130 Orientalism and Empirebig peoples and small peoples
Conservative writers in the capital cities of Russia were particularly
concerned about cultural competition on the frontier, and their ideas
found an audience among frontier officials in daily contact with dif-
ferent “cultural-historical types.” “Native soil conservatives” and
proponents of Pan-Slavism drew on the heritage of Romantic and
Slavophile thought, but reworked the Slavophile focus on Russian
tradition into an ideology of ethnic essentialism, religious exclusivity,
and imperial expansion and conquest.^23 Inspired by Nikolai
Danilevskii, thinkers such as Dostoevsky and Nikolai Strakhov apoc-
alyptically worried about European geopolitics.^24 Russia was still a
young and energetic people destined to “work out its own culture
and fulfill its historical tasks,” argued general and Pan-Slavist
M.G.Cherniaev, but its principal task was the realignment of the map
of Europe and the destruction of the Ottoman Turks.^25 The Slavic
Benevolent Society throughout the late imperial era offered inflam-
matory denunciations of the historic role of Ottoman Turks in both
the Byzantine Empire and the Russian borderlands.^26
This new climate of competitive nationalism and imperialism held
out a belligerent discourse that many frontier officials found especially
compelling. Both Slavophiles and Westerners drew upon the heritage
of the German Romantics and liked to measure civilizations and their
respective contributions to “universal history,” although they were
never particularly belligerent about the implications of such differ-
ences.^27 This was not the case with later Slavophiles such as Ivan
Aksakov, for example, who regularly voiced his fears of Bismarck and
the Germans in Rus’ throughout the 1880s.^28 Aksakov had been ex-
posed at an early age to Khomiakov, Kireevskii, and Slavophile circles
and then far outlived them to witness further conflicts with the
Ottoman Turks and the emergence of the various Pan-Slavic commit-
tees. He was obsessed with international competition and the need for
Russia to counter its rivals in the Balkans and on its various frontiers.
He was instrumental in the formation of the Slavic Benevolent Society
in Moscow, served briefly as its secretary in 1862 and treasurer until
1868 , and was close to General Cherniaev.^29 Slavic visitors to the 1867
Slavonic Ethnographic Exhibit, Aksakov wrote in Moskva, strength-
ened “their spiritual and moral ties to Russia” as preparation for sub-
sequent struggle with Magyars, Germans, and Turks.^30
These were the competing big civilizations in borderland regions
that threatened to divert small peoples from the correct path. While
the preoccupation of conservative writers with Russia’s relationship
to the West is well known, scholars have paid less attention to the