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Prior to the Crimean War the Slavophils, with someexceptions, had taken little sustained interest in theother Slav peoples, whose linguistic and cultural revivalwas then in full swing. After 1856 a change set in.Slavonic Benevolent Committees were set up withofficial approval and there was much cultural interchangeand educational work, particularly among the Bulgars.In 1867 a Slavonic Ethnographic Exhibition was heldin Moscow, the first of its kind, which was loudlyadvertised in Russia and much commented upon abroadas a thin cultural cloak for political propaganda. Infact, it did not result in much more than a platonicdeclaration of common Slav sympathies, and it was notrepeated until after the lapse of forty years. Theabsence from it of the Poles underlined only too acridlythe divisions within Slavdom. "When the Russiansbehave like Tatars,'' a Pole summed up in that sameyear, "can they complain if they are despised? IfRussia is really our Slav brother, she is as Cain to Abel. ,,Slavdom, as a contemporary Russian critic of panslavismcomplained, was "a sphinx, an enigma,"something "amorphous, elemental, unorganized, ratherlike the appearance of distant and spacious clouds out ofwhich . . . the most varied forms may emerge." Thiswas precisely why it could be a dangerous force, especiallyin the eyes of the West. Panslavism was neither adefinite creed or party, nor a clear-cut policy, but onthe one hand a form of Great Russian nationalism, onthe other hand an aspect of the rebirth of the otherSlavs and of their struggling for a changed future.The earlier Slavophils had dreamed poetically of a"great Greco-Russian Orthodox Empire," headed indeedby "the Pan-Slavonian Tsar," but with their primeemphasis on the redemptive powers of Orthodoxy andRussia's messianic calling as the saviour of humanity atlarge. Most of the later Slavophils and the panslavsconfined this messianic calling either to the OrthodoxSlavs or to the Slavs in general. 1 As long as Orthodoxy1 An exception is Dostoevsky, whose mixture of slavophilism andpanslavism is very well illustrated in his impassioned Diary of a Writer(1876-78; various translations).242