Epilogue in 1945 the Croatian Writer Vladimir Nazor

EPILOGUE In 1945 the Croatian writer Vladimir Nazor (1876–1949), who joined the Partisans at the end of 1942, wrote a poem entitled ‘Poems of the Fist’, in which he declared that the Croats were not Goths but ‘an ancient fragment of Slavdom.’ Whoever dared to claim differently, Nazor wrote, would ‘feel our fist.’1 After the collapse of the NDH in May 1945, the new communist authorities soon turned Nazor’s threat of violence against the proponents of the non-Slavic theories of Croat origin into actual policy. The leading proponent of the Gothic theory, the 78 year-old historian and Catholic priest Kerubin Šegvić, was sentenced to death, and subsequently executed, by a Yugoslav military court, on the grounds that his theory on ‘the non-Slavic origin of the Croats’ was designed to ‘demolish Slavic unity’ and ‘incite national hatred among the peoples of Yugoslavia.’2 In spite of its theoretical adherence to Marxist internationalism, the leadership of the new Yugoslav state under Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) also strongly promoted the racial-supranational ideologies of pan-Slavism and Yugoslavism, at least in the early period of its rule. Belgrade was chosen as the site of the Soviet ‘Pan-Slav Congress’ held in December 1946, because Marshal Tito was regarded as Stalin’s most ‘trusted communist fighter’, while ‘the Yugoslavs were regarded as the second ranking Slav nation’ after the Soviet Union. At the end of his opening speech at the Congress, Tito made a ‘three-fold toast, to Slav solidarity, to our greatest Slav brother, the Soviet Union [and] to its leader of genius, Stalin.’3 Theories of the non-Slav origin of the Croats were not officially welcome in Yugoslav academic and political life. In a similar manner to Nazor, another pro-Yugoslavist Croat writer, Miroslav Krleža, later ridiculed Stje- pan Krizin Sakač’s Iranian theory of Croat origins as ‘historical lunacy.’4 Although Tito‘s Yugoslavia officially recognised the various South Slav peoples as separate nations, these peoples were nonetheless thought to belong to a wider South Slav ethnolinguistic community united by ‘brotherhood and unity.’ As Ante Škegro points out, ‘until the collapse of 1 A verse of Nazor’s poem is cited in Jareb, ‘Jesu li Hrvati postali Goti?’, 871. 2 See ‘Šegvić, Kerubin’ in Tko je tko u NDH, 378. 3 Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), 235–237. 4 Škegro, ‘Two Public Inscriptions from the Greek Colony of Tanais’, 11. epilogue 225 Yugoslav Communism, every debate regarding . the Iranian theory of Croatian origin was dangerous.’5 Therefore, pan-Slavic racial nationalism was (within certain limits) completely acceptable to the Yugoslav communist regime; the national anthem of Tito’s Yugoslavia was a nineteenth century pan-Slavic song, Hej Slaveni (‘Hey Slavs’). The Yugoslav Partisans had fought to re-establish the South Slavic national state and, conversely, also set up a socialist state in which citi- zenship was open to all regardless of ethnic-racial origin. The Ustashe had fought to establish an equal position for Croatia in the European-Aryan political community of states under the leadership of the Third Reich. While the Yugoslavist Croat Partisans saw Slavic Russia as their natural ally and the Germans (‘Goths’) as their natural enemies, the Ustashe regarded the Aryan Germans as a related people in contrast to the largely Asiatic Russians. In the nineteenth century the Croat pan-Slavists and Yugoslav- ists had stressed the Croats’ Aryan heritage in relation to the Hungarians, but their pan-Slavism had also led them to view the Germanic peoples as their historical enemies. The pan-Slavists/Yugoslavists had not distin- guished between language and race, or rather, had equated language with race. The Ustashe had drawn a clear theoretical dividing line between lin- guistic and racial identity. In terms of ideology, the racial ideas of the Ustasha state cannot be examined without exploring their deeper intellectual and ideological roots. As this book has highlighted, the peculiarly Croatian Aryan race theory in the NDH was not a politically pragmatic imitation of Nazi race theory, but had developed within a long ideological South Slavic discourse involving the rival (but in some respects similar) racial ideas of Yugoslav- ism, Greater Serbianism and anti-Yugoslavist Croatian nationalism. For the Ustashe, the Slavic-speaking Croats were of mixed ethnolinguistic stock, but this mixed stock of Iranians, Slavs, Goths, Illyrians and Celts belonged to the same white Indo-European or Aryan race of peoples. The racial idea in the NDH encouraged the Croats to look for their authen- tic biological and cultural-spiritual roots in the heartlands of the Nordic- led white Aryan race: northern Europe, the Caucasus and Iran. Ustasha race theory also emphasised the partially autochthonous Balkan-Illyrian- Dinaric racial roots of the Croats. The image of the ideal Croatian racial type—of Aryan Slavic-Iranian- Gothic-Illyrian-Celtic blood and marked by Dinaric and/or Nordic 5 Ibid..

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