Well culturally in the 1850s you did see a few Russian cultural movements that argued that 'genuine Russia' was found in the vast mass of the peasantry, rather than in Westernized St. Petersburg. Novels like War and Peace, for example, pretty much indicate that the peasantry/countryside was where one could find 'true Russian values', whereas French was used for deceitful purposes.
OTL Russian intellectuals embraced the peasantry partly because they saw in them the foundations for a modern state - the communalism of the peasants to form the basis for liberal rule etc. This was pretty much utopianism, and in practice it didn't work out.
After the failure of various reform projects one could argue that this idea of the Russian peasant as some 'proto-19thC European' was abandoned in intellectual circles in favour of the idea of the peasant as an 'Asiatic' being - hence the Russian interest in ethnography in the late 19th C, and arguably the genesis for modernist Russian works like the Rite of Spring.
So a PoD could, perhaps, be that Russian intellectuals perceive this 'Asiatic-ness' of the peasantry earlier and embrace it (a more powerful Slavophilism, if you will), and over time Russia itself begins to perceive itself as separate from the 'moral decadence' of Europe.