Abstract
This article will argue that in late 1800s Russian Pan-Orthodox and Pan-Slav activists portrayed their Balkan co-religionists and co-ethnics as both the same as and different from the Russians. By bridging the class divisions of Russian society, this kind of propaganda contributed to the making of a Russian national identity centred on the self-image of powerful virile crusaders for the only true form of Christianity and saviours of the emasculated and feminized Slavs from cruel foreign domination. These attitudes precluded the formation of a horizontal community and help explain the high-handed policies leading to the break between Russian liberators and ‘ungrateful’ Bulgarians in the aftermath of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–8. The article will also relate Russian Pan-Orthodoxy and Pan-Slavism to the larger phenomenon of irredentism to encourage similar explorations along this new avenue of research in that field.
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