On Muscovite territory there came other changes, for during these years Moscow developed a sharp aversion to Kiev and everything for which it stood. The whole tradition of the Third Rome, which was hostile to everything outside the land, taught that Moscow was the centre of Christian civilization and that Kiev, like Constantinople and like the First Rome, had definitely fallen into heresy. Now and then the tsars might employ the word Rusia, but even this was too much of a concession for their stubborn pride and it was not until Tsar Alexis in the seventeenth century began to nourish hopes of recovering the area around Kiev that he gave any significance to the use of the word Rus’. In fact it was not until the time of Peter the Great that the name Rossiya--Russia--came into common use and even then Peter introduced it with the idea of asserting his power as a European sovereign and he did it against the usage of the European states, which continued to refer to him as Tsar or Emperor of Moscow. Even later the great poets of the eighteenth century continued to use the adjective Rossiysky and the ordinary form that was employed during the nineteenth century, i.e. Russky, was of rare occurrence. Through the centuries, regardless of the ups and downs of the two states, of the political issues of union and disunion, there remained a sharp differentiation between Moscow and Rus’. It was not until Moscow saw itself in a position to make itself the heir of Kiev in the eyes of the world that it preempted very definitely the name of Rus’, proclaimed that Rus’ was Russia, and dangled it before the eyes of the world to win belief that both Kiev and Moscow belonged together under the aegis of Moscow and St. Petersburg. In earlier ages Moscow had been content to seek the support of Rus’ on the basis of the Orthodox religion, when it desired to secure cooperation. Then it was Orthodox Moscow and Orthodox Rus’ against the Roman Catholic Poles and Lithuanians. That idea could not appeal in the eighteenth century, when Peter was manifesting little interest in the traditional religion of the people and was trying to change all the old established customs. A new basis had to be found and this new equation was the result. The injustice of the action was appreciated even by the Poles, who had maintained to the end of their national existence their control of the province of Rus’. An Encyclopedia put out by the Polish National Committee during the First War (Vol. II, No. 5, p. 867) summed it up well. “In very deed, Russia stripped Ukraine of everything; she even appropriated its very name of ‘Rus’ (Ruthenia), she annexed its history of pre-Tatar times, she declared the language was a Russian dialect.” It is a clear statement of conditions.