ABSTRACT
The Soviet aggression in Afghanistan was readily denounced by Peking as "a well-orchestrated Soviet master plan for world hegemony," which "the new tsars" had designed in part to encircle China. The Soviet Union's predicament vis-a-vis the west-east axis dates from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the decision was made to transform the Far East into an integral part of the Eurasian Empire. The Sino-Soviet split forced the Soviet leadership to rethink the function and stability of the existing west-east nexus between metropolitan Russia and the Far East. The strenuous efforts to complete the Baikal-Amur Mainline must be directly related to the enormous military buildup of the Far Eastern zone under way since the 1960s. After the Sino-Soviet split, Moscow decided to double, and then triple, the actual number of units. The systematic improvement of the transportation infrastructure in Central Asia must be brought together with the main trends of Soviet naval policy.
