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Rh state and church were regulated, saying that these proved that the church lacked freedom. He also demanded freedom of conscience in the church's own interest, but this demand remained purely academic Moreover Aksakov associated Orthodoxy so inseparably with Russianism, saying that while Orthodoxy might exist outside of Russia, Russia could not exist without Orthodoxy, that he was compelled willy nilly to make concessions to the official police church.

Russia contains a notable percentage of nonrussian inhabitants, whose Russification had long been part of the official program, but this Russification was carried on quite mechanically by the administration and the army. In the eastern frontier lands there were differences of religion as well as differences of nationality, and here the slavophil theory supported Orthodoxy as the national religion against Catholicism and Protestantism.

Aksakov did not withstand the temptation, and he approved the official Russification of the Eastern frontier lands.

But he did not desire the Russification of the Poles. "It is impossible," he wrote, "to sympathise with the movement of the Ruthenians against the Austrians in Galicia, a region whose possession is legally (or rather illegally) profitable to the Austrians as the possession of the kingdom of Poland is proﬁtable to us, whilst simultaneously regarding as without justification the endeavours of the Poles to free themselves from their dependence towards us." These words were penned a year after the revolt. In 1863 he had proposed that the purely Polish areas, those which had not belonged to Russia prior to the partition, be granted entire liberty should the Polish people decide by referendum in favour of internal autonomy under Russian suzerainty. In 1848 Homjakov had recommended a similar solution of the Polish problem.

At the time of the rising in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and during the Russo-Turkish war, Aksakov once more subordinated slavophil ideals to official policy. In the interim, after the death of Pogodin, he had become chairman of the Slav Welfare Committee. But the issue of the war and the upshot of the congress of Berlin having been described by him as a "colossal absurdity," he was banished from Moscow. In Bulgaria, however, some of the electors nominated him as candidate for the Bulgarian throne.

The increasing activity of the opposition after the Rh