View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Serbian Academy of Science and Arts Digital Archive (DAIS) UDC 930.85(4–12) ISSN 0350–7653 SERBIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND ARTS INSTITUTE FOR BALKAN STUDIES BALCANICA XLVI ANNUAL OF THE INSTITUTE FOR BALKAN STUDIES Editor-in-Chief DUŠAN T. BATAKOVIĆ Director of the Institute for Balkan Studies SASA Editorial Board JEAN-PAUL BLED (Paris), LJUBOMIR MAKSIMOVIĆ, ZORAN MILUTINOVIĆ (London), DANICA POPOVIĆ, BILJANA SIKIMIĆ, SPIRIDON SFETAS (Thessaloniki), GABRIELLA SCHUBERT (Jena), NIKOLA TASIĆ, SVETLANA M. TOLSTAJA (Moscow) BELGRADE 2015 448 Balcanica XLVI (2015) Like in the subchapters on Kosovo, The political situation in the self­ the author outlines the political activity proclaimed Republic of Kosovo and in of the Turkish parties in Macedonia, as Macedonia remains problematic and well as the Turkish community’s activi­ volatile. Albanian­Serbian and Albanian­ ties through numerous cultural and civic Macedonian relations are always first to organisations. As already mentioned, the come to mind when trying to explain the dispersion of the Turkish population is a complexities of the region’s recent history, limiting factor as regards their represen­ and they certainly are key to understand­ ing its past and future. But Çelik offers tation in the parliament and local coun­ the readers of his book a new perspective, cils, and impedes more ambitious politi­ that of the region’s Turkish minority. Al­ cal engagement. Moreover, as is often the though the numerical strength and politi­ case, political, ideological and personal cal and cultural influence of the Turkish divisions within the Turkish political population is relatively weak, they form class further complicate political life. an integral part of these societies and are The main division is into adherents of a active participants in political events and moderate liberal political stand and na­ developments in the central Balkans, es­ tionalists who accept the Turkish­Islamic pecially given the support they enjoy from synthesis. the Republic of Turkey. Kosta Nikolić, MIT O PARTIZANSKOM JUGOSLOVENSTVU [The Myth of Partisan Yugoslavism]. Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike, 2015, xvii+502 p. Reviewed by Dragan Bakić* Many generations of Yugoslavs born after Serbia, in particular, a section of population, 1945 thought that their socialist homeland not limited to youth­nostalgic older genera­ had been forged in the Second World War tion, still maintains a strange affection for in the heroic armed struggle fought by Tito’s dead and buried Yugoslavia. All this makes communist partisans against the occupiers the necessity of scholarly examination of and their collaborators (narodnooslobodilačka the phenomenon more pronounced. That borba). It was then, as the communist origin is exactly what Kosta Nikolić, one of the myth expounded, that the nations and na­ most gifted Serbian historians, embarks on tional minorities of Yugoslavia forged their in his most recent monograph. His analy­ brotherhood and unity (bratstvo i jedinstvo) sis is a continuation of what he had already which laid ground for the post­war socialist discussed in his excellent Srbija u Titovoj federation. That new country replaced the Jugoslaviji (1941–1980) [Serbia in Tito’s “rotten monarchist dictatorship” that was Yugoslavia] (Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia destroyed in the 2011). Nikolić has presented a thorough Axis invasion of 1941 and put an end to na­ deconstruction of what he terms “the myth tional discrimination of non­Serb peoples of partisan Yugoslavism”. It should be noted that was synonymous with the rule of a that his study is not that of the history of “Greater­Serbian hegemonic clique”. The the Yugoslav idea or the Yugoslav state from legacy of communist Yugoslavism, however, seems to have survived the break­up of the country nearly twenty­five years ago. In * Institute for Balkan Studies SASA Reviews 449 1918 onwards. It focuses on the official dis­ Ustashas, Montenegrin separatists, pro­ course of Yugoslav communists and draws Bulgarian IMRO, the Albanian Kosovo largely on the impressive range of sources of Committee. Complying with Stalin’s turn their own provenance and not that of their “to the left” into world revolution to top­ opponents. ple European fascist regimes which were Nikolić analyses the communist view about to start a military crusade against of Yugoslavism from the inception of the the Soviet Union, the CPY codified its bolshevised Communist Party of Yugo­ anti­Yugoslav orientation in the decisions slavia (CPY) at the Vukovar congress in of the 1928 Dresden congress. 1920. This included the struggle for prole­ As a corollary of this emphasis on a tarian dictatorship and terror as means of national­revolutionary agenda came the achieving it and ensured that the CPY be­ transformation of the CPY from a single came but a mere section of the Comintern working class party organisation into whose policy it would blindly follow. It also several national parties. Serbian com­ meant that Lenin’s view of Yugoslavia as munists were completely marginalised in an artificial Versailles creation that needed this ideological shift and their role was re­ to be broken became the guiding principle duced to extending help to the struggle of of CPY; the exploitation of the national communists from the “oppressed” nations question in this country became “the most for their national liberation. This process efficient method” to accomplish its dis­ was rounded off with the elimination of memberment and seize the power (p. 26). the most prominent Serbian commu­ Rather than adhering to their internation­ nist, at least partly independent­minded al doctrine, the communists thus opted for Marković; after that, the next generation “national communism” as the author aptly of Serbian communists trained their rev­ puts it. Based on Lenin’s interpretation olutionary consciousness “with no regard that communists should support revolu­ for national interests of their own people” tionary national liberation movements in which was “a unique phenomenon in the “backward” countries, the “left faction” of political history of the European twenti­ CPY insisted on encouraging national dif­ eth century” (pp. 144–145). The founding ferences with the view to bringing down of the Communist Party of Croatia and the Kingdom. Those Serbian communist the Communist Party of Slovenia in 1937 such as Sima Marković and Filip Filipović was a concession to separatist tendencies who believed that the national question of Croat and Slovene communists and was democratic and constitutional had to prepared the ground for (con)federalisa­ renounce their views and accept those of tion of the Yugoslav party and later the their Croat and Slovene party colleagues. communist Yugoslav state. This was the The latter proclaimed Yugoslavia to be a organisational structure of CPY that Tito “dungeon of nations”: the “ruling” Serbian sanctioned when he became its leader in nation – and not just a “Greater­Serbian 1940 emerging from Stalinist purges. bourgeois clique” – suppressed the other The true role of Tito’s partisans dur­ nations, Muslims, Croats, Slovenes and ing the Second World War in establish­ Macedonians, and the struggle for their ing their own brand of Yugoslavism is national liberation was instrumental in the perhaps the most revealing part of the struggle against capitalism and imperial­ book. Far from the official narrative about ism. Such attitude led to the CPY’s coop­ the joint struggle of all Yugoslav nations eration with nationalist and even terrorist and national minorities against the Axis organisations of all anti­Yugoslav shades, invaders forging brotherhood and unity, the Croatian Peasant Party, Ante Pavelić’s the partisans were participants in, and 450 Balcanica XLVI (2015) one of the initiators of, the horrible civil if not the Ustaha regime. In order to gain war fought along ethnic and ideological support of Croats and Muslims, Tito and divides which claimed the lives of the the CPY revived the bogey of “Greater majority of war casualties. Nikolić con­ Serb chauvinism” and went as far as to in­ vincingly argues his case in an analysis timidate them with the prospect of being of partisan war effort in each of Yugosla­ slaughtered by Mihailović’s chetniks un­ via’s regions with their different national less they joined the partisans. Even such structures. After having abstained from tactics did not yield much result until the fighting the occupiers as long as the 1939 capitulation of Italy in September 1943. German­Soviet pact of non­aggression Party headquarters in Croatia as well as in was in force, communists rose to arms at Slovenia had an absolute autonomy in the the Comintern’s order following Hitler’s conduct of military operations and acted attack on the USSR in June 1941. The in­ without coordination with each other surrection was quickly quelled by German or Tito’s Supreme Command. In Janu­ troops but not before the partisans initi­ ary 1943 when the survival of the main ated a civil war in Serbia against another partisan forces in Bosnia was at stake, the resistance movement, Draža Mihailović’s commander of Croatian partisans, Ivan royalists. In doing so, Tito discarded the Rukavina, refused direct requests for as­ Comintern’s instruction that “class strug­ sistance; Tito himself never set foot in gle” was a second phase of revolution that Croatia during the war (p. 459). He had should follow, and not precede,