ABSTRACT
A century ago, Halford Mackinder presented a paper entitled the ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, in which he set out a central concern of western defence policy – the fear that the landmass of Euro-Asia would be controlled by one power, which would be in a position to exercise global domination. 1 Mackinder's Pivot, in ‘the closed heart-land of Euro-Asia’, consisted of the basins of the rivers that drained to the Arctic ocean, together with the regions of internal drainage that fell into the Aral and the Caspian inland seas. The Volga river, which drained the lands between Moscow and the Urals, flowed to the Caspian and was beyond the influence of sea power. Mackinder illustrated the drainage basis of his concept with a map depicting continental and Arctic drainage using an equal area map projection.
