From Ethnic Hatred to Religious Solidarity: The Rise and Fall of Russophobia in Greece,1830–1924

Abstract

After being dominant in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, the expectation of fellow Orthodox Russian saviours was then muted by the fears of Russian expansion but was never completely erased from the public discourse and popular memory. If ethnonationalism gradually sidelined religious identification among the educated, geopolitical changes brought it back to the fore. Subject to such contingencies, this kind of reversal does not support the accepted notion of the unstoppable disintegration of pre-modern religious communities into national ones.

After the Crimean War, the obsession with the Panslav threat increasingly prevailed in educated society and influenced Greek policymakers who often sought to ally their kingdom with England and even the Ottoman Empire. The Russians and their Bulgarian agents came to be seen as implacable barbarian aggressors. But just before and during the First World War, the Ottoman Turks became the main national enemy again, as in the early 1800s. The Russian revolutions of 1917 also helped Greek elites discover another common foe – radical socialism. As a result, Greek-Russian ethnic tensions diminished – while World War I certainly created new ethnic hatreds it also healed some old ones. From 1918 at least until the abolition of Greek monarchy in 1924 significant numbers of Russian émigrés did not suffer from Russophobia. As such, this article contributes to the study of national indifference and of the effects of the Great War in Eastern Europe. The article is based on Greek and Russian archival sources as well as on the unique pamphlet collection of the Gennadios Library in Athens.