"Whatever happened to Pan-Slavism?" Topic

If you go back a century or so, the pan-Slavic movement was a real deal. The idea being that all of the Slavic peoples should be united, perhaps under the banner (in those days) of Czarist Russia. Imperial Russia coming to the aid of slavic Serbia was one of the contributing factors to the start of World War One.

Whatever happened to pan-Slavism? Does anyone feel that way any more? Did various nationalisms make it obsolete? Did Communism replace it with various idealisms?

1. WWI killed Czarist Russia and many idealistic things.
2. Communism is an international philosophy.
3. Stalin. Enough said.

You only have to look at the voting blocs in Eurovision to see that Pan Slavism is alive and kicking. Putin likes this sort of thing.

Pan Slavism was created, fed and spread by Great Britain, France and Russia, with sn anti German and anti Austrian.
Even today, the Slavic peoples are much more nationalistic than the Western ones.

I'm of the opinion that the rise of ethnic and religious conflicts after the breakup of Yugoslavia and the dissolution of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact have destroyed pan-Slavism.

Jim

The Russians are still paying for having attempted to bring up the standard of living and culture of their central asian republics. Only time will tell if their ex=republics revert to gravel or if they advance to the level of two ply toilet paper or not.

Give Russia a century or two to recover financially first and forget what they spent the bank on.

Maybe if pan slavism didn't cost them money,,,they might get back to it.

Surprisingly, they are actually rather supportive of orthodox religious institutions.

Idealism ran head first into reality.

The Slavic area of the map has some serious historical fault lines running straight down the middle, with generally Catholic one side and Orthodox on the other. Those lines – be it Baltic/Poland v Russia or Imperial v Ottoman Empire – existed for centuries, with radically different cultural and political development on either side.

Attempts to extend political power across the fault lines has usually bred more flat-out animosity than ecstatic brotherhood. Those carrying out the extending tend to be viewed as overbearing foreigners first, and brother Slavs second.

Musketballs is right. They are united against everyone except each other…

Panslavism looked appealing in the late 19c, particularly if you were Russian and it furthered your interests.

Its echoes lingered long enough into the 20c to give us the national flags of (then) Czechoslovakia and today's republics which were once Yugoslavia.

But the limitations had by then become clear. Russia had played Serbia and Bulgaria off against one another in eth Balkan Wars – not much pan-Slavic about it. The largest Slavic nation outside Imperial Russia was Poland, and the Poles were curiously coy to accept the Russian embrace.

Then ask yourself which of these newly-independent Slavic countries in 1918 was looking to Bolshevism for leadership.