintegration of the Soviet Empire, however, the non-Russian republics once referred to as "the Soviet Union in Asia" found themselves spinning in a geopolitical void. Time-sensitive designations (former Soviet republics, "newly--independent states") lose relevance with each passing year. Thus, the term "Eurasia" is being revived, sometimes to refer to the entire ex-USSR, but often to designate only the Caucasus and Central Asia--those countries lying beyond the pale of any realistic prospects of being included in NATO or the EU. (1) An old term has met a new history head on.

Blok prophesied that Eurasia would be the host for a major clash between civilizations:

Quick, leave the land,

And clear the field for trial by blood and sword,

Where steel machines that have no soul must stand

and face the fury of the...horde.

And so, in the aftermath of September 11, Eurasia has become the principal front in the war against terror--the crucible where Islamist terrorism and a far more ecumenical system of organized crime merge. Two well-traveled smuggling routes for all types of contraband--drugs, weapons, dirty money, and illegal migrants--crisscross the region. The north-south corridor runs from Afghanistan into European Russia via the Central Asian republics; the trans-Caspian route connects Central Asia with Georgia and Azerbaijan, with further extensions via Chechnya and Dagestan (into Russia and northern Europe) and through Turkey and the Balkans (into southern Europe). Call them, for short, the Sleaze Road and Grifter Avenue. Russian law-enforcement sources estimate that the drug trade alone in Eurasia generates up to $12 billion in income and assets. In places like Uzbekistan (where the average monthly wage is $20) or Georgia (where 60 percent of the population lives below the poverty line), that kind of money buys about as much political "access" and police "protection" for all sorts of nefarious activities as anyone could reasonably require.

Seen in this light, the optimism radiating from the Oval Office about the "deepening of regional integration" as the sine qua non for the security of the entire region--as a joint U.S.-Kazakh statement in December put it--seems a little misplaced. The weak post-Soviet successor states of the Caucasus and Central Asia are in no position to develop effective multilateral regional institutions capable of effectively meeting the challenges before them. Over the past decade, several organizations have been created with much fanfare--the Central Asian Union, the Collective Security Treaty of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Eurasian Economic Community, GUUAM [Georgia-Ukraine-Uzbekistan-Azerbaijan-Moldova] and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization among them. They have accomplished little...