It was in the mid-19th century that Slavophiles discovered the mir. Romantic nationalists and the Slavophiles hailed the mir as a purely Russian collective, both ancient and venerable; free from what they considered the stain of the bourgeois mindset found in western Europe. Not surprisingly, it was but a short step from this to the mir being used as a basis for Slavophilic idealist theories concerning communism, communalism, communal lands, history, progress and the nature of mankind itself.[8]