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of all Slav and freedom-loving nations against theGerman Fascist curs." This was not, it was emphasized,a revival of panslavism, which was repudiated as thetool of tsarism and reactionary chauvinism. But it wasan evocation of a century and more of Russian historyin which Slavophil sympathies and the tradition of'oppressed Slav brothers' had been a force among theRussian people; and it was a new departure in Sovietpolicy.The October Revolution replaced the idea of thesolidarity of the Slav peoples by that of the solidarity ofthe working class in all countries. After the Sovietdefeat by Poland in 1920 and the agony of the Civil War,Allied intervention, and the famine, the Communists weretoo weak and too engrossed by internal problems to paymuch attention to the Slav states, except for a timeBulgaria. Soviet energies were turned to the East andto the vast hinterland of Soviet Asia rather than to theold mosaic of the Danube basin and the Balkans. Inthe building of a new Soviet world there was no thoughtof old conceptions of a Slav world or the common linksbetween Slavs.In the First World War Germany and Russia were thelosers, the other Slav peoples (except the Bulgars) thevictors. Victory was theirs on an unprecedented scale.They owed its possibility to the valour of the Russianarmies, but its achievement to the valour of the Westernallies. Inevitably the new Slav states looked to theWest and the League of Nations: Communism was anightmare or a bugbear to them: the Soviet attack onreligion violently antagonized the Orthodox churches,previously one of the strongest sources of russophilism:the old appeal of 'Holy Russia' to the Orthodox Slavswas gone: White Russian emigres reinforced anti-Sovietfeelings, particularly in Jugoslavia where the dynastypersisted in its refusal to have any dealings with theassassins of the tsar and of the monarchical idea inRussia. In Bulgaria, where the traditional links of thevery radical peasantry with Russia were powerful, theCommunist party found its strongest foothold outsidethe Union, but its attempt at revolution and its terrorism236

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