– Excerpt from “Commander with a Halo of a Martyr” –
On March 15, 1946, in a Soviet transport plane, along with the “Voroshilovists,” were listeners of military academies named after Dzerzhinsky, Lenin, Stalin and Kuybyshev. The “Voroshilovists” included Generals Arso Jovanović, Peko Dapčević, Radovan Vukanović, Slavko Rodić, Milutin Morača, Ljubo Vučković, Dušan Kveder, Mate Jerković, Đoko Jovanović and Božo Božović, along with Colonels Sredoje Urošević, Momčilo Momo Đurić, Vojo Todorović Lerer, Pero Kosorić and Slobodan Radulović. They were divided into two groups according to rank: army and corps commanders, as they would later be grouped in the Academy. Most of them were intellectuals, predominantly lawyers, and of the “former officers,” only General Staff officers Arso and Colonel Radulović — a former captain in the People’s Army, a war prisoner in Germany, from where he escaped and joined the National Liberation Movement and later served as an operational officer in the Main Staff of Slovenia and then Croatia, and after Victory Day worked in the Training Department of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army. According to some records from the General Staff’s archives, they left for Moscow on March 15, while Đoko Jovanović, in a serialized article by Milan Šarac published in October 2000 in NIN, states that it was March 28, noting that the lessons began on April 8, 1946…
They were free to go out in the city, and in addition to the courteous caretaker of the building, they were also visited freely and sat in armchairs in the spacious lobby. Arso, Peko, Radovan and Milutin repeatedly visited their wartime friend and companion, Lieutenant Colonel Volođa Ješurin, a film cameraman at the headquarters of the 2nd Corps and later the 1st Army, where he had filmed invaluable footage at Njegovuđa under Durmitor and at the Srem front. They would look at that perfectly organized material together and reminisce about the war and soldiers.
Several times, Arso, with some of his comrades, would go towards the exit from Moscow, to a place visibly marked by a cross — where the Germans had reached during their offensive on the red capital in the autumn of 1941. They stopped there. Forever. He would stand there, deep in thought, for a long time. Similarly, in Borodino, the site where, in one day in 1812, 94,000 soldiers from the French and Russian armies died, the site of the bloodiest battle of the 19th century, which tactically remained unresolved, though both Field Marshal Kutuzov and Napoleon considered it their victory. He was allowed to visit the Mamayev Kurgan near Stalingrad, where the bloodiest battles of the Stalingrad epic took place, but his unfulfilled wish was to visit the front on Lake Ladoga from 1941-43, although the brilliant Ješurin had filmed that as well.
Near the end of his stay in Moscow, he managed to fulfil an old wish — he visited Lenin’s Mausoleum on Red Square. In front of the entrance, on a cold January afternoon — just like any other day of the year — there was an unusually long line of people of all ages, disciplined and waiting in some reverent silence to “meet Ilyich,” but the group of “Voroshilovists” was let in without waiting, through the “doors for state guests.” They walked in icy silence, looking breathlessly and somewhat mysteriously at the guides. From there, as he confided to General Radovan Vukanović, he “left a bit disappointed,” probably expecting more, with the impression of the small stature of “the leader and teacher of the world proletariat,” forever trapped in a glass sarcophagus, “the taken” hand, the wax-coloured skin and the voice from a tape recorder. That impression was not notably improved even by the unforgettable performance of the evening show Eugene Onegin.
It happened to Arso — as some “Voroshilovists” recall — that on Sundays, he would put down his book and, for hours, together with his friends from Moscow, visit the Novodevichy Cemetery, discovering the memorials of “Russian giants” in poetry, painting, military leadership, Pan-Slavism…
Soon after arriving in Moscow, he unofficially visited his old and dear acquaintances, confirmed friends of the Yugoslav Army, Generals Alexei Antonov, Nikolai Korneyev and Nikandr Chibisov, with the knowledge of Ambassadors Vladimir Popović and Military Attaché General Niko Jović. He gifted each of them, in a gesture of attention and in good Slavic tradition linked to the joy of giving, a bottle of Serbian rakija.
Some of the students established emotional connections with “the girls,” which the secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia cell, General P. Dapčević, harshly criticized during a party meeting, causing the “immorality” to be discussed even in Belgrade.1
They came home to visit their families by airplane, staying for about twenty days.2 All other days in Moscow were filled with intensive studying and, mostly, genuine camaraderie. No one stood out; it seemed that everyone found studying and being separated from their families and comrades at home equally difficult. And when M. Morača received a telegram from his wife Mira that they had a son, Arso gladly accepted the role of godfather and named the youngest Morača after his own father, Radivoje, with the “Bosnian variant” of Radivoj being recorded.
Notes
1 At one of the meetings of the party leadership, Ljubinka Milosavljević asked if it was true that “there are Voroshilovists with two wives.”
2 Most of the “relatively high salaries” were sent back to families in Yugoslavia, where life was marked by great scarcity.
(Ivan Matović, Commander with a Halo of a Martyr, Sava Press, Toronto 2025, pp. 690-91, 694-95)