PANTALEON, Saint, Martyr
S. P. Fresco, 12th century. Nerezi (Macedonia), Church of St Pantaleon.The “Slavophiles” (v.) developed, in the first half of the 19th century and with a characteristically Russian accent, romantic tendencies of Slav solidarity, echoing states of mind that were widespread, moreover, also in the West, tending toward the “primordial” national and, at the same time, toward new mystical universal values. From the Slavophile school, vaguely influenced by Herder, Schelling, and Hegel, there then developed a less philosophical and less folkloric, more decisively reactionary position, favorable to a Russian primacy within the Slavic world. Danilevskij, in a well-known book, *Russia and Europe* (1871), projected around 1870 a great Slav federation (including also Greeks, Romanians, and Hungarians), with Constantinople as its capital.
The tendencies toward Slav solidarity took on in Bohemia and Slovakia a more literary, peaceful, and liberal character. Kollár evoked in a famous poem the ancient Slavic peoples who had become Germanized over the centuries. Scholars of various tendencies concerned themselves with Slavic archaeology and dreamed of a closer brotherhood among the Slavic peoples. At the beginning of the 20th century, Kramář developed the so-called Austro-Slavism, aiming to impress upon Austria a predominantly Slavic character, in an anti-German function, in close collaboration with Russia. Russian Pan-Slavists and Czechoslovak romantics (advocates of Slav solidarity) found at certain moments considerable echo among Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Numerous Slav congresses (notable those of 1848 and 1867, as well as some of the early 20th century) yielded meager practical results. Profound indeed was the discord among the principal Slavic peoples: Russians and Poles. Attempts by representatives of the smaller Slavic peoples to mitigate these divisions proved repeatedly unsuccessful. The Ukrainians, moreover, increasingly tended to emancipate themselves from the Russians and were also in conflict with the Poles (in Galicia). No less profound were the conflicts between Serbs and Bulgarians and between Serbs and Croats. Nor were there lacking tensions between Poles and Czechs, especially over the Teschen region.
The Bolsheviks traditionally saw in all forms of Pan-Slavism and Slav solidarity either an imperialistic program or a romantic and bourgeois ideal. Following the evolution of the U.S.S.R. toward a greater valorization of Russian national traditions, numerous elements of “Slavism” have also been incorporated into the new Soviet policy. Russia has resolved, according to its own vision, the conflicts existing among the smaller Slavic peoples: Königsberg has become Kaliningrad; Poland has reached the Oder (in exchange for Polish territories ceded to Russia); millions of Germans have been expelled from the Sudetenland; and, at the moment of the peace treaty between the Allies and Italy, Russian and Western interests—partially convergent—favored the Yugoslav push toward Friuli.