Russia and the South Slav Republics: The Contemporary Relationship

Paul Jukic

International Security Studies at Yale University
Historical Roots of Contemporary International and Regional Issues
Occasional Paper Series No. 5

RUSSIA, SERBIA, AND THE BALKAN CRISIS

Since the disintegration of the Soviet empire and the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991, extremists of various stripes in Russia and Serbia have consistently looked to one another for aid and succor in the post-Communist political wilderness. In their days of international opprobrium and isolation, former communists, extreme nationalists, and neo-fascists in Belgrade all looked to Russia. Similar groups in Moscow, embittered by the collapse of the Soviet empire and alienated from the course of reform pursued by the ruling regime in post-Soviet Russia, readily took up Belgrade's cause in Serbia's wars against its neighbors. Even before the outbreak of hostilities in former Yugoslavia, hard-line Communists had looked to the Soviet Union, especially to the Soviet military, for support in their struggle to rein in the upstart republics of Slovenia and Croatia. They reasonably expected to receive a sympathetic hearing from the leadership of the "fraternal" Soviet Army. As the generals fully realized, Yugoslavia's case was pregnant with implications for the Soviet Union.

Both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were nominally federated, multi national, and single-party states born of fratricidal revolutionary struggles that spawned durable, repressive regimes. Both failed to outlive the collapse of Communism as their acute and unresolved national questions were freed from the straitjacket of one-party dictatorship. In the ex-Soviet Union the disassociation of the republics was achieved with surprisingly little bloodshed as the central union authority was buried. In ex-Yugoslavia, where the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic had been going about forging a "red-brown" coalition of diehard Communists and radical nationalists for some time, events in 1991 took a much different and much more destructive course. In both cases, centralizing forces were confronted and eventually overwhelmed in 1991 (at the latest) by waves of national enthusiasm coupled with disgust with the rotten socialist system. The federal centers in both countries became objects of revulsion as the attraction of union fell away, leaving little more than brute force in the repertoire of centralist arguments. Open defiance of the threat of violence, whether in the streets of Vilnius or Moscow in 1991 or, on a more massive scale, in Croatian towns and villages in the autumn, was the end product. In ex-Yugoslavia, though, the center merged with the leadership of one republic, Serbia, which came to be seen in Croatia as an existential threat to the polity, by the masses as well as by politicians across the entire political spectrum.

The Balkan situation is germane to any analysis of post-Soviet politics and foreign affairs. Even without the expressed passion of many Russian nationalists for Balkan affairs in the last few years, it could be expected that the morbid attraction of "the tragedy of Yugoslavia" (as Russian apologists for Belgrade's policies of war and "ethnic cleansing" prefer to phrase it) would eventually exercise influence on Russian society and politics. Post-Soviet observers understand the implications of Yugoslavia's post-Communist territorial struggles, and have consistently warned of "a repeat of the Yugoslav scenario" in the post-Soviet space, on a grander scale to be sure. ₁ In the wake of the tumultuous events of 1991, and in view of its pressing domestic troubles, the Russian Federation's leadership gave precedence to multilateral efforts to mediate the Balkan crises. Despite the insistence from right wing and nationalist quarters that it was Russia's "duty" to get involved in Balkan affairs, Russian foreign policy toward the Balkans conceded primacy to international negotiating efforts, first through the European Community and later the United Nations. Moscow put its stamp of approval on all international actions toward the ex-Yugoslav area in 1992. But Russian impatience with initiatives usually led by one or another of the Western powers slowly accumulated. This was signaled as early as December 1992, when Andrei Kozyrev stunned listeners at the CSCE meeting in Stockholm with a speech full of right-wing rhetoric on Russia's international aims and agenda. The Russian foreign minister later qualified his words as a worst-case scenario, an illustration of what might happen were the reform course in Russia, whose international standard-bearer he was, to fail.

Since that time, Russian foreign policy has become increasingly belligerent. Russian nationalists have continued to trumpet their demands for strong support of Serbia, even unilateral Russian action in the Balkan crisis. Extremist critics of Yeltsin-era foreign policy, many of whom went down to defeat in the bloody confrontation at the old parliament building in October 1993, have heaped scorn on the Kremlin on account of policy in the Balkans, accusing the Kozyrev team of playing lapdog to Western interests and selling out Russia's traditional Slavic and Orthodox ally. The actor Nikolai Burlyaev, writing in the extremist daily Den' two years ago (a publication later banned, then renamed), put it simply and pathetically:

"Today Serbia is alone. The whole world seems to have ganged up on it. The current Russian Government has betrayed it. It betrayed a people of the same blood and faith as the Orthodox Russian nation, it betrayed its own -- Slavs, so similar to Russians, just as free of hatred, open, generous and loving." ₂

Activist voices in Moscow, invariably from the ranks of the stridently anti-liberal opposition until quite recently, have advocated Russian intervention in the Balkans for some time. Of course, they have been bitterly opposed to any military intervention against the Bosnian Serbs (or Serbia), a course of action which NATO has recently though belatedly embarked upon in Bosnia and Hercegovina. On the contrary, Russian conservatives have seen Belgrade's advantage as their own, whether in the international arena or at home.

Boris Yeltsin's opponents have consistently used Balkan policy as a bludgeon with which to pummel his administration, especially its liberal members (most now long-gone from the Yeltsin team) and their reformist, pro-Western policies. As one astute observer has noted, certain political and ideological groups in Moscow "have supported closer relations with the Milosevic government or have made common cause with extreme Serbian nationalists, in order to fire nationalist sentiments in Russia and embarrass Mr. Yeltsin. Their actions have little or nothing intrinsically to do with Serbia, but are directed to influencing the domestic power struggle in Russia." ₃ Such critics could not cause Moscow's foreign policy to shift dramatically in the first years after the break-up of the Soviet Union, when domestic problems, internal political paralysis, and the government's obvious need to court Western sympathy and economic support preoccupied the Russian political elite. The radicals' influence was handicapped too by their dubious loyalties. Their treasonous inclinations were given vent in the events preceding the shelling of the White House in Moscow by troops loyal to President Yeltsin in October 1993.

In an atmosphere of acrimony between president and parliament, right-wing criticism in 1992-93 could do little more than nudge Russian policy toward a more conciliatory hearing of Belgrade's demands. In 1994, all that changed. Following the extremists' Waterloo at the former parliament building, the elections in December 1993, and the establishment of a new constitution and parliament, the Russian right reemerged triumphant under the flag of Vladimir Zhirinovskii's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. Since the disastrous performance of the genuine Russian democrats and liberals in the elections, the Yeltsin government has fundamentally changed tack, moving spryly to assume the foreign policy positions previously held by radical nationalist critics of the government. ₄ With a large block of voters in the new Duma, often seconded by the ex-Communists and Agrarians, and smaller right-wing parties, the Zhirinovskii faction certainly has played a role in spurring changes in the Russian foreign ministry. Tellingly, Moscow has adopted much of the right-wing international agenda that Kozyrev used to spook an unsuspecting European audience in 1992. Whether this should be read as the rise of Russian neo-imperialism, or a justified assertion of Russian rights in areas of criticalRussian national interest, the impact is just as serious. ₅

Following NATO's belated ultimatum to the Serbs besieging Sarajevo in early 1994 and the subsequent Russian dispatch of troops to the suffering city, the profile of Russian diplomacy changed dramatically. ₆ The spectacular Russian diplomatic success not only averted a looming showdown between the Bosnian Serbs and the Western alliance, but also signaled Moscow's return to an active role in its traditional sphere of interest in the Balkans. This action was part and parcel of a more assertive Russian foreign policy across the board. Yet Russia's Balkan success was short-lived: in April, NATO and the Bosnian Serbs were again at a crossroads, and yet another ultimatum was issued. This time, Russian mediation efforts ended miserably as Serb tanks advanced on the Muslim enclave of Gorazde in eastern Bosnia despite Serb assurances to the contrary. In a front page story, Izvestiya called the affair "Russia's most serious diplomatic defeat in recent times." ₇ The Deputy Foreign Minister Vitaly Churkin vented his anger and exasperation with the Serbs so sincerely and sharply that the Russian Foreign Ministry was compelled to distance itself from his remarks (and distance Churkin from his sensitive negotiating post; such are the vagaries of diplomacy in the Balkans). Despite the humiliation caused by this failure in pro-Serb policy, Russia has since veered further and further from the common course charted by some combination of interested powers since 1991. To be sure, the relations of the Western states have been anything but a model of cooperation. ₈ Squabbling western statesmen have been relieved to have back-channel Russian influence with the Serbs to get them out of the occasional tight spot, as in Sarajevo in February 1994. But this did not always work. In Gorazde a few months later, the Slavic-Orthodox solidarity maxim failed Vitaly Churkin badly. Lately the Russians have been thoroughly compromised by an increasingly obvious sympathy for the positions of an unapologetic Milosevic, now regarded in the West as the sole legitimate negotiating partner on the Serb side (as many of his detractors have claimed all along) in the ongoing and likely futile search for a "peaceful" resolution of the war in Bosnia Hercegovina.

By the beginning of 1995, Andrei Kozyrev, richly detested by nationalist critics at home for his friendliness with the West, more and more openly sided with Belgrade, expressing at the same time an untoward understanding for Milosevic's rigid and bellicose charges who continue to militarily control (and systematically "ethnically cleanse") areas of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia, despite their serious recent setbacks on the battlefield. As Russia's leaders have adopted a more muscular posture on the world stage, especially toward their erstwhile partners in the Soviet Union (the "near abroad" in popular usage), Balkan policy has shifted palpably as well. Moscow has taken to backing Belgrade to an extent which not only cheered the supporters of the Milosevic regime, but has rankled Moscow's Contact Group partners who in turn could be accused of everything but refusing to bend before the demands of the men most responsible for the carnage in ex-Yugoslavia since 1991. Since Milosevic has turned Balkan peacemaker, there seems to be no concession that cannot be wrung from the Great Powers' diplomatic representatives, at the inevitable cost of political prestige and principle. The unabashedly pro-Serb Russian foreign policy has become more of an obstacle to eventual solution of the Bosnian conundrum than a contributor to a just and lasting settlement. With many observers concluding that the war can only be wound down after a decisive shift in the military balance on the ground, whether directly aided by NATO airstrikes or not, resolution of the Bosnian problem is increasingly likely to come about in confrontation with Russian demands, and not in partnership with Russian leaders.

Milosevic's deputies have lobbied hard in Russia, banking on latent ties with the ex-Soviet establishment (political, economic, cultural), and not only relishing Russian disappointment with an initially pro-Western foreign policy course, but openly seconding its right-wing critics. ₉ At every turn in the domestic Russian political drama since August 1991, regime elements in Serbia have rooted hard for conservative forces of whatever ideological provenance, which is to say, everyone opposed to Yeltsin. The extremist Serb idea also has uncritical and influential advocates in various sectors of Russian society: in academia, the media, the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as in the military, whose members proved quite susceptible to right-wing demagoguery in the 1993 elections. Belgrade has sought to exploit evident conservative tendencies in Russian society to push its agenda. Moreover, Serb politicians from outside Serbia have also consciously tried to capitalize on the rhetoric of Russian nationalists and fascists. "Serbia is Russia's historical ally in the Balkans," said the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in an August 1994 interview with the relatively liberal newspaper Segodnya. In his view, Russian politicians "should not forget that the Serb interests are also their own interests, and that we are fighting not only for our freedom but also for Russia's future security [in the Balkans]." Seeking Russian guarantees for an independent Serb state in Bosnia, Karadzic openly prostituted his hoped-for statelet: "That is very important for Russia, for only an independent Serb state can be Russia's reliable ally in the Balkans." ₁₀ If one believes Karadzic and the Russian conservatives, foreign- policy makers in Moscow have shamefully ignored Russia's traditional relationship with the Serbs and Russia's strategic interest in the Balkans while bowing to Western and American demands since Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991. History, goes the argument, should dictate an entirely different Russian approach to the problems in ex-Yugoslavia.

Many Western commentators have conscientiously rushed to explain Moscow's pro-Serb inclinations as being the result of this time-honored Russian friendliness with the Serbs. The question of Russia's involvement in the Balkans is often conveniently reduced to some supposedly historically-determined but really rather enigmatic Moscow-Belgrade axis. ₁₁ Analysts have occasionally seized on a formula in which Russia's traditional stalking-horse in the Balkans, Serbia, is opposed to predominantly Roman Catholic Croatia, labeled as Germany's entry in the deadly Balkan race for post-Communist power and influence. ₁₂ In the ongoing Great Power competition (so another version of the idea goes), the small nations are playing out the deadly rivalries of the Great Powers on their own blood-soaked soil, manipulated by the diplomacy of one or another great state, entangled in the inextricable (yet invisible) strings of economic, military, and geo-strategic factors. This is quite in line with the paranoid and xenophobic rhetoric of radical nationalists in Serbia, as in Russia. A perceptive journalist noted already in 1993:

"In the propaganda of the Russian nationalists there are distinct echoes of the anti- Western, anti-German, anti-Catholic sentiments of the classic pan-Slavs, leavened now with a measure of anti-Americanism. 'The so-called U.N. sanctions in Yugoslavia -- these are sanctions of the Vatican and a Germany united by Gorbachev,' snarled the Slavophile writer Vasily Belov." ₁₃

Ideas about inscrutable and sinister plots hatched in foreign capitals are common in East Europe even in the most absurd variations, but they need concern us less than the assumptions from which they are derived, and the motivations that inspire them.

The long background of the contemporary Russian Federation's relations with Serbia (and Montenegro), or the other South Slavic peoples, has received little real analysis, especially in the headline-hungry press. ₁₄ The conventional argument that Slavic and (nominally) Orthodox Russia has increasingly adopted a different line toward the South Slavic crises as a result of its traditional links with Serbia cries out for closer scrutiny. Economic, military, and strategic rationale are conspicuously absent from the stated formula, while the historical elements are initially asserted and then usually ignored. The truth in any case lies somewhere in the divide between historically-derived mythology masquerading as political rationale, and shrewd self-interest dressed as charity, fraternity, and idealism. The ubiquitous Slavic-Orthodox formula should be reexamined on its intellectual merits and as a political axiom which presages conflict among the Western powers and Russia. Though many contemporary commentators tell us that Russia's relations with the Serbs are determined, as they supposedly have been in the past, by their Slavic origins and shared allegiances to the Orthodox Church, they rarely tell us why this is so. Perhaps this is because the historical record in the notoriously complex and contradictory Balkans tells a very different story.

 

RUSSIA AND THE BALKANS IN HISTORIC PERSPECTIVE

Long-standing cultural and religious links among the Eastern and Southern Slavs are as old as the coming of Christianity to the Slavic peoples. Under Prince Vladimir (a saint in the Orthodox tradition), Kievan Rus' was converted in the tenth century, somewhat later than the Balkan Slavs. Cultural contacts in the early medieval period were rooted in the traditions and practices of Eastern Christianity, and based on a shared liturgical language of South Slavic derivation introduced by the Salonikan brothers, the beloved Slavic apostles Saints Cyril and Methodius, in the late ninth century. Relations were conducted at first with the mediation of Byzantium, and these ties ebbed and flowed with the political fortunes of the feudal principalities of Serbia, Bulgaria, and (after the Mongol sack of Kiev in 1240) Muscovy, with cultural influences usually flowing on a south to north course from the Balkan lands nearer to the wealth of Constantinople. With the waning of the Mongol threat in Russia, and the rise of the Ottoman power in the Balkans in the 14th and 15th centuries, the southern Slavs and their more numerous northern cousins found their positions basically reversed. Despite the dynastic ties, cultural affinities, and shared religion, none of these early contacts had much effect on the situation of the hard-pressed South Slavic princes or their downtrodden subjects.

The rise of the axiomatic Russo-Balkan (or Russo-Serb) connection belongs to the modern era, but it is impossible to fathom without reference to the long period of Turkish domination of the Balkans. Ottoman armies snuffed out the medieval Serbian kingdom after the legendary Battle of Kosovo in 1389, and progressively subjugated the remaining Serbian feudatories in the decades that preceded the sack of Constantinople in 1453, and the fall of the Bosnian kingdom ten years later. For hundreds of years subsequently, the Serbian lands were integral parts of the Ottoman Empire, along with all of Bosnia and Hercegovina (until 1878), and sizable chunks of Croatia and Hungary too (until the late 17th century). Yet the memory of independence and medieval power lived on in the institution of the Serbian Orthodox Church, whose clergy and hierarchy (whether in Ottoman or Habsburg territory) carefully nurtured the cult of Serbian statehood among the faithful and looked to Orthodox brethren in Russia for material and spiritual assistance. The Orthodox church became a sort of surrogate state structure which survived and even flourished under the Turkish system of political division according to religious creed. This model of preserving and propagating the national idea was successfully transplanted to the Habsburg monarchy as well after the mass Serbian migration to southern Hungary (today's Vojvodina, northern Serbia) in 1690. Evoking the precedent of early medieval contacts, and in the simple absence of a national state authority, Serb relations with Russia were conducted on a confessional basis, fortifying the church's role as representative of the nation and setting the stage for close church-state ties in the secular diplomacy of later centuries. The common religious tradition, and the loyalties it commands, has been a powerful factor in later Russian attitudes toward the Balkans, and remains so -- if in a latent form -- even today.

Just as Serbian subordination to the Turkish conquerors is the central motif of national frustration in Serbian history, so the role of Russia as chief sponsor of the 19th century struggle to overturn the centuries-old order is the key to the continuing Serb fascination with Russia, and the legendary Russian role in the country's past. The idea of Russian aid and protection for the Orthodox and Slavic subjects of the Ottoman empire was alive in the minds of many Balkan Christians, but attempts to interest the tsars in the plight of their co-religionists in the Balkans met with little success until Peter the Great. None of the early Russo-Serb contacts, however important for subsequent national traditions, left a great impression on Russian history or culture.

In fact, when Slavophile thinkers in the latter half of the nineteenth century discovered antecedents of their own ideas in the Russian past, an itinerant 17th- century Slavic cleric from the Balkans was elevated to an honored position in the pantheon of Slavic greats. Yet Juraj Krizanic, dubbed "the first pan-Slav" for the ideas he propagated in his lifetime (c. 1617-1683), was a Roman Catholic priest from Habsburg Croatia who undertook an illicit mission to Muscovy in 1658 against the orders of his superiors in the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide. ₁₅ This learned Croat priest failed in his bid to win the tsar to his ideas of Slavic reciprocity in the cause of Church reconciliation. Nor could he interest Alexei Mihailovich in making common cause with the Western nations in the struggle against the Turks, in order to lead the liberation of the Christian South Slavs from Muslim rule. Instead, he spent fifteen years in Siberian exile composing learned tracts in a composite Slavic language of his own design, developing his vision of a common Slavic future free of foreign cultural and political domination. It is doubtful whether his chief manuscript ever came to the attention of the great reformer of Russia, Peter the Great (as some scholars have argued), but his ideas have certainly appealed to thinkers inside and outside of Russia ever since. No classic Russian history text fails to make mention of his quixotic quest. As the famous Russian historian V 0. Kliuchevskii wrote, Krizanic was a man of many talents, but "above all a patriot, more precisely, a passionate pan-Slav." ₁₆

It is remarkable, considering the established ties between the Russian and Serbian churches and the later glorification of Russo-Serb traditional links, that it was precisely this unsung Croat priest who became a source of wonder and fascination for 19th century Pan-Slavs -- men who were much concerned with Russia's status in the world, Russian influence in the Balkans, and the cause of the downtrodden South Slavs, all of which also obsessed Krizanic in the 17th century. More extraordinary still is that these ideas ever occurred to a man from his milieu. Yet such was the attraction of cultural and linguistic similarity, and - more importantly -- the pressure of political expediency, that early modern Croatia could indeed produce such an idealistic figure, obsessed with Russia even absent the powerful impulse of religious community. Krizanic's story provides clues to the attraction of Russia for so many other petitioners from the Balkans whose motivations may not have been so well-articulated, activities so well-documented, or ideas so well-studied. Juraj Krizanic, it is quite clear, was enamored in the first place with Russian power. Like those of most other pilgrims, clad usually in the mantle of Orthodox piety and Slavic fraternity, Krizam.c's priestly robes also concealed less exalted and more self-interested goals.

Whatever the effect of various South Slavic petitions to the tsars in the centuries before Catherine the Great's abortive "Greek Project", Russian rulers were never moved by emotional arguments alone. In the shifting sands of European hostility and alliance, no number of emotional appeals from pious Balkan clerics could move the tsar like a guarantee of friendship or neutrality from a powerful neighbor or competitor. During the entire period of Russian southward expansion against the Ottoman empire, Russia's immediate interests always lay along her borders, whether in the Ukraine and southern Russia, the Crimea, or the Baltic region. Only with the intensification of the Russo-Turkish imperial competition in the 18th century did the plight of the Balkan Christians become a matter of political import in Russia, and then essentially as a convenient tool of pressure on the Porte. Peter the Great first took an active interest in the South Slavs, and not only the Orthodox. ₁₇ Peter appealed to the anti-Ottoman and pro-Russian sentiments of the Montenegrins in 1711 (calling on their Croat neighbors as well), but his attempt to rally the Balkan Christians failed and invading Russian armies suffered a debacle on the river Prut. Thereafter, Peter turned his attentions to the Baltic area and the Great Northern War with Sweden which became the hallmark of his reign.

Later in the century under Catherine II, Bessarabia and the Danubian area, and the whole coast of the Black Sea again became objects of Russian desire, a course of expansion which collided with the Muslim and Ottoman south and awoke visions of Russian reoccupation of Constantinople for the Christian Orthodox world. This occurred independently of the hopes of the long-suffering Balkan Slavs, and Russian policy was carried out without regard for the intentions of Balkan leaders, though South Slavic dreams of liberation from foreign rule could be powerfully linked to homegrown theories of Russia messianism later on. ₁₈ Furthermore, the attraction of the Straits had more mundane benefits for Russian rulers concerned with military strength and the European balance of power, as well as Black Sea security. Yet Russian actions in the Balkans, if not Russian ambitions, were always dependent upon and circumscribed by general international conditions, as well as limited by the actual Russian ability to project power (witness Peter the Great's failed Balkan expedition). In light of fundamental geographical facts and international realities, Russian adventures further afield were a corollary to the basic rule of imperial engagement along Russia's extensive borders.

Another constant of Russian foreign policy after Peter, the idea of Russian protection of the rights of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, was wielded to great effect following the controversial 1774 peace with the Ottomans. The Kuchuk Kainarji treaty was the thin end of a wedge that would be used as leverage over the Turks in subsequent diplomatic and military maneuverings in the Balkans and elsewhere. Yet the idea was little more than a function of Russian military and territorial designs, or, since not all of Russia's European rivals were prepared to concede Russian dominance in the Balkans, complicated alliance strategies. For all the South Slavs' appeals to Russia or Russian attempts to turn the Orthodox Slavs against the Turks, their relations were subordinated to greater Russian strategic and military plans. In fact, Catherine the Great's scheme to divide the Ottoman Empire and revive Byzantium conceded the western Balkans, Serbia and Bosnia Hercegovina included, to the Habsburgs. Imperial planners focused their attention on the Ottoman possessions along the shores of the Black Sea, while in European affairs Poland became a prime concern which dogged successive Russian emperors.

Despite the failure of Russian emperors to make good on the promise of Russian aid in the previous century, during the Napoleonic Wars of changing coalition partners and shifting battlefields various parties in Serbia and Montenegro again looked to Russia for support for their local ambitions. So it was that Russian and Montenegrin troops jointly fought the French (and Austrians) on the southern Adriatic coast, even besieging the still nominally independent Republic of Dubrovnik in 1806, in an attempt to prevent Napoleon's armies from occupying the extinct Venetian Republic's possessions in the eastern Adriatic. The Montenegrins had their sights set on the Bay of Kotor with its ancient urban settlements, territory that would repeatedly elude their grasp until Tito's revolutionary Yugoslavia finally united the entire coastal strip with the interior in 1945. But Russian activities in the Balkans regularly assumed significance to distant Slavic cousins in inverse proportion to their importance for Russian strategy, always grander and yet more subtle than coarse Balkan politicians (or partisan chroniclers of events) cared to realize or admit.

Russia's reputation as patron of the Balkan peoples was cemented in the 19th century when strategic factors converged powerfully with ever-present emotional arguments to present Russian leaders with attractive options that could further imperial ambitions in the Balkans and elsewhere. The Christian revolts against crumbling Ottoman Turkish rule could be beneficial for Russia in an era when the tradition of strategic southward expansion along the Black Sea coast -- and toward the Turkish Straits -- was already well-established in Russian foreign policy (and greatly feared in certain European capitals). Yet Russia's Balkan thrust represented only one of several parallel directions of imperial expansion in the Caucuses, Central Asia, and Siberia. Moreover, it included several local components which were not easily reconciled. Following the inescapable logic of geography, Russia gained a territorial foothold in the Balkans in Bessarabia in 1812, and in the Romanian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia. Thereafter Russian Balkan policy always affected, first of all, the Danubian principalities. ₁₉ Similarly, the Bulgarian lands represented the easiest road to the legendary gates of Constantinople. Other Balkan lands presented other possibilities, or just problems, for Russian foreign policy. Despite the uproar they caused in European capitals, neither the Serbian risings (1804, 1815) nor the Greek revolt (1821) enjoyed official Russia's unqualified support, to say nothing of impetus. Nor was Russian involvement always entirely satisfactory for the aspirations of the insurgents in Serbia. Karadorde Petrovic's rebels recognized the authority of the Porte in 1806 at the urging of St. Petersburg, and only the Turkish declaration of war against Russia in December revived the Serbian insurrectionists' more ambitious plans. Napoleon's ill-starred invasion of 1812 naturally turned Russian attention away from Balkan conflicts, and the Turks drove out the leaders of the uprising the following year. The second, Obrenovic-led Serbian uprising in 1815 achieved modest gains for the Serbians, but the Serbian affair remained unresolved at the time of the Greek rising in 1821. ₂₀

As in previous centuries, international conditions and domestic realities circumscribed Russian options even in this legendary period of Russian engagement on behalf of the Balkan peoples, Slavic or not. Despite the best efforts and desires of various Balkan warlords, Russian behavior often disappointed them. All the Greek and Serbian and Montenegrin blood and tears spilt in the preceding years could not deter Emperor Nicholas I from concluding an alliance with the Porte in 1833 which for a short time at least (until 1841) assured Russian advantage over the other Great Powers in the Bosphorus and Dardanelles and gave the Turks the promise of Russian favor in the face of threats from other quarters. At the same time, Nicholas pursued the Alexandrine policy of close cooperation with the other autocratic European dynasties in Prussia and Austria, upon which the European order of the Vienna Congress had been founded. This assured the status quo in Central Europe, especially in turbulent Poland, and represented a constellation of Great Power amity not likely to work to the advantage of ambitious politicians in little Serbia or any other upstart Balkan province. The notorious Russian intervention during the revolutionary upheaval in Europe in 1848 showed how durable was the love between Vienna and St. Petersburg, while the 1856 settlement of the Crimean War put an end to thoughts of Russian primacy in Ottoman affairs and ushered in a period of Russian lethargy in Balkan affairs, as imperial armies looked to more exotic prizes further east.

In short, the political history of 19th century Europe presents no more reasonable arguments for the centrality of Serbia in Russian geo-political designs than do previous eras. In fact, the principal direction of tsarist expansion in the Balkans, as before, lay not through Serbia and Bosnia-Hercegovina (under Habsburg control by 1878) toward the Adriatic coast, but along the Black Sea Coast toward the Turkish Straits. Though Russia had declared war on the Ottomans in 1877 following the uprisings in Bosnia and Hercegovina, and the consequent war with Serbia and Montenegro, when Russia dictated terms to the defeated Turks in 1878 the result was a Great Bulgaria -- not a Great Serbia. Notably too, Russia failed to impose its will on the other European Great Powers at this time, and the Russian imposed Treaty of San Stefano was overturned by the Berlin Congress. Ottoman Turkey may have been Europe's chronically sick man in the decades preceding the First World War, but its continued existence served the interests of other Great Powers (as it had served Russia's interests in the first half of the century), and no amount of Balkan conniving and Russian sponsorship was able to upset the existing balance of power, such as it was.

It is also difficult to show a consistent Russian preference for Serbia and Serbian political ambitions in the Balkans over those of its neighbors (whether Slavic, Orthodox, or both). Russia has always been confronted with rival national claims which common origins or common religion could not (and still cannot) mediate. The political aspirations of individual kindred national groups, especially the Serbs and Bulgars (the case of Montenegro is special, and more recently Macedonia too, but for different reasons), have been mutually contradictory and antagonistic. The Russians have never been prepared to back the Serbs' cause against their ever-present regional enemies, to say nothing of the Great Powers, blindly or unconditionally. Imperial Russian strategy could count on several supports in the Orthodox and Slavic Balkans in the 19th century: in Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Yet the latter two have been in constant competition and conflict, especially over Macedonia, practically since independence. Serbia and Bulgaria were the first Balkan Slavic states to fight one another under their own flags in the modern era (1885), and warred three times over Macedonia in the 20th century, falling out first over the spoils of the First Balkan War, and fighting on opposite European coalitions in each of the subsequent world wars. In both the First and Second World Wars, Bulgaria played a key role in breaking the resistance of Serbian and (in 1941) Yugoslav armies. Indeed, the national interests and ideologies of Serbia and Bulgaria are basically incompatible, as their history of armed clashes in this century has demonstrated. Slavism and Orthodoxy have little helped to heal the divisions that geographic proximity and political competition engender.

The dubious axiom of Russian-Serb political solidarity also cannot account for the intricacy of the Balkan Slavs' historical relationships with the rest of Europe, to say nothing of 19th century Russia's own notoriously close links with the conservative autocracies of Central Europe, Prussia (and after 1871, Germany) and Austria. The Serbs have always looked West. The political tract upon which all subsequent Great Serbian ambitions have been based, the famous "Nacertanije" of Serbian foreign minister Ilija Garasanin (1844), was in fact conceived in the Polish émigré circles of Prince Czartoryski, in part as an anti-Russian program. The inspiration for every subsequent modern notion of Serbian expansion in the Balkans, until the present day, the much-abused "Nacertanije" was originally a programmatic text for Serbian autonomous development as a regional Balkan power center under the Karadordevices. This plan presumably precluded Serbian dependence on Austrian or Russian tutelage. Nevertheless, Milan Obrenovic proclaimed Serbia a kingdom in 1882, but only after doing a secret deal with Vienna in which the Serbian government promised to turn its attentions away from Habsburg-occupied Bosnia-Hercegovina to Macedonia, which Russia, in turn, had promised Bulgaria but failed to deliver in 1878.

Neither were the ideas of Slavic national solidarity and Orthodox religious community the only bases upon which representatives of the small nations of southeast Europe could be inspired to look for aid to the powerful Slavic North. At the same time that Russia was maturing in the role of political patron of the Orthodox nations of the embattled Balkan peninsula, Slavic or not, Mother Russia was also a magnet for would-be liberators of Balkan lands further west. The Croat revolutionary Eugen Kvaternik, who was killed in an abortive rising against Austrian rule in the Croatian Military Frontier in 1871, emigrated from Habsburg Croatia to Russia in 1858. Though he was sorely disillusioned by his reception in a St. Petersburg establishment suspicious of his Roman Catholic background and Austrian passport, he became a Russian subject and, for a time, a Russian diplomatic agent in Central Europe before throwing up his hands and abandoning all contacts with his Russian intermediaries in 1860. Kvaternik eventually took his cause to the West, seeking support for Croat independence among Polish, Italian, and French sympathizers and fellow nationalists. His doomed rebellion, launched in the solidly Orthodox hinterland where Kvaternik expected to find ready support for his anti Habsburg plans, set a precedent for Croat revolt against Austria as well as romantic sacrifice for the sacred national goal.

The attraction of Russia for advocates of liberation from foreign rule even affected the much-glorified and much-maligned Ante Starcevic, Kvaternik's one time collaborator and the acknowledged father of integral Croat nationalism. ₂₁ Starcevic, a bitterly anti-Habsburg politician, ideologue, and satirical writer, underwent a distinct Russophile period as a result of the Russian war against Turkey in 1877-78. Doubtful of support from France, whose revolutionary traditions he most admired, troubled by the ascendance of a Germany which underwrote Habsburg oppression, disappointed by Turkey's continued inability to solve its own myriad problems, and suspicious of the clever opportunism of England, Starcevic concluded that Russia was the only hope to break Vienna's hold on Croatia. Only Russia, under whose auspices several oppressed Balkan nations had achieved independence, could possibly offer aid for the proponents of a free Croatia. For a time it seemed that "the Cossack hoof on the Viennese pavement," in the oft- quoted words of one of Starcevic's followers, would decide the Croat question too. Losing hope in a quick change in the European balance of power, Starcevic eventually concluded that only war among the Great Powers could provide the opportunity for Croat freedom. For this rationalist thinker, coldly calculated geo political arguments were more important than traditional concepts of cultural affinity or religious communion. Other 19th century Russo-Croat contacts on the cultural plane, though perhaps less expressly political, were not necessarily uncharged by ideology or free of controversy either. ₂₂

A documented Croat fascination with Russia, however surprising or apparently unrealistic, is comparable to the more well-attested Serb traditional Russophilism for its romanticizing of Russia and attraction to Russian power. Various nineteenth century manifestations in Croatian history, like that of Krizanic several centuries before (and others since), provide an unconventional perspective on the fascination with Russia among the Balkan nations. ₂₃ The hopes and dreams of Croat Russophiles may have been more fanciful than their Serbian or Bulgarian (or Montenegrin or Macedonian) counterparts, perhaps, and they have certainly been slighted by the historical profession, in Russia as in the West. But the force of conviction, as well as the political pragmatism which often accompanied it, should not be overlooked. Even those who could not refer to their Slavic and Orthodox pedigrees when brought before the agents of the mighty Russian throne consistently looked to Russia~ A common thread in all cases was the belief that Russian intervention in the councils of the European Great Powers was of more than passing importance in the domestic struggles for self-rule and national autonomy. The Croat experience contradicts the idea that Russophilism is an exclusively Orthodox Slavic preserve and suggests that the motivations for Slavic-Orthodox solidarity are not necessarily as self-evident as their numerous advocates would argue. Moreover, the Russian responses to Croat overtures through history, though they served to inspire little confidence in Russian political goodwill, were varied and sympathetic enough to demonstrate the pluralism of attitudes on international affairs (or political or national ideas) among the Russian elite. Passionate debates on all the major questions of Russian politics, culture, and society were axiomatic in 19th century Russian intellectual life. Certainly, many cultural and emotional factors accumulated over the long centuries of mutual church contacts favored Russian sympathy for the Orthodox Slavs in the Balkans. Yet as the record of 19th century diplomacy attests, such ideas never won easy or unanimous approval in the Russian establishment. More importantly, sectarian feelings or Slavic reciprocity alone never dictated Russian foreign priorities, nor for that matter, did they exercise exclusive influence on Serbian politicians.

If Russia never favored Serbia to the exclusion of its Balkan rivals, neither was 19th century Serbia wholly subservient to Russian interests. Only after the anti Obrenovic coup of 1903 (which scandalized Europe by the vicious murders and defenestration of the last Obrenovic king and his wife), did Belgrade's sympathies shift decisively in Russia's favor and lock Serbia on a course of confrontation with Vienna that precipitated the world war. The Habsburgs' annexation of Bosnia Hercegovina in 1908 threw up a further obstacle to Serbian expansion, and raised another logical argument for eventual conflict. Russia had not yet recovered from the disastrous effects of war with Japan and revolutionary upheaval at home, before the Young Turk revolution provided a pretext for assertion of Austro-Hungarian privilege in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Arguably, were the crisis not so badly handled by the Russian foreign minister Izvolskii, who struck a sterile bargain with his Austrian counterpart leading to Russian humiliation through German mediation, Russian politicians and generals may not have felt compelled to react as they did in 1914. ₂₄ When another Habsburg ultimatum threatened to bring mighty Russia low before the united German front in Central Europe, the Russians acted to protect the honor of their monarch and their empire -- not to save plucky Serbia from the clutches of German imperialism.

The debates about the causes of the Great War of 1914, like the intricate play of international relations in the 19th century which preceded it, are too extensive to recount. What is certain though, is that the first shots were fired in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914, by Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb who felt sure that his homeland belonged to Serbia. The four years of European war not only rewrote the political geography of Central and Eastern Europe, occasioning the passing of German, Habsburg, and Russian empires, but reshuffled Serbia's foreign policy orientations fundamentally. Serbia's chief prewar rival and enemy, Austria- Hungary, was gone, while as a result of the Russian revolutions and eventual civil war, Serbia lost its main sponsor and supporter as well.

 

YUGOSLAVIA AND THE SOVIET UNION SINCE 1918

The subsequent course of 20th century political history brought the definite political estrangement of the "traditional allies," Russia and Serbia. In a sense, neither existed any longer. Old Russia gave way to the revolutionary Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a Russian-dominated ideological empire now shyly dressed in a federalist fig leaf. By 1918, little Serbia had realized all the goals of various national prophets who had labored through centuries of Turkish tyranny, Habsburg rule, and international indifference to win the western Balkans for Serbia, amassing an impressive record of territorial expansion along the way. All this was finally achieved only as the Russian empire, the mythic sponsor of Serbian liberation, had floundered in war and disappeared in revolution. Imperial St. Petersburg, mutating from Petrograd to Leningrad finally, was replaced in the Bolshevik order by the old tsarist seat of power in Moscow. Russia's new rulers looked anxiously, not toward the Balkans, the rebellious Slavs, and the Straits, but toward the restless working classes in Germany and Central Europe and the revolutions they should lead. As a result of its ideological tenets and the fundamental shift in Russian foreign policy priorities, Central European affairs (read: Germany) were to dominate Bolshevik foreign policy throughout the next two decades, further marginalizing the old Balkan ties. ₂₅

As a result of changed conditions caused by European war and revolutionary upheaval, no axiom of Moscow-Belgrade political cooperation can be posited based on 20th century experience. Since 1918, Soviet and Yugoslav policies have more often been at odds than not. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (commonly, and after 1929 officially, Yugoslavia) reckoned on Anglo-French support against a defeated Germany and Sovietized Russia between the wars, participating in the various French-sponsored alliance projects meant to cement the Versailles order against Habsburg recidivism in Hungary, resurgent imperialism in Germany, or the incursion of chaotic forces of Bolshevism from Russia. King Alexander's conservative regime took a decidedly hostile attitude toward the new order in Soviet Russia, which feelings were duly reciprocated. Yugoslavia harbored large numbers of tsarist emigres, and Belgrade became a center of émigré Russian life and culture. The Soviet regime was consequently bitterly antagonistic toward this "creature of Versailles," an attitude reflected in the policies of the Communist International which essentially ordered the revolutionary destruction of Yugoslavia and independence for its constituent peoples from 1924 until 1935. Interwar Moscow was more likely to look with favor on the national movements of the Croats and other disaffected minorities than on Belgrade's centralist regimes, whose policies were determined to safeguard the fruits of long-awaited and Serbian-led "liberation and unification" of the South Slavs. ₂₆

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes after 1918 was a patchwork of historically distinct territories with precious few cultural affinities or political traditions held in common with independent and ascendant Serbia. Among other South Slavic national communities, the Croats in the first place, the much-vaunted "reunification" with their "fraternal" neighbors (in the language of unitarist ideologues) looked less like the culmination of some inevitable historical process than the beginning of a new term of service under a different foreign crown. The only important South Slavic leader to flirt with Moscow in the interwar period was the revered Croat politician Stjepan Radic, whose Croat Peasant Party led the democratic national movement in opposition to Serbian-dominated governments until the demise of royal Yugoslavia. ₂₇ Radic traveled to Soviet Russia in 1924 hoping to interest Moscow in his plans for a Croat peasant republic. His overture to the Bolshevik regime was a tactical gambit that came on the heels of similar, unsuccessful sojourns to Western capitals, and yielded little more than the entry of his party into the (Red) Peasant International. ₂₈ Radic' s formal accession to the Comintern's subsection for non-Communist agrarian parties in Europe was obviated the following year when his party entered the Yugoslav government. Radic's escapade can be ascribed to a number of impulses more important than his attraction to the propaganda of worker-peasant revolutionary solidarity: his own deeply-held Slavophilic views (he spoke Russian perfectly, and had traveled to Russia in 1888, 1896, and 1904), desperation at the lack of sympathy for his ideas in London and Paris, or simple desire to pressure the Alexandrine regime by conjuring visions of alliance with one of its worst enemies. Still, his trek was in keeping with a long and frustrating Croat tradition of appeals to Russian support. That his effort failed to bear fruit is also in keeping with that tradition, though there was no lack of enthusiasm from the Soviet-Russian side.

Things did not improve under the royal dictatorship of King Alexander, inaugurated in January 1929 after the assassinations of Stjepan Radic and several of his lieutenants in the Belgrade parliament the previous summer. Even after King Alexander's murder in 1934, at the hands of Macedonian and Croat revolutionaries working in common, Soviet-Yugoslav relations remained icy. In the late 1930s moreover, the typically Serbian-led government of Prime Minister Milan Stojadinovic brought the country dangerously close to the Axis fold in foreign policy and to fascist models of political conduct at home, while continuing an anti-Soviet policy which delayed mutual diplomatic contacts until 1940, after Stojadinovic's fall. A Soviet-Yugoslav pact was belatedly signed in the night before German planes began bombarding Belgrade on April 6th 1941, in answer to the military coup which had removed the government which had signed the Axis Pact in March. German bombs drowned out the rousing Pravda reports of yet another Soviet foreign policy success. Hitler's Germany destroyed Yugoslavia in a matter of days and parceled out her remnants to various greedy neighbors.

The Second World War illustrates the full folly of historical theses of Russo Serb political reciprocity based on shared religion and Slavic culture. The wartime period is notable for the dominance of Soviet political propaganda on traditional, Slavic themes, and provides many examples of the facile (if influential) use of pan- Slavic propaganda in the service of particular policies, in this case, the defense of the Stalinist system and the Soviet state against the rampant Nazi threat. The Soviet Communists' ringing calls to the enslaved Slavic nations of Europe for support in the common struggle against German fascism, portrayed in propaganda as the implacable enemies of all Slavdom (with Russia, naturally, at its head), were basically self-serving historical caricatures. Still, the old slogans had resonance in some quarters. The obvious irrelevance of such emotional appeals to all those groups in Slavic lands who collaborated with the occupiers for whatever reasons (whether in Croatia and Serbia, Slovakia and Ukraine, or elsewhere), did not deter the embattled Soviet leadership from quite effectively utilizing this approach.

Among Tito's Partisans in occupied Yugoslavia, the Soviet Slavic campaign had tremendous local significance, despite the contradictions with interwar political realities. As both the Soviet and Yugoslav Communists fully appreciated, "the masses" could be swayed more effectively to the Communist side by appeals to traditional themes and traditional patriotism, in which until-recently proscribed religion also played a role. It took some convincing for Tito to be won over to the Stalinist line of broad-based "anti-fascist" and "national liberation" struggle, but the lessons, once learned, were competently executed. As often as possible, non- Communist spokesmen brought the message to the equally non-Communist masses. Vladimir Nazor, the eminent Croat poet who abandoned occupied Zagreb in 1942 to join the Partisans, masterfully played the chords of martial defiance, Slavic pride, and loyalty to the wartime icons, Stalin and Tito, in his Partisan poems and motivational speeches. In 1944, the elderly, bespectacled Nazor, as unlikely a Balkan warrior as can be imagined, addressed an assembly in the Serb-populated town of Glina and delivered a rousing oration about Ilya Muromets, the peasant- giant and hero of Russian folklore. Evoking images of bygone Kievan Rus' and its mythical glory, Nazor briefly paused to rue its passing, before connecting the sacred memory of medieval Russia with the Red Army's epic struggle of the day, to the evident excitement of his rustic listeners:

Everything has disappeared, but I think that Ilya Muromets -- that Russian power, that symbol of the peasants and workers, that giant, who carries in one hand a plow, with which he can plow furrows from the Dnieper to the Volga, and in the other a club, with which he can open mountain passes -- still lives in the city of Kiev. He is marching again, no longer to the East, but to the West. He will, comrades, cross not only the river Dnieper, but the Dniester too in a few paces. He will come to the Carpathians and step over them. Some hearts will be set atremble out of fear, ours, out of joy. (Mirth and applause. Shouts: The sooner the better!). ₂₉

Not only was Nazor's oratory vastly more comprehensible to the average Serb peasant than the strident and overblown Communist propaganda pamphlets, but it was all the more powerful for the simplicity and skill with which he delivered his message of hope and victory, spiced with references to cherished old legends.

Soviet propaganda theses were faithfully repeated in Partisan Yugoslavia, but were also powerfully seconded by Partisan statements on the idea of "brotherhood and unity" among the South Slavic peoples, projected founders of the constituent republics of a new, federated Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav Communists, ever since the Comintern's strategic flip-flop in 1935, had supported Yugoslav state unity leavened by insistence on national rights. This turned out to be a winning formula abroad and at home, especially in the situation of overlapping fratricidal wars which the collapse and partition of Yugoslavia had set in motion. The Soviet and Yugoslav agit-prop experts pulled out all the historical stops, appealing not only to the latent popular fascination with Russia among the Serb and Montenegrin masses, but even trotting out the obscure example of Juraj Krizanic, in the interpretation of a young Russian scholar, and republishing Stjepan Radic's impressions of his trip to the Soviet Union from 1924. ₃₀ So it was that Krizanic's ideas became a propaganda piece in the service of the Soviet war effort, while Radic's description of Soviet Russia became an argument in Tito's campaign to overcome peasant and "bourgeois" opposition in Croatia to his revolution born of resistance to the Axis occupiers.

Of course, much more relevant counterarguments to the ubiquitous appeals to Slavic solidarity could be found at every turn. The bloody internecine struggles among Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims and others on the territory of defunct Yugoslavia offered ample contradictions to utopian Communist prattling. This might have been enough to discourage the propagandists, were the Communists not more passionately interested in the fruits of power which would accrue to them in the event of unlikely victory. Furthermore, not only did Bulgaria take part in the Axis dismemberment of Yugoslavia as Hitler's ally (providing bases for German armies which delivered the knock-out blow to the overmatched and underenthused Yugoslav Army with a thrust through Macedonia, most of which Bulgaria immediately occupied), but German forces in Serbia also found willing allies among the sizeable Russian émigré community which had found haven in royal Yugoslavia. Many returned the generous treatment they had enjoyed in the interwar period by collaborating with the Germans during the war, believing Axis victory would mean the rebirth of old Russia. Bulgarians garrisoned parts of Serbia throughout the Second World War, relieving German troops needed for the Soviet front, and causing much local resentment in Serbia. Significantly though, Bulgaria never declared war on the Soviet Union, nor were quisling Serbian troops deployed on the Eastern Front among Nazi Germany's minions, as were token forces of the Axis-created "Independent State of Croatia" and other allied units under German command. ₃₁

To make the picture complete, the typically Serbian-dominated and furiously Serb nationalist exile governments of Yugoslavia were arguably the most antagonistic (after the Poles) toward the Soviet Union. Many Serbs regarded the Soviet-backed Partisan movement of Josip Broz Tito as a CroatAed Communist conspiracy against Serbia because of its promises of political reform and national equality in a federated Yugoslavia, an idea which was anathema to royalist circles weaned on the tales of Serbian military might and manifest destiny of Balkan dominance. Even Stalin joined in this game. During a meeting with a Yugoslav delegation in early 1945, Stalin baited its head, the Croat Communist Andrija Hebrang, about the still unconstituted Tito-Subasic provisional government (a compromise solution meant to reconcile émigré politicians with Tito's supporters at home), by mentioning Churchill's doubts about the efficacy of such a Croat dominated body in postwar Yugoslavia. "Just the same, the English miscalculated, that is now evident," the wily dictator concluded, in an unmistakable reference to the Partisan military victory and Communist political dominance, assured through no small contribution by the Soviet Union. ₃₂

The course of Soviet-Yugoslav relations during the war also revealed that despite the vigor of the Communist-led Partisan movement, their ideological subservience to Moscow, and readiness to adopt the propaganda and every other Soviet wartime line, Stalin's priorities were ordered according to other criteria. As always, Russia's policy was determined by a calculation of Russia's interests. The demands of the Grand Alliance, the epic struggle against Nazi Germany, and overriding preoccupation with future Soviet security outweighed Soviet concern for the Partisan cause in Yugoslavia. Soviet armies were aimed squarely at the heart of Europe, on the road leading through Poland to Berlin, and Stalin was hesitant to confront the British in an area of their traditional concern before the defeat of Germany was secured. All of this marginalized the Balkans in Soviet plans and contributed mightily to the over-publicized and much-exaggerated conflicts which soured Tito's and his companions' ideal views of the Soviet Union, and brought them into conflict eventually with the Soviet leadership. ₃₃

From 1914 until 1945, along with changing geo-political imperatives, modern political ideologies thoroughly negated the influence of traditional Russian ties in the Balkans. Yet even the convergence of interest, ideology, and tradition demonstrated in the close wartime collaboration between the Yugoslav Communists and the Soviet Union was short-lived. Tito rebelled at Stalin's attempt to enforce Soviet supremacy in the Balkans in 1948, and the Yugoslav Communists blazed a postwar trail of "workers' self-management" at home and "non-alignment" abroad outside the confines of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet empire in East Europe. It is too much to describe the vagaries of Soviet-Yugoslav relations during the Tito years, before or after the break with Stalin in 1948, but it could safely be said that neither Slavic reciprocity nor Orthodox solidarity were relevant determinants in the foreign policy of the Tito regime, nor in the post-Stalin USSR.

In the history of Russia's relations with the South Slavs, never were links of blood and culture, or ties of religion and faith, sufficiently strong arguments for Russian action on behalf of one or another supplicant Slavic group when weighed against strategy, ideology, or simple immediate political or diplomatic considerations. At the same time, there were always those who argued for Russian action precisely on this basis. This is true from Peter the Great to Vladimir Zhirinovskii. The ties of tradition, like the emotions and allegiances they sometimes command, should not be denigrated nor ignored, as the consistent and loud rhetoric of conservative and rightist groups in the contemporary Russian Federation constantly warn. That these historic links exist, and were very deeply felt in certain quarters (intellectual, clerical, political), and often actualized in debates in various contexts, including the post-Soviet period, can be easily demonstrated. Yet that these ideas have been resurrected in Russia and Serbia is eloquent testimony only to their present political utility, not to their past historical validity.

Upon any reasonable analysis of Russian and Balkan history and their mutual contacts in the premodern and modern periods, theories of Slavism, however seductive, can be dispensed with as consistent explanatory frameworks for Russian foreign policy, if not for Russian-South Slavic interactions in other spheres. In the first place, no theory of predictable political reciprocity among Slavic nations can be reasonably constructed on the basis of Slavic solidarity. Russo-Polish relations in the last two-hundred odd years, or Serbo-Croat relations more recently, provide enough evidence to deter would-be proponents of that idea with even a slightly-refined sense of reality. Nor are national rivalries limited to cross-faith divides. Bulgaro-Serb relations, notoriously bad, and Ukrainian-Russian relations, notoriously convoluted, are also marked by serious ruptures, despite common confessional allegiances and church traditions shared by all these predominantly Orthodox nations. The experience of the Second World War reveals the perhaps unbridgeable chasms that divide the Slavic nations. Indeed, conflict among Slavs is perhaps more the rule than cooperation. No theory of Slavism can reconcile divisions born of geographic proximity, concomitant political rivalry and, especially more recently, economic competition.

The Slavic card aside, it is difficult to argue for the importance of the religious element in inter-state relations in an era when the Orthodox churches were chained, and deeply infiltrated, by the Communist regimes in the respective Balkan and East European states. The idea of cooperation among officially atheist governments on the basis of common religious traditions is rather ludicrous. The impossible position of the East European Orthodox churches after the Second World War may not have been obvious in Western countries. But as national churches with long traditions of cooperation with or subordination to the respective secular governments, the Orthodox communities were little likely to successfully oppose or contradict governments so sharply antagonistic to religion in the long term, and were more prone to collaboration with the powers-that-be. This partly accounts for the Orthodox churches' practiced coziness with post-Communist regimes in Russia and Serbia, and may also go a long way in explaining the vocal support in the Serbian Orthodox Church for radical nationalist programs. The contemporary dovetailing of religion and politics, so typical for the Eastern Orthodox world, is no more fortunate for its familiarity, especially having resulted in the birth of a peculiar and virulent strain of contemporary nationalism, anathema to Western concepts of political pluralism and cultural and religious tolerance.

 

RUSSIA, SERBIA AND THE WEST: FROM 1991 TO 1994 AND BEYOND

Throughout history, Russia's behavior in Balkan questions has been determined, in the main, by calculation of Russia's strategic interest and limited by Russia's responsibilities in international politics. The sum of traditional ties was a useful corollary at certain times, but was always subordinated to geo-political laws: military factors, diplomatic priorities, territorial appetites, basically, the usual stuff of Great Power rivalry, including the issue of regime prestige. Even were this not so, the political history of the Balkans casts much doubt on the idea that it is possible for Russia to act as sponsor of the political designs of the Orthodox Slavs considering the divisions among them. Thinkers and leaders among the South Slavic peoples truly looked to Russia for support and aid in their early struggles and later victories against the Turks, and the help that was occasionally extended assured that the cult of Russia became strong in Montenegro, Serbia, and Bulgaria. But since Russian policy never placed Balkan questions in prime place without immediate reason, or to the exclusion of other areas of vital Russian interest, neither can Russian involvement in the Balkans be bound up inextricably with the fate of the South Slavic nations. Judging by the record, Russia's Balkan policy today will not be dictated by woolly notions of Slavic reciprocity and Orthodox solidarity, but by real Russian interests and priorities. The most likely policy for Russia in the Balkans (and in this judgment history concurs) is that which best conforms to Russian aims, and Russian possibilities, by definition limited, in any given period. Whether these goals also correspond to the desires and designs of Balkan leaders in whatever country is another question, and always has been.

Here of course is the rub for contemporary diplomacy in the crises in ex Yugoslavia. Whatever the instances of Russo-Serbian (or Russo-Bulgarian or Russo-Croat) political cooperation or cultural affinity, and whatever importance these events had in their time and in the context of specific crises, no historical pattern based on traditional ties of religion and culture emerges which might somehow dictate Russian policy toward the South Slavs in the future -- or today. That course will be charted, as in the past, according to immediate diplomatic realities and strategic imperatives, leavened with domestic pressures in this age of public opinion and information technology. The Russian shift in Balkan policy is primarily a result of internal political changes, but is not therefore irrelevant to international affairs, whether in the ex-Soviet space, Eastern Europe, or elsewhere. Those who would summon Russia's armed might to save and liberate Serbia and threatened Orthodoxy from the nefarious designs of Germany and the Vatican are not concerned primarily with history (else they would write for learned journals, not sidewalk scandal sheets), but with politics, power, and the logic of international competition on a nineteenth century model. All of this has implications with which Western statesmen must be concerned, since the assertion of a natural Russian sympathy for the Serbs presupposes a Russian predilection for diplomatic support of Serbia in the ongoing conflicts even to the detriment of Western and especially American interests. Insofar as traditional Slavic-Orthodox arguments are advanced, they are necessarily rooted in political platforms with concrete, if not always advertised goals, either on the domestic front or internationally. All that said, it remains to ask: so what is the attraction of the ex-Yugoslav case to Russian nationalists?

Clearly, the anti-liberal and anti-Western politicians in contemporary Russia, when viewing the ex-Yugoslav situation and the Serb minorities in the newly- independent states, draw parallels with the situation of their own co-nationals in former Soviet republics, left stranded by the receding of empire in 1991. Russian nationalists of various shades have not concealed satisfaction with the preferred means of redressing "historical wrongs" (read: borders) in the Balkans or elsewhere. Nationalist critics of the Yeltsin administration's foreign policy have given prime place to Balkan affairs for a similar reason. "Their scenario is Yugoslavia: use force to crack down on republics and reestablish the empire or whatever you chose to call it,"the shrewd and flexible Andrei Kozyrev complained to Time magazine last year. ₃₄ Then the Russian foreign minister was referring to the ideas of Russian neo fascist and Communist leaders in a clearly negative tone. From today's perspective one may wonder about his sincerity. In any case, Russian relations with the former republics of the Soviet Union (like Russian treatment of minorities at home) will remain a major concern for Western leaders as well as post-Soviet politicians in Russia.

The loss of the Soviet empire also meant loss of international status and prestige, something which also never fails to rankle the "red-browns". The New York Times journalist Serge Schmernann summed up the situation nicely: "And even in the old days, it was less ethnic kinship than imperial ambition that guided Russia. Now it is less ethnic kinship than the loss of empire that bothers the Russians -- a resentment at the sight of former rivals romping unfettered in regions where, at other times, a more powerful Kremlin might have given them pause. ₃₅ Also, the response of the international community to the wars of the Yugoslav succession, whether led by Western countries hoping for regional stability or Muslim nations concerned about the fate of embattled co-religionists (in Bosnia Hercegovina, Kosovo, or the Sandzak region of Serbia), may be regarded as a precedent for future reactions to internal crises in the Russian Federation. United Nations meddling in Croatia or Macedonia, or NATO power exhibited in Iraq or Bosnia, is bound to give pause to Russian planners conscious of the possibility of future religious or national strife inside Russia's borders. Also, the Muslim fundamentalist factor is one which Bosnian Serb extremists have brazenly exaggerated, hoping to seduce West European chauvinists and neo-fascists, while positively thrilling the Russian right nervous about the demographic picture in the post-Soviet area. All things considered, it is not difficult to surmise why traditional ideological constructions, comfortable for nationalists in both camps and redolent of old battles, old camaraderie, and old biases, came to occupy a prominent place in ongoing Russian debates about the course of post-Communist Russian foreign policy.

Along with post-imperial trauma and the fear of precedents for international intervention, there are basic ideological affinities among Serb and Russian rightists. One skeptical and prescient commentary on Russia's new assertiveness in Bosnia in early 1994 correctly identified the hopes of the architects of Belgrade's Russian policy and urged the US leadership to "vigorously counter the hard-line effort in Moscow and Belgrade to use Bosnia as a way to play Russia off the US." The Christian Science Monitor further warned: "Clearly, the Serbs, led by Slobodan Milosevic, the most imaginative and ruthless politician in Europe, would like to pump up Russian nationalism and to have Moscow secure its ill-got gains in Bosnia." The deeper and more sinister link was also divined:

The line created by Russian troops in Sarajevo is not some vague cultural line between East and West; it is a line between the idea of liberal multi ethnic values -- and ethnic and fascist beliefs. In one sense, what Washington or London or Bonn would like to believe the Russian-Serb connection means is not the issue; the issue is what the Russians and Serbs themselves believe it to mean. The three-fingered Serb salute given by Russian troops to Serb troops this week as they jubilantly entered Bosnia says more than stacks of Western policy options and position papers do. The salute signals a shared "ethnic logic." It doesn't matter that a Serb-Russian Slavic brotherhood is historical fiction; for now the story has power in the minds of the people. The three-fingered salute suggests to both groups that what counts most is not human rights, community of nations, tolerance, and democracy -- but the use of power to subvert those considered ethnically inferior. ₃₆

This can be put in much more mundane terms: the Russian hard-liners like the way the Serbs do business. The brutal reality is that what most excites Russian "national-patriots" about the Serb cause are precisely the methods by which the Milosevic regime and its proxies in neighboring states have gone about settling the most vexing questions of the post-Communist (dis)order, particularly the explosive territorial disputes. ₃₇ The lesson for Western policy makers is not to rely on dubious historical constructions when dealing with Russia's present-day interests, whether in the Balkans or elsewhere. "Concern about Russian sensibilities must not cloud the issue of aggression [in ex-Yugoslavia]," wrote one analyst after musing over Russia's history of Balkan entanglements. "The Russian commitment to the Serbs has always been strong, but also always something of a bluff. At some point, Clinton should be prepared to call it. ₃₈

Remedies which some Serb faith-healers have prescribed for ethnically-mixed areas in parts of the former Yugoslavia are clearly (and not coincidentally) applicable in the post-Soviet Russian context as well. The crisis in Slavic-inhabited parts of Moldova along the Dniester river in 1992 foreshadowed murky Russian involvement in a number of intractable Caucuses disputes (Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia) which resemble the Balkan conflicts in intricacy, emotion, and the studied distance (and consequent impotence) of Western statesmen who dealt with them, if not for the direct threat to minority (Russian) populations. The Chechen crisis is only a new twist on an old formula. The Crimea is a likely crisis spot which has threatened to boil over into open hostilities before and may be put on the agenda again. Given the unpromising reality on the ground, Western attitudes and policy toward the Balkans are necessarily relevant to policy in the ex Soviet area as well. ₃₉

In Yugoslavia in 1991, the Yugoslav generals labored under the delusion that they could deploy their considerable military strength and crush all opposition in the republics quickly while the Western powers stood aside. In the wars of conquest launched by the Milosevic regime, the strategy of preemptive strikes, massive terror, and forced population exchanges has devastated the ex-Yugoslav area and little improved the situation of Serbs anywhere. This is especially true in the aftermath of Croatia's lightning retaliatory strike against the Serb rebels on its territory, which occasioned their massive flight from their homes. Russian generals in 1994 probably reasoned much like the Yugoslav generals while planning the expedition in Chechnya. Viewed from Zagreb, the Chechen crisis looked like a farcical repetition of the Croatian experience in 1991 in many respects, though clearly no one gave a thought to Western intervention this time. The Russian generals evidently did not learn the right lessons from the Yugoslav experience, and one wonders whether the politicians will.

Despite the outcry in the Russian parliament and press against the disastrous military campaign against Groznii, such methods have their unequivocal backers too. The notorious Vladimir Zhirinovskii has openly and loudly supported the Russian adventure in Chechnya. It is no coincidence that it was precisely Mr. Zhirinovskii who, on several previous trips to Belgrade and other areas of ex Yugoslavia, openly flirted with extremist Serb politicians, going so far as to deliver oratories in the ruins of towns shattered by the Yugoslav Army and its subordinate militias in 1991 and 1992. Vladimir Vol'fovich (as he is frequently and fondly referred to in a constant reminder of his non-Russian antecedents) inflamed the western Balkans with his incendiary rhetorical bombs in early 1994. One commentator noted at the time that Zhirinovskii's statements were so outrageous that he even managed to scare some of his own supporters with his bellicose speeches: "After a whirlwind tour of Serbia, during which he voiced support for the most extreme Serbian nationalists, Mr. Zhirinovsky recently told Russian lawmakers that any NATO strikes against Serbs would amount to an attack on Russia, and provoke a Third World War." ₄₀ Zhirinovskii visited areas forcibly occupied by Serb troops in the wars of the past several years, like Bijeijina in Bosnia and Vukovar in Croatia, both scenes of barbaric outrages against civilians and non combatants well-documented by world news media. The Russian leader's visit to Vukovar, which was basically leveled and emptied of its inhabitants after a vicious Yugoslav Army siege in the fall of 1991, was a particularly flagrant manifestation of right-wing indifference to the costs of exclusivist ideology and aggressive nationalism.

It is useful to recall the events of 1991 in Croatia, especially following the Chechnya crisis and the second round of the Croatian war which saw the utter destruction of the rebel Serbs. The case of Vukovar, which remains under Serb occupation, is still instructive. Once a charming baroque town on the Danube, dominated by its Catholic church on a hill, and inhabited by Croats, Serbs, Hungarians, Ukrainians (Rusyns), a handful of Germans, and other nationalities, Catholic and Orthodox, Vukovar endured a three-month Serb siege which ended in November 1991 with the town reduced to rubble, the non-Serb population expelled, and several hundred persons disappeared," liquidated under the noses of international aid workers ostensibly arrived to assure that no harm would come to the wounded and captured. Cyrus Vance, one-time UN mediator and among the first visitors to the destroyed town, was suitably horrified by the sight of the "Croatian Stalingrad," but seemed at a loss as to whose artillery had done the dirty work. He shook his head and went about his business -- diplomacy -- a process which, incidentally, has been continuing without marked improvement. The Serb manned guns, just like the ones on the heights above Sarajevo (or Tuzia or, until recently, Bihac) remain nearly three years after the siege of that one-time Olympic city began and despite the unleashing of NATO airstrikes against the Bosnian Serbs. In Vukovar meanwhile, UN peacekeepers (some from Russia), preside over an eerie calm among shell-marked ruins in the wrecked town, to which few non-Serb refugees have returned despite the terms of the UN peace plan which international troops were ostensibly enforcing in Croatia. In retrospect, it is more than obvious that Vukovar is the ghost of policies past and present, and likely -- future. The sight of a deserted Knin in Croatia, once the epicenter of Serb revolt, is also a commentary on the ultimate result of policies which Milosevic's stooges outside of Serbia have pursued.

The Russian assault on the Chechen capital evoked memories of the Serb pummeling of Vukovar for its awful brutishness, questionable tactical sense, incompetent organization and execution, and criminal disregard for considerable casualties both among civilians and the untrained troops sent into battle without proper training, support, or orders (the recent Croat offensive is remarkable for the absence of such errors). The Chechen model is pregnant with implications for the future: for inter-nationality relations in Russia and the CIS, for Russia's foreign policy, for the resolution of the crisis in ex-Yugoslavia, and for relations among the Great Powers. The adoption of this pattern of violence and resistance in the post- Soviet area is a worrying if not unforeseen development with still unclear and potentially cataclysmic consequences, especially if a similar form of warfare were to spread to an area like Crimea (which was dangerously close to a boiling point in the spring of 1994). The potential for mayhem in a border struggle over historical claims and minority rights between two nuclear-armed and politically fragile, even bad4empered regimes (with much accumulated mutual acrimony), need not be too strongly emphasized. The effect on international stability can also be imagined darkly.

The United States, Europe, and indeed Russia too, did not comprehend the destruction of Vukovar as the omen that it was at the time. The first war of Yugoslav succession, of which Vukovar was an exemplary part, was the precedent for the ongoing Bosnian catastrophe: for national exclusivism and brutality, for "ethnic cleansing," for de facto territorial partition, and for more war. The war in Bosnia-Hercegovina made the war in Croatia, bloody as it was, pale in comparison. The Balkan war which may eventually usurp the role now reserved for Bosnia in world affairs may similarly overshadow the present conflict, especially if the international community accedes to peace without justice or restitution in Bosnia Hercegovina. Yet the real catastrophe may yet be brewing elsewhere, as the scenes of a devastated Groznii intimate. Shifts in Russian internal politics have raised the stakes for doomsayers everywhere, as Zhirinovskii's disconcerting rhetoric has long and loudly warned. Calls for Russian support for Serbia based on traditional Slavic and Orthodox solidarity are the product of bogus reading of complex and contradictory history, but such slogans are not empty of all but emotion.

Those who argue for Russian alliance with Serbia against all her neighbors (and without regard to world opinion) regularly invoke dangerous precedents. Propagandists often point with great satisfaction to Russia's solidarity with Serbia against Austria-Hungary (and Germany) in the July crisis in 1914 as the model, the apogee of Russian support for Serbia. But while Serbia was expanding its borders to the Alps and the Adriatic as a result of the European conflagration, Russia descended into a hellish period of war, revolutions, civil war, and the rest, having bowed out of the original conflict in disarray and disgrace. It may be that only fools go where wise men fear to tread, but as Zhirinovskii and his ilk have taken no trouble to conceal, there are candidates for the job in Bosnia, in Chechnya, or anywhere else (say, Crimea). All of these crises have serious international implications, none as immediately inflammatory as the Balkans. William Pfaff captured the essence of the particularly potency of Balkan sparks: "The great danger of the Yugoslav war is that the Serbs succeed in imposing their own apocalyptic vision of a redivided and warring Europe upon everyone else drawn into the crisis. Thus far they have failed to do so." ₄₁ Yet considering the course of recent events, and changing political moods in Washington and Moscow, there is little comfort in assuming that the worst is impossible.

The anemic international response to post-Communist trouble in the world, from Vukovar to Groznii, has led sober observers to connect political and social malaise in industrial societies (manifested in bombastic, populist movements ranging from Ross Perot to Vladimir Zhirinovskii) with a moral crisis immediately relevant to the post-Cold War realignment in international politics. The failure of multilateral efforts to promote the ideals of Western civilization with unanimity and conviction, to say nothing of force, is relevant here. The NATO bombings in Bosnia, however extensive, do not qualify as long as they are coupled with plans for the final partition of the country and the abandonment of cherished Western ideals that the Sarajevo government has desperately championed. Charles Maier has suggested that Bosnia is to the world of today what Ethiopia or Spain, Austria or Czechoslovakia represented in the 1930s. "Once undertaken," he wrote, "the struggle against Nazism helped to expiate and overcome the moral crisis of the late 1930s. What equivalent recuperation will be possible now is not at all clear." ₄₂ Whether one accepts the author's arguments, it seems clear that incoherent and indecisive international reaction to global crises contributes greatly to their mismanagement, and is unlikely to discourage future flare-ups. Though Majer failed to connect rising "territorial populism" or neo-fascism in Europe with the course of conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia, his musings are not without application to the Russo-Serbian relationship, independent of the accuracy of the historical analogy. It seems apparent that events in the unfortunate Balkans are not an anachronism, but an omen. With the Russian Federation and other ex-Soviet spaces constantly offering new spins on old conflicts, it does not seem unrealistic to expect more warfare and greater instability, creating more occasions for Great Power division and disunity. If Vukovar was not worth fighting for, nor Sarajevo, and certainly not Groznii, what is?

Warnings of the spread of Balkan wars or blossoming Caucuses conflicts seem tame compared to the shades of (past and perhaps future) Great Power conflicts. The firebrand Zhirinovskii has directly and openly echoed the "apocalyptic vision" so dear to radical Serb nationalists, those primarily responsible for the worst carnage in Europe since the Second World War. The most extreme Serb nationalists have threatened to provoke world war over Serb territorial claims against their neighbors practically from the start of armed conflict in 1991, regularly suggesting a different historical parallel. They know the history of the Balkans well enough to know that this century's First World War was also sparked in Sarajevo, also involved Bosnia and Serbia's desire to claim it for her own, also drew in a reluctant Russia, and also came at a time when the world power balance was changing dynamically and in ways difficult to predict. Few have been listening to their ravings. After the leader of the LDPR made his rounds of ex-Yugoslav battlefields in 1994, more people began paying attention; or should have. True, the parallel to 1914, for Russia in any case, could hardly be less attractive. It should not be a story calculated to rouse Russian enthusiasm considering the decade of turmoil in Russia that began with all-European war. ₄₃ Yet propagandists from the Balkans, with more nerve than good sense, celebrate precisely this moment in Russo-Serbian relations as some sort of climactic historical moment. The cost of reckless pursuit of expansion measured in Serb lives, genuinely horrific, fades from memory. That suits Russian nationalists just fine, because the pursuit of a hard line in Balkan affairs has a clear internal application as well.

Some will say the world has changed much since 1914. But it is little different now than it was in 1991, when disaster engulfed the citizens of Vukovar, or 1992, when the siege of Sarajevo began, or 1994, when the frenzied Russian assault on Groznii was launched. The same forces which moved people then propel others now, and presumably will for some time to come. Statesmen ignore this fact at their peril, raising the costs of inevitable confrontation with attitudes and ideologies that perfectly negate the shared values upon which so many hopes for a peaceful future in Europe, east and west, are and have been based.

 

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Note 1: The phrase is Andref Kozyrev's. See "The Lagging Partnership," Foreign Affairs (May-June 1994), pp. 59-71. Back.

Note 2: Cited in Serge Schmemartn, "From Russia to Serbia, a current of sympathy," The New York Times (Jan. 31, 1993). [Source cited from the on-line database Nexis]. Back.

Note 3: William Pfaff, "On Boania, it matters that Russia and the West stick together," Internalional Herald Tribune (Aug. 5, 1994). [Nexis]. Back.

Note 4: See Tad Szulc, "Fear of Russia's ambitions rising in Eastern Europe Los Angeles Times (Nov.21, 1993). [Nexis]. Back.

Note 5: For a discussion of Russia's sew course, see Dimitri Simes, "The Return of Russian History," Foreign Affairs (1an.-Feb. 1994), pp.67-82. Back.

Note 6: Ken Fireman, "The cold peace; U.S., Russia: A case of too close, too soon?" Newsday (March 7, 1994). [Nexis]. Back.

Note 7: Maxim Yusin, "Serba deal a cruel blow to the prestige of Russian diplomacy," Izvestia (Apr.20, 1994). In Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press (Vol. XLVI, No.16), pp.1-2. Back.

Note 8: For an excellent review and critique of Western diplomatic approaches to ox-Yugoslavia with an eye on recent history, see Mark Almond, Europe's Backyard War: The War in the Balkans (London: Heinemann, 1994). Back.

Note 9: Ian Traynor, "Belgrade tries to divide Russia from the West The Guardian (Dec.15, 1992). [Nexis]. Back.

Note 10: Maria Eismont, "Radovan Karadzic to defend Russia from NATO," Segodnya (Aug. 2, 1994), in Russian Press Digest. [Nexis]. Back.

Note 11: Evan in the Soviet period, many Russian scholars have shown an uncritical sympathy for such theses in their writings on Russian-South Slavic links. For an example, see Iu. S. Girenko's introduction to his book on Soviet-Yugoslav links in the 20th century, Sooietsko-Iugoslaoskie otnosheniia (stranitoy istorii) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1983), typically titled: "Many Centuries of Fraternal Friendship". Back.

Note 12: The evidence for the historic Berlin-Zagreb axis is flimsy. Most arguments are derived from superficial and usually incendiary extrapolations from World War Two. Bconomic links between the Balkans and Germany are significant, and not unlike the ties of other European states locked in the orbit of Germany's powerful economy. Even the anti-German Milosevic regime pegged their "super dinar", promulgated to halt inflation in 1994, to the D-mark. Loftier emotions presumably would have dictated the Russian ruble, perhaps even the French franc or British pound sterling. Back.

Note 13: Cited in Schmemann, The New York Times (Jan. 31, 1993). Back.

Note 14: Two well-reasoned exceptions are the previously-cited pieces by William Pfaff and Serge Schmemann. Back.

Note 15: A. Bezsonov, Pravoslavnoe obozrenie XII (1870), p.830 Krizanic hit the Russian historical stage in 1859 when excerpts from his chief work were published as supplements to the Slavophile journal Rusokafa beseda. Bezsonov, who discovered Krizanic's manuscript, was among ten signers of A. Khomiakov's Letter to the Serbs in 1860, a document which represented the transition from philosophical Slavophilism to political Panslavism. See Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth Century Russian Thought [Translated by Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka] (Oxford: Clarendon 1975) pp 495-508. Back.

Note 16: V. 0. Kliuchevskii, Kurs russkoi istorii Part III (Moscow Lissner and Sovko 1908) p 316 For a short explanation of Krizanic's significance in English see James H Billmgton The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York Vmtage 1970) pp 168-171. Back.

Note 17: Russia's first emperor hoped to employ the sealarmg Croats of Venetian Dalmatia Slavic speakers who could easily corrununicate with the Russians m his fledgling navy One captam from Perast m the Bay of Kotor, Matija Zmajevic (1680-1735), even achieved vice admiral 5 rank distmguishmg himself in naval engagements with the Swedes. His Roman Catholic background (his brother was archbishop of Zadar) was not an impediment to his career in that era. Back.

Note 18: For a standard overview of Russian expansion see Barbara Jelavich. A Century of Russian Foreign Policy, 1814-1914 (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1964). Back.

Note 19: Perhaps for this reason, and despite shared Orthodox convictions, Romanian enthusiasm for Russia has never been as great as that in other, more distant parts of the Balkans such as Serbia and Montenegro, or even Croatia. Back.

Note 20: Serbia achieved autonomy in 1830 but remained a nominal part of the Ottoman Empire until 1878. See Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920 (Seattle: U. of Washington Press, 1977). Back.

Note 21: For the history of South Slavic national ideologies see Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1984). Back.

Note 22: For a collection of essays on Russo-Croat links in the last two centuries see Ivan Ocak, Hrvatsko-ruske veze: Druga polovica XIX. i pocetak XX. stoljeca (Zagreb: Hrvatska sveucilisna naklada, 1993). Back.

Note 23: An anthology edited by Josip Badalic, Hrvatska sojedocanstea a Rusiji (Zagreb: Suvremena naklada, 1945), brings together tales of the Russian travels of a dozen Croat writers, including a number of influential literary personages. Back.

Note 24: See D. C. B. Lievon, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), pp. 34-7. Back.

Note 25: For a survey of Soviet foreign policy, see Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-73 (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1983). Back.

Note 26: On the controversy in the Yugoslav Communist Party over the national question, see Ivo Banac, With Stalin Against Ti to: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp.45-79. Back.

Note 27: The Comintern's attitude toward Radic is mentioned by Ivan Avakumovic in History of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, vol.1 (Aberdeen: U. of Aberdeen Press, 1964), pp.72-75. Back.

Note 28: Radic's activities in Moscuw are well-documented in the former Central Party Archives' Comintern collection (RTsKhIDNI: Fond 509 and 535) and in the foreign ministry archives (AVPRF: Fond 04). Back.

Note 29: VIadimir Nazor, lIja Muromec dotazi (Nasa imjiznica, 1944). Institute of Contemporary History [ISP], Zagreb, Croatia. ZB-br-14/432. Back.

Note 30: See Boris Dacjug, Juraj Krizanic i ruski narod (Nasa knjiznica, 1944). ISP: ZB-br4/128. In this highly dubious interpretation, Krizanic is presented as a Catholic apostate in the service of Slavic unity. And: Stjepan Radic, Sovjetska Rusija i seljacko pravo (Izdao Izvrsni odbor Hrvatske seljacke stranke, 1944). ISP: ZB-br-15/472. Back.

Note 31: A regiment of "volunteers" met its end at Stalingrad. The captured survivors, and others, were organized into a pro-Tito force and dispatched to Serbia in 1944, where they fought as Partisans against the Germans. Back.

Note 32: AVPRF: 06/7/53/872/pp. 8-20. Ivan Subasic was a Croat Peasant Party leader, ban of Croatia since 1939, and Partisan sympathizer while in wartime exile in New York. As a volunteer on the Salonika front in the First World War, a true believer in Yugoslav unity, and favorite of Belgrade, he seemed a perfect choice to replace uncompromisingly anti-Tito Serbian candidates for the job of last exile Prime Minister. Back.

Note 33: All this is the subject of my dissertation, "The Soviet Union and the War in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945," based on research conducted in the cited archives in Moscow and Zagreb. Back.

Note 34: lnterview in Time (July 11, 1994), pp.44-5. Back.

Note 35: Schmemann, The New York Times (Jan. 31, 1993). Back.

Note 36: Editorial, "A Three-Finger Salute," The Christian Science Monitor (Feb.25, 1994). [Nexis]. Back.

Note 37: Russian mercenaries have fought on various battlefronts, especially against the Bosnian Muslims. Fighters from various Muslim countries (commonly: mujahedin) have also found their way to Bosnia, creating a miniature, mercenary picture of Great Power (some might say, civilizational) conflict by proxy. Back.

Note 38: Charles Lane, "TRB from Washington: Slav story," The New Republic (March 14, 1994), p.6. Back.

Note 39: The American record in dealing with Russia's "imperial impulse" near or far hoyond Russia's borders, in the ox-Soviet space or in the Balkans, has been unirnprossive. For a scathing condernnation of U.S. policy toward Russia, see zbigniew Brzezinski, "The Premature Partnership," Foreign Affairs (March-April 1994), pp.67-82. Back.

Note 40: Celestine Bohlen, "Conflict in the Balkans: Russia's Balkan Card," The New York Times (Feb.18, 1994). [Nexis]. Back.

Note 41: lnternatianal Herald Tribune (Aug. 5, 1994). [Nexis]. Back.

Note 42: Charles S. Maier, "Democracy and its Discontents," Foreign Affairs (July-Aug. 1994), pp. 48-64. Back.

Note 43: Astute Russian analysts are well aware of the sinister overtones of Serb appeals to "historic" Russian support. See Pavel Felgengauer, "The Balkanization of History," Segodnya (Apr.19, 1994). In Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press (Vol. XLVI, No.16), pg. 4. And by the same author, "Moscow doesn't want to be a hostage to the Serba," Segodnya (May 30, 1995). In Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press (Vol. XLVII, No.21), pg. 8. He calls the Balkans an "unlucky region for Russia" historically, with no long-term advantage since the area gravitates economically to Central Europe and Germany. Back.