Peter-Simon Pallas was born in Berlin, where he received his formal education. He also spent some time in Holland and England working in museums with rich collections in natural history. One of his early studies dealing with polyps and sponges was published in the Hague in 1761 and immediately attracted wide professional attention, not only because of the richness and originality of the presented empirical data, but also with its precisely stated general theoretical propositions. In 1763 Pallas became a member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, and a year later he led an exploratory expedition to the Caspian and Baikal areas, concentrating on both natural history and ethnography. Published in three volumes between 1771 and 1778, under the title Travels through Various Provinces in the Russian Empire, and written in German, the study was immediately translated into Russian, and then into French, Italian, and English. Pallas guided several other exploratory expeditions; the trip to Southern Russia, with a heavy concentration on Crimea, proved especially enlightening. All these studies manifested not only Pallas’s observational talents but also his profound familiarity with contemporary geology, botany, zoology, mineralogy and linguistics. His Flora Rossica provided a systematic botanical survey of the country’s trees.
Pallas’s studies extended beyond the limits of traditional natural history. He pondered the general processes and laws related to geology: For example, he presented a theory of the origin of mountains in intraterrestrial explosions. He also made a technically advanced study of regional variations in the Mongolian language, articulated a transformist view of the living forms, which he later abandoned, and, responding to a suggestion made by Catherine II, worked on a comparative dictionary. He also made a historical survey of land tracts discovered by the Russians in the stretches
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of ocean between Siberia and Alaska. In the journal of the Free Economic Society, established in the age of Catherine II, he published a series of articles on relations of geography to agriculture.
Most of Pallas’s studies offered no broad scientific formulations; their strength was in the richness and novelty of descriptive information. Charles Darwin referred to Pallas in four of his major works, always with the intent of adding substance to his generalizations. Georges Cuvier, by contrast, credited Pallas with the creation of “a completely new geology.” Pallas’s writings appealed to a wide audience not only because, at the time of the Enlightenment, there was a growing interest in the geographies and cultures of the world previously unexplored, but also because they were master-works of lucid and spirited prose.
Together with the great mathematician Leon-hard Euler, Pallas was a major contributor to the elevation of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences to the level of the leading European scientific institutions. See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Pallas, Peter-Simon. (1802-1803). Travels through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire. 2 vols. London: Longman and Kees. Vucinich, Alexander. (1963). Science in Russian Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
plored both Soviet-style socialism and western democracy and capitalism. They held tsarist autocracy as the ideal model of statehood. Much of their ideology drew on the ideas of the Black Hundreds, which organized pogroms against Jews in Tsarist Russia. This reactionary ideology contained a strong Orthodox Christian element. Alongside provisions for the recognition of the place of Orthodoxy in Russian history, Pamyat made demands for the priority of Russian citizens in all fields of life.
In 1988 Pamyat had an estimated twenty thousand members and forty branches in cities throughout the Soviet Union. It later splintered into a number of anti-Semitic and xenophobic groups. Competing factions emerged, the two most prominent being the Moscow-based National-Patriotic Front Pamyat and the National-Patriotic Movement Pamyat. This factional conflict belied an ideological symmetry; both groups emphasized the importance of Russian Orthodoxy and blamed a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy for everything from killing the tsar to “alcoholizing” the Russian population. The success of Pamyat’s xenophobic platforms sparked debates about the negative consequences of glas-nost and perestroika.
Factional disputes, crude national chauvinism and contradictory political platforms led many Russian nationalists to distance themselves from Pamyat. Pamyat and its many splinter groups were largely discredited and their influence much reduced by the time the USSR collapsed in 1991. Nevertheless, it is widely recognized that Pamyat was a forerunner of post-Soviet Russian national chauvinist and neo-fascist groups. See also: NATIONALISM IN THE SOVIET UNION
PAMYAT
The Pamyat (Memory) society was established in 1978 to defend Russian cultural heritage. Pamyat came to adopt extreme rightist platforms, particularly under the direction of Dmitry Vasilyev from late 1985. It rose to prominence as the most visible and controversial Russian nationalist organization of the neformaly (informal) movement in the USSR during the late 1980s. Although not representative of all strains of Russian nationalist thought, Pamyat was representative of a broad xenophobic ideology that gained strength in the perestroika years.
At the heart of Pamyat’s platform was the defense of Russian traditions. Pamyat ideologues deBIBLIOGRAPHY Garrard, John. (1991). “A Pamyat Manifesto: Introductory Note and Translation.” Nationalities Papers 19 (2):135-145. Laqueur, Walter. (1993). Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia. New York: HarperCollins.
Panslavism in a general sense refers to the belief in a collective destiny for the various Slavic peoples-
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generally, but far from always, under the leadership of Russia, the largest Slavic group or nation. Thus the seventeenth-century author of Politika (Politics), Juraj Krizanic (1618-1683) is often regarded as a precursor of Panslavism because he urged the unification of all Slavs under the leadership of Russia and the Vatican. His writings were largely unknown until the nineteenth century. The Czech philologist Pavel Jozef Safarik (1795-1861) and his friend, poet Jan Kollar, regarded the Slavs historically as one nation. Safarik believed that they had once had a common language. However, despite his belief in Slavic unity, he turned against Russia following the suppression of the Polish rebellion in 1830 and 1831. The Ukrainian national bard, Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), also hoped for a federation of the Slavic peoples.
In a narrower and more common usage, however, Panslavicism refers to a political movement in nineteenth- century Russia. Politically, Panslavism would not have taken the shape it did without the Russian claims of tutelage over the Slavic populations of the declining Ottoman Empire. Intellectually, however, Panslavism drew on the nationalist ideas of people such as Mikhail Pogodin (1800-1875), the most important representative of “Official Nationality” and especially of the Slavophiles. Slavophilism focused critically on Russia’s internal civilization and its need to return to first principles, but it bequeathed to Panslavism the idea that Russia’s civilization was superior to that of all of its European competitors. Of the early Slavophiles, Alexei Khomyakov (1804-1860) wrote a number of poems (“The Eagle”; “To Russia”), which can be considered broadly Panslav, as well as a “Letter to the Serbs” in the last year of his life, in which he demanded that religious faith be “raised to a social principle.” Ivan Aksakov (1823-1886) actually evolved from his early Slavophilism to fullblown Panslavism over the course of his journalistic career.
The advent of Alexander II and the implementation of the so-called Great Reforms began the long and complex process of opening up a public arena and eventually a public opinion in Russia. Ideas stopped being the privilege of a small number of cultivated aristocrats, and the 1870s saw a reorientation from philosophical to more practical matters, if not precisely to politics, a shift that affected both Slavophiles and Westernizers. It is against this background that one needs to view the eclipse of classical Slavophilism and the rise of Panslavism. It is plausible to date the beginning of Panslav-ism as a movement-albeit a very loose and undisciplined one-to the winter of 1857-1858, when the Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee was created to support the South Slavs
