In The Last Break Southward (1995), Zhirinovsky described his worldview. “Since the 1980s, I have elaborated a geopolitical conception—the last break southward, Russia’s reach to the shores of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.” This is “really the solution for the salvation of the Russian nation … It solves all problems and we gain tranquility.”[47] Russia will rule the space “from Kabul to Istanbul.”[48] The United States would feel safer with the Russian rule in the region, since wars there would cease under the Russian rule. Perhaps, some people in Kabul, Teheran, or Ankara would not like it but many people would feel better. “The Persians and Turks would suffer a bit but all the rest would gain.”[49]
The “bells of the Orthodox Church must bell from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.” And Jerusalem becomes close. It is necessary that “the Christian world reunifies in Jerusalem.” The Palestinian problem can be solved by partial transfer of the Palestinian population to the former territories of Turkey and Iran.[50] The great Russian language and Russian ruble would wield Near Eastern and Central Asian peoples into one Russian citizenship.[51]
Dostoyevsky:
Egregious examples arise in his “Diary of a Writer”, a genre-bending collection of fictional and non-fictional sketches produced towards the end of his life, in which he enthused about the then-ongoing Russian conquest of Central Asia. In a passage written in January 1881, he celebrates the Russian army’s victory at Geok-Tepe (now Gokdepe in Turkmenistan), a bloody battle that cemented the empire’s authority in the region. As Olga Maiorova of the University of Michigan notes, in the book Dostoyevsky hopes Russia will continue its conquest into Asia, so that people “all the way to India” might “become convinced of the invincibility of the white tsar”.
