The image of Russian Pan-Slavism in the last third of the XIX century: historiography of the issue and the assessment issue

Abstract

The article is devoted to the image of Russian Pan-Slavism in the last third of the XIX century. The subject of the study is the explanation of the phenomenon of Russian Pan-Slavism in the main works of domestic and foreign historiography of the XX-XXI centuries. An attempt has been made to trace the change in the assessment of the relationship between Russian Pan-Slavism in the last third of the XIX century with the later idea of Slavic reciprocity through the prism of perception of Russian/USSR foreign policy. In the framework of this study, the author distanced himself from attempts to compare it with the idea of Slavic (or Orthodox reciprocity) as vectors of foreign policy. The main conclusions of this study are the affirmation that domestic tradition remains a desire to separate Pan-Slavism, Slavophilism, the idea of Slavic and Orthodox reciprocity; in the foreign tradition, authors tend to trace the continuous genesis from the middle of the XIX century and to this day, they often associate very different political and social views in their structure within the framework of the single term “Pan-Slavism”.