Short answers, pulled from the story.
Moscow in the 1830s became the birthplace of Slavophilia, an intellectual movement that rejected Western European modernization. Aleksey Khomyakov led this charge alongside his devoutly Orthodox colleagues from 1804 to 1860.
Aleksey Khomyakov and Ivan Kireyevsky coined the term sobornost to describe organic unity and integration within society. They viewed individualism as a foreign poison threatening the social fabric while praising rural life and the peasant commune known as the mir.
The emancipation reform of 1861 marked a turning point for many Slavophile thinkers who had previously been liberals supporting serf abolition. The movement shifted from liberal reformism toward conservative autocracy after 1861 following changes in internal social structures.
Poland presented an endless embarrassment for Russian nationalists because their identity rested on Roman Catholicism instead of Orthodoxy. Slavophiles conflated language and religion equating Slavdom exclusively with Eastern Orthodox faith and dismissed Ukrainian and Belarusian cultural aspirations as results of Polish intrigue.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Konstantin Leontyev, and Nikolay Danilevsky developed Pochvennichestvo as a conservative version of Slavophilism. Ivan Ilyin further developed these ideas among émigré religious philosophers after the Russian Revolution of 1917.