The reaction after 1848 roughly coincided with the arrest of Shevchenko and the crushing of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Russia. Yet the revival up to that period had shown striking differences in Eastern and Western Ukraine. In Russia it had been a lay revival, with special emphasis upon the development of a modern literature in the face of a determined government, which insisted upon the unity of both Russians and Little Russians. Any thought of political action was in the beginning useless, and prison or Siberia was the fate of every one who dared to advocate national recognition. Under Austrian rule, the Uniat Church had taken the lead in the movement. It had developed into an anti-Polish but government-favored policy, which only too readily admitted the racial and cultural differences between the Poles and the Ruthenians. Unfortunately, there were no outstanding political leaders to profit by this opportunity. Before the triumph of reaction the Ruthenians were most hampered by the stubborn conservatism of their own people who refused to face the fact that it was necessary to modernize the language. Actually the two Ukraines had become widely separated areas with differences in religion, in the goal of their efforts, and in their weapons of struggle. There was little knowledge on either side of what the other was doing and perhaps even less appreciation. Yet in both regions, and in Bukovina and Carpatho-Ukraine, the Ukrainians had awakened from their long slumber. Something was stirring, but the trend to cooperation was still very weak and it was only the Congress of Ruthenian Scholars that had even mentioned the possibility of joint action, even in the cultural and linguistic spheres, so well had the enforced separation done its work. Everything seemed lost as 1850 approached, but the new dullness was not of long duration. CHAPTER FIFTEEN _PROGRESS IN RUSSIA_ The arrest and exile of the members of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius brought to a halt the first phase of the Ukrainian revival in the Russian Empire. It had been the work of a group of brilliant idealists who had ignored many of the practical difficulties in the way of their cause under the influence of the Romantic movement. There was no romanticism and hardly any sense of realism in the response that was delivered by the government of Nicholas I, who had been born before Kotlyarevsky had commenced the revival with the _Eneida_, and who could, from his childhood, obtain information from the men who had actually suppressed the last vestiges of the Hetman state.