ABSTRACT
The importance of the heartland region was first suggested to Halford Mackinder. His conception of the value of a central position with interior lines of communication made powerful and unified by the development of land transportation to a point where it could begin to compete with sea communication. The actual facts of the Russian economy and geography make it not at all clear that the heartland is or will be in the very near future a world center of communication, mobility, and power potential. A large part of the rimland areas which touch the heartland have even poorer transportation facilities. The rimland of the Eurasian land mass must be viewed as an intermediate region, situated as it is between the heartland and the marginal seas. In Mackinder's conception, the inner crescent of amphibian states surrounding the heartland consists of three sections: the European coast land, the Arabian-Middle Eastern desert land, and the Asiatic monsoon land.
