PANSLAVISM. The term Panslavism has had very various interpretations. Roughly it may be summarized as the doctrine that all Slavonic peoples should have as large a measure as possible of political solidarity. The first great Panslavist writer was a Croat Catholic priest, Jurij KriianiC (b. 1616), who conceived a remarkably broad and liberal programme of Slavonic political unity, and undertaking the life's task of propagating this idea, was trained in Rome as a missionary to Slavonic countries and spent the major part of his later life in Russia, in the reign of Alexis, father of Peter the Great. Kriiank, like many of his successors, emphasized the remarkably close kinship between the Slavonic languages.
Language has been almost the sole link between the Slav peoples, and they only had a common history in the period before the consolidation of political states. Slav political unity had been fatally broken by the invasion of the Danubian Plain by the Magyars at the end of the 9th century, introducing a wedge of Asiatic origin between the East, West and South Slays, which has lasted till to-day. The Tartar invasion of Russia in the 13th century not only arrested the promising growth of Russian cul ture, but led indirectly to the loss of the Dnieper water-road, which had been the central nerve of the first Russian State of Kiev. This territory now passed to Lithuania which, by the marriage of its prince, Jagailo ( Jagellon), with the heiress to the Polish throne in 1386, fell into the orbit of Polish administration and policy. The Poles had accepted Latin Christianity in the loth century when the Russians accepted the Orthodox form, and this religious difference, coupled with the passing of so much Russian territory under Catholic rule, led to an interminable series of wars between Poland and Russia lasting up to the final partition of Poland in 1795, and, in different conditions, even to 1814. The Hungarian invasion and the course of events just enumerated between them made almost impossible the creation of a great Slav empire. On the other hand, several of the most eminent statesmen in Russia and Poland saw the evils of this struggle and the blessings which might result from peaceful co-operation. Of these the most dis tinguished was Ordyn-Nashchokin, the peculiarly modern minded foreign minister of Tsar Alexis, who was himself greatly taken with the same idea. Kriianic belonged to a Slavonic people which, like many other smaller Slav units, had fallen under German domi nation, and he sought the help and co-operation of Alexis definitely as "the Tsar of his own people" against Germans, Turks and all non-Slays.
Krizanic obtained only a very qualified success in Russia, and in fact left behind him little more than a great political ideal. Succeeding Russian sovereigns, such as Peter the Great, Anne, Catherine II., and Alexander I., always had this ideal in view as an instrument of political expansion, and frequently their policy was strongly tinged with it, but in their diplomatic relations with Turkey, Austria and Prussia, there were often compromises which seriously restricted its realization. Of these compromises the most important was the joint partition of a Slavonic state, Poland, between Russia, Prussia and Austria, initiated by Frederick the Great, and adopted by Catherine II.
In the short period while Russia with an autocratic regime and Poland with a constitutional, were united under one sovereign (1815-3o), some Russian statesmen showed a great interest in the cause of Slavonic intellectual reciprocity, the movement towards which was greatly advanced by the philological studies of the Czech Dobrovsky and others relating to the period when the Slays had a common 'history.
The Slavophils.—Towards the middle of the 19th century as a reaction against the policy of Peter the Great and the whole sale adoption of Western forms and ideas in Russia, arose a group of Russian thinkers known as Slavophils. Slavophilism must be very carefully distinguished from Panslavism. In the interpre tation of its two principal exponents, A. Homyakov and I. Kireyevsky, it cannot be identified with any programme for the political expansion of Russia. Both believed that Western civiliza tion had been permanently thrown out of gear by the break which had occurred in the West with the triumph of humanism in the Italian Renaissance and the rupture brought about by the Refor mation. Homyakov saw in Russia, as a country which had re mained intact from this disturbance, elements which offered the promise of a much more healthy and normal development, and Kireyevsky found in the Orthodox Fathers the elements of a creed in which reason and instinct, instead of being in constant conflict, can freely co-operate to form a complete and har monious human personality. The Slavophil creed, however, was always very vague, and this helped to facilitate its utilisation for political objects.