No less than other peoples, Russians have traditionally been open to the proposition that there is a logical meaning and significance to be read into their geographical position in the world. And because they are further inclined to believe that this significance of location has direct implications for the most basic questions about their national identity and destiny, it has commonly been the object of rather intense preoccupation. In the case of Russia, “location” is to be understood first and foremost in terms of a gradient running east and west, that is to say from the Orient to the Occident. The country, it is well appreciated, had the peculiar historical-geographical fate to emerge and develop in a vast intermediary space between highly differentiated zones of global civilization, and the ensuing sense of occupying some sort of critical middle ground has been pervasive, throughout modern Russian history at least.