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The Panslavists were a Russian nationalist and monarchist political faction which existed during the Russian Empire. The faction supported an absolute monarchy, the Russian Orthodox Church, an aggressive foreign policy, and Russification, and it thus played a key role in engineering Russia's involvement in the Crimean War and intervention in the Balkan Wars. In 1912, the Panslavic "Nationalist" faction of Russian politics won 120 of the 442 State Duma seats up for contention, making it the largest party; this faction eagerly supported intervention on the side of Serbia at the start of World War I in 1914, and Czar Nicholas II of Russia promoted its reactionary and nationalist ideals throughout his reign (having previously heeded the Panslavic faction's advocacy for the Russo-Japanese War). The Panslavic Party suffered from never being an organized party, unlike the moderate conservative Octobrists, and the monarchist "Russian rightists" won only 1 of the 767 Russian Constituent Assembly seats contested in the 1917 election following the February Revolution. The faction was expelled from politics following the Bolshevik seizure of power in the October Revolution, and its supporters went on to make up a major faction of the anti-communist White movement during the Russian Civil War.

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