Mikhail Pogodin

Misinterpreting Schlözer's novel teachings, Kachenovsky declared that "ancient Russians lived like mice or birds, they had neither money nor books" and that Primary Chronicle was a crude falsification from the era of Mongol ascendancy.

In the wake of the Polish Uprising it fell to Nicholas I's minister of education, Count Uvarov to find ways to unite the various branches of the "true Russians".

[1] In the report of the investigations into the actives of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, professors Mikhail Pogodin and Stepan Shevyrev were named as key figures in the Slavophile movement.

However, though a key figure in the emerging pan-Slavic movement by stressing the unique and self-awareness of the Russian nation, Pogodin set an example to non-Russian Slavs who wished to celebrate their distinctness and consequently their rights to autonomy and independence.

What more, he considered the Princes of Kiev, including such a major figure in the development of the Grand Duchy of Moscow as Andrei Bogoliubsky, to have been Little Russians.

[1] Pogodin drastically changed his analysis of Kievan Rus and of Russian nationalism after the arrest of his pro-Ukrainian associate Mykola Kostomarov and the remaining members of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius.

Their journal became embroiled in a controversy with the Westernizers, led by Alexander Herzen, who deplored Pogodin's "rugged, unbroomed style, his rough manner of jotting down cropped notes and unchewed thoughts".

By that period, he championed the pan-Slavic idea of uniting Western Slavs under the aegis of the tsars and even visited Prague to discuss his plans with Pavel Jozef Šafárik and František Palacký.