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and her liberation from Turkey. A generation ofBulgarian nationalists was trained in Russia at herexpense (1856-78), but half of them brought back notsound Orthodoxy and belief in the beneficent might oftsarism, but on the contrary disgust at its oppression andbelief in armed revolution and a democratic republic ofa very equalitarian kind. When Russian generals andreactionaries tried to impose their will on the infantBulgaria (1878-86) they found to their cost that enoughof the Bulgars were determined "to breathe free air andnot through Russian nostrils,'' with the result thatBulgaria caused a first-class international crisis (1885-87)that ended in the complete discomfiture of Alexander III.Increasingly after 1878 the internal problems whichfestered into the 1905 Revolution and the new Asiaticimperialism, which ended by launching out into thedisastrous war with Japan (1904-5), distracted attentionfrom the other Slav lands, though not that of thegovernment from Constantinople and the Straits. Panslavismas such was in decline. In its place thereflourished its twin brother pan-russianism, with thegovernment at its head. Both Alexander III (1881-94)and Nicholas II (1894-1917) intensified russifyingmeasures at home, not only in the Ukraine, 'the westernlands,' and 'Congress Poland,' but in the Baltic provincesand finally Finland (cf. pp. 114-115). Anti-Semitism wasnow deliberately encouraged by the police, while in theCaucasus the old feuds between Armenians and Tatars wereexacerbated. Thus when the Revolution came in 1905 itwas marked by the violent reaction of almost all the non-Russians in the empire against Great Russian chauvinism.The Revolution was marked by revived connexionswith the other Slavs, including now the Poles, and bywhat was known as neoslavism. Liberal, and someconservative, elements stood for a change of policywithin the empire towards those who were not GreatRussians, and for a time concessions were granted. Thereaction from the Far East turned opinion again toEurope and the Balkans, and neoslavism was encouragedby Russian foreign policy, now in the hands of Izvolsky(1906-10), whose ambitions were directed to the Straits.246