More than that, they were faced with the same situation and even with the same books. Peter the Great had sent to the Balkans men educated in the Kiev tradition. He had sent down the same grammar of Smotritsky that had served for a century to teach the Russian grammar from the Ukrainian Church Slavonic standpoint. The same books appeared at Belgrade and Sofia that had vanished from Kiev and Chernihiv under Russian influence. During most of the eighteenth century, there was used among the Serbs exactly that same mixture of Church Slavonic, Muscovite and Ukrainian that was preventing the revival of the Ukrainian spirit. It had the same effect elsewhere. The Russian Church Slavonic that mastered Serb and Serb Church Slavonic blocked for nearly a century the cultural revival in the Balkans. The Russian rulers played heavily on the theme of the linguistic unity of Slavonic Orthodoxy. When it was necessary to check a dissent, they ignored the language and demanded the unity of the Orthodox Church. They stressed the religious unity as opposed to the Catholic West. At other moments, they were ready to ignore this and to emphasize the linguistic similarities and to argue that there was no need for linguistic reform among the Slavs, since Russian had already been thus favored and there was no need to have two literary Slavonic languages. They emphasized with a bland disregard of facts that it would be child’s play to remodel all the languages on the Russian basis and to combine into one Russian language all the varied tongues. It was no wonder that they aroused in the Balkans the same reactions that they did in Ukraine. The more rigid monks refused to listen to their demands and there was repeated on a small scale something of that revulsion of feeling that had come when the Kiev scholars first appeared at Moscow. We can parallel the Ukrainian situation with that of the Czechs and Slovaks. From the time of the Thirty Years War to the end of the eighteenth century, there was hardly a book of any value published in Czech. There was nothing as important as the _History of the Rus’_, for here it was Latin and German that took the lead as the permitted and encouraged languages. We must never forget that the great work of Dobrovsky which began the Czech revival was itself written in Latin, exactly as the few surviving scholars of Ukraine wrote in the archaic form of Ukrainian Church Slavonic.