When at one time Karađorđe and Prince Miloš were looking for Russian aid for the fight against the Turks, they did not think that this help should turn into complete control over the administration Serbian state. As soon as they, first one and then the other, found ways to complain about it to the Russian diplomats, they lost their throne.
In 1804, the Serbian insurgents led Serbia from a century of slavery and tutelage in the then political East with the capital in Constantinople, towards the political West of Europe ("that there is a Serbian state in Europe", M. Obrenović). In this direction, in December 1918, the Yugoslav state was created, based on the Western, Versailles, European and civil model, with the potential for the newly created Kingdom of SHS/Yugoslavia to develop even into a certain power in the southeast of Europe, and not just into an ordinary state with a small mission. If by any chance it was created according to the Russian model, it would probably turn into some form of an expanded Serbia, without the territories west of the Drina and the Danube - as was the Kingdom of Serbia before it merged into the SHS. The third way, the so-called "Greater Serbia", did not exist, no matter how much the fanatics without knowledge of the historical context talked about it.
photo: Fonet / Nenad ĐorđevićMonument to Tsar Nicholas these days in Belgrade
Russia or "Moscow", as Prince Miloš called it, one hundred and fifty years before the creation of Yugoslavia (1918) initiated and resolved the Eastern Question (1774), as the protector of the Christian nations that were under Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Its ultimate goal was the complete liberation of the Balkans, the creation of new states under its protectorate and its territorial access to the warm seas (Aegean, Mediterranean), via Constantinople and the straits. She helped liberate Serbia (1830), Greece, Montenegro, Romania and Bulgaria, but only Serbia and Montenegro remained loyal to her for a long time. She repeatedly signed and confirmed agreements with Austrian diplomacy according to which the Russian sphere of interest would not cross the line west of the Drina and Danube rivers (1807, 1809, 1859, 1876). With such goals in the Balkans, among other things, it also entered the First World War and received consent from the Allies from the Entente for the conquest of Tsarigard. Within reach of the goal, it left the Entente as soon as the Bolsheviks carried out the revolution (1917/1918) and, among other things, did not participate in the aforementioned creation of Yugoslavia. But it became the capital of a new European East, an ideological one, which continued to seek the blind obedience of its allies. Unconditional obedience.
Until then, there were short periods in which Serbia managed to free itself from Russian influence: the defenders of the constitution (1842–1858) and King Milan (1878–1889) found support in the West. During Yugoslavia (1918–1991), this was done by the Karađorđevićs, as opponents of Bolshevik Russia (which earned them a hostile rating in socialist historiography), and Tito, after 1948, himself requested and received help from the West; with Russia (USSR), after Stalin's death (1953), like an old Bolshevik, he cultivated relations, but without much reliance on it.
The Yugoslav state, as it was created in 1918, was immediately declared in Moscow to be a Serbian, artificial and "Versailles" creation, which should immediately be divided on a national basis (federalized) and demolished. In it, through her section of the KPJ (Yugoslav Communists), she carried out the first successful Bolshevik revolution in Europe (after Russia itself), already during the Second World War, and reorganized it into a federation of six states, according to the Soviet model. But before Tito, the leader of that revolution, a similar problem appeared as before the Serbian insurgents in the 19th century - the excessive tutelage of Russia. The tutor was none other than his boss from the Kremlin, J. Stalin. Only after the brutal split in 1948, Yugoslavia sought and received help from the West. Thus, it eliminated the danger of an attack by the USSR and the Eastern bloc, resolved the Trieste crisis (1954) with Italy, signed agreements with NATO (as part of the southern wing along with Italy, Greece and Turkey), received military, civil and financial aid; the army was renamed the JNA, workers' self-management was introduced into the management of factories, companies and all labor collectives, which resembled a grain of democracy in a one-party communist dictatorship. During the next thirty years, the soldiers were trained for the war against the "Russians".
The country of the South Slavs began to emerge from a deep economic crisis. It was facing both the West and the East (after 1956), but it was under no one's tutelage during the Cold War.
At the end of the 80s, the climate of the end of the Cold War was felt over Europe, and the leader of the defeated side M. Gorbachev already in 1988 announced the abolition of the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine and the free will of "the European allies of the Soviet Union to do what they want".
A look at the map of Europe from 1988 shows that Yugoslavia, after the USSR and Poland, was the largest among the socialist countries in terms of territory, and that within its federation, the largest country was SR Serbia. Yugoslavia did not belong to any bloc in the Cold War and was therefore seen as the first, best new candidate for a united Europe in relation to other socialist countries. The European Economic Community (EEC) was just turning into the EU, and given the earlier agreements with NATO, Yugoslavia already had one foot there. The reformist federal government of Ante Marković (1988–1991) was given economic aid and promised a date of official accession to the EEC, December 10, 1992.
All eight federal units, six republics plus two provinces in Serbia voted. Serbia and Montenegro were against it (it wavered until 1991). Serbia changed the leaders in the provinces who agreed to vote like them, and that's how the result was tied - four to four.
A year or two before that, the specter of a united Europe and "perverted Western values" began to spread across Serbia. Such thinking was a consequence of the confrontation between two factions among the Serbian communists at the time, the so-called Titoists and the so-called Stalinists, in which the Stalinists won the final victory in 1987, waiting for it for four decades, since 1948. They were vengeful, against Tito, the end of the Cold War, the abolition of the Brezhnev Doctrine in the East, Gorbachev, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yugoslavia's entry into the EU and NATO. They rejoiced at the fall of Gorbachev (1991) and in the same summer applied the Brezhnev doctrine in Yugoslavia, with military intervention and an ideology based on two old positions of the Kremlin: 1) any weakening of the power of the Communist Party is considered a direct reason for reaction (monopoly of power) and 2) only the leadership in the capital (Belgrade/Moscow) has the authority to interpret what constitutes "socialism" and what "capitalism" (defining ideology).
Since then, for 40 years, no one in Serbia has said anything critical about Stalin.
Serbia began to behave according to that model towards other republics, by trying to redraw the federal constitution and state borders ("ordinary administrative lines tailored by Tito to the detriment of the Serbian people" S. Milošević).
When it realized that it could not conquer the whole of Yugoslavia as it did in 1945, Moscow drew a new line of its zone of interest in Europe, right across Yugoslavia, this time west of the Drina and Danube, where it has allies in the new communist leadership in Belgrade: Karlobag-Ogulin-Karlovac-Virovitica, as the so-called "Serbian border from 1918". That line against the West now, on behalf of Russia, had to be defended to the last Serb. Soldiers suddenly changed their potential enemy and trained for war against the "Americans", regiments were renamed brigades, divisions into corps - all according to the Soviet model.
Although not much was officially said about it, it still seems that the ancient patriarchal weakness of the Serbs towards the Russians, as towards an older brother, protector, father or "Mother Russia", has been abused. Along with that went the implicit obedience that befits a protégé in relation to a protector. Such relations were also established by the voters towards the party in power.
In everyday life in Serbia, this was felt in the sudden change of the value system and the change in the meaning of basic terms, the appearance of anti-heroes and the replacement of earlier roles. The communists began to speak out against Tito and urge the people to go to church, whose committees were also occupied by communists, directors and committee members: it was as if the places of party meetings had been moved from comfortable armchairs to parish homes. At first glance, something was not believable, let alone original or autochthonous, as it was very loudly presented as. A strange conceptual, even aesthetic combination was emerging: democracy and the immutability of power, anti-system and worshiping the system, Serbia and Bolshevism, the crisis of national identity and national superiority, anti-Yugoslavism and the defense of Yugoslavia, anti-communism and loyalty to the Kremlin, Chetniks and republicans, the church and the godless, the army and paramilitary heroes, pious loyalty to the newly created political parties and their leaders. In that inauthenticity, it was as if everything was possible only by someone's order, out of blind obedience, which was not hidden much. In that combination, there was no longer any place for Christ or the working class, but they were no longer important or needed in that newly created "blasphemous empire".
On the second day after the first multi-party elections in Serbia, on December 10, 1990, high representatives of the UN and the USA, Herbert Okun and Cyrus Vance, landed in Belgrade to talk to the President of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic. It was exactly one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall and two years before the scheduled admission of Yugoslavia to the EEC. They had the authority of high bodies to ask whether Serbia will interfere with the whole of Yugoslavia in the beginning of the path towards the EEC/EU and the respect of the old obligations according to the NATO pact. They got the answer. And they flew away the same day.
photo: marija janković...
On the day when the Warsaw Pact and the Cold War officially ended (1991), a war broke out in Slovenia, in which the JNA intervened. Slovenia wanted to join the EEC and NATO, which protected it. Already on July 19, 1991, the JNA admitted defeat and the war moved to Croatia, east of the Karlobag-Ogulin-Karlovac-Virovitica line. There, on January 8, 1992, the JNA signed the defeat and acceptance of the Vance plan on the deployment of UN troops in Croatia. The soldiers who were mobilized in Serbia for the war in Croatia did not know which country they were fighting for. Serbia officially dissociated itself from participation in that war (back on October 8, 1991), and Yugoslavia no longer existed. The day after the defeat in Croatia, on January 9, 1992, the state of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was declared, without the consent of other nations in that republic, who saw this act as a kind of declaration of war. The JNA fought in Bosnia as the Army of the Republika Srpska, and the defeat was signed on its behalf, at the insistence of the USA, on November 21, 1995 by Serbian President Milošević. The Republika Srpska, the remainder of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, retained less than half of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, excluding the capital Sarajevo, which it unsuccessfully besieged. The fugitives of the remaining Serbs from Croatia passed through its space that summer. When the alliance of Serbia with Russia and Belarus, even a possible unification, was proclaimed in Belgrade not long after, the fourth war followed, in Kosovo, on the territory of Serbia, and the fourth defeat of the NATO pact on June 9, 1999.
For all that time, the Russians pretended to be "English" and washed their hands of this demonstrative exercise for future wars on the territory of the former USSR and the suppression of "colored revolutions". The line of national topography of the Serbs was cleared from the Karlobag-Karlovac-Ogulin-Virovitica line in the west to Prizren and Vardar in the southeast, more meticulously than under any occupation regime ever. No Serbian politician or military leader resigned due to the political debacle and four consecutive military defeats.
The regime in Serbia has been more or less unchanged since 1987: every defeat was declared a victory for the Serbian people and the highest honors were awarded to secular, military and ecclesiastical figures for the greatest national disaster in history.
"Communists have a strange style...", says one of Pasternak's heroes, who happened to be close to the Bolsheviks, "for them, people are just bipeds that can serve them, and if they don't serve, they can be done whatever they want, they can be removed or sent to prison or war (...) Their mission is supposedly in the constant creation of some kind of new worlds, through conflicts and sacrifices, but that circle never ends, you know why? Because they don't have the talent to make a world better (...) Through the story of equality offers a piece of dry bread, but not freedom. The individual does not matter to them, nor the present time, because one should supposedly think of three hundred years ahead - when poverty, a murdered society and total obedience will also rule."
They say that in 1945 some unfortunate partisan went over to the side of the Chetniks. As a nation, before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, we sided with the Russians. The Russians suffered four defeats at the hands of NATO in 1991–1999. on our soil. Cynics would say that we didn't take "a single pixel". We turned out to be Pasternak's "bipeds" sent to war by the Bolsheviks.
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