The Decembrist movement was, however, a prelude to other action. On the one hand it increased the determination of the tsar to maintain order and the autocracy at all costs. On the other, it drove from active leadership in political movements the representatives of the higher aristocracy, who were without exception the foremost representatives of Russian influence in Ukraine and the best educated people of the day. It thus cleared the way for newer groups to appear upon the scene. It settled nothing in reality. There came a new tendency for autocratic control of everything and the new measures still more infuriated the Poles, who had already begun the work of active organization of secret societies. More and more, in places like Wilno, these societies became very active. Finally they burst out in a great Polish revolt in 1831 and its failure thrust down the hopes of the Poles for a restoration of their country. It is to be noted that Taras Shevchenko, as a young serf, was shortly before this time in Wilno and could not fail to have heard of the preparations for the revolt. Because of the danger, his master Engelhardt left Wilno and went to the capital and the young Shevchenko with his inquiring mind had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of several of the leaders of the revolt. Instead of winning him to the Polish cause, they seem to have sharpened his interest in his own people and to have revived in him an appreciation of the rights of Ukraine, even if those rights had been abolished by the decrees of Catherine the Great. It was at this moment that the poem of Jan Kollar, _The Daughter of Slava_, began to circulate throughout the Slavonic world. Kollar, a Slovak Protestant, went to Jena in 1817 to study. There he was greatly impressed by the sentiments of the students calling for a unification of Germany and the introduction of a republican form of government. It set him to thinking and when he fell in love with a German girl from the south, he transformed her in his own poetic way of thinking into a descendant of the Germanized Slavs. He published in 1821 his first collection of _Sonnets_ and then in 1824 he increased this to the book, _The Daughter of Slava_, in which he called for a great Slavonic union on liberal principles. It was probably as a result of this that there appeared a Pan-Slavic Society in Ukraine about the time of the Decembrists, but so few details have been preserved that it deserves little more than a passing mention, for we know very little of the actual development in Ukraine at this time, except among the officers of the Russian army who took part in the secret societies.