Description
“The monarchy is an historical anachronism… condemned by history to extinction.” — Communist Deputy Života Milojković, May 1921.
In his book on the formation of the old, prewar Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Momčilo Đurić lays bare its true origins— not as a gift from Versailles, a triumph of the Serbian crown or a feat of bourgeois diplomacy, but as the inevitable result of the revolutionary tide sweeping Europe after the October Revolution. The creation of Yugoslavia in 1918 was not the fulfilment of elite conferences or dynastic ambition, but the expression of the masses’ struggle against imperialism, capitalism and foreign rule.
Based on documents, declarations, uprisings and ideological currents, this book traces the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the mass revolutionary movement of soldiers, peasants and workers, the rise and betrayal of socialist and communist hopes, and the imposition of Greater Serbian bourgeois hegemony backed by international imperialism. It is a gripping historical study, but also a fierce indictment of the fraudulent Corfu and Geneva Declarations, of the reactionary social-democrats who betrayed the workers, and of the December 1 unification act as a counter-revolutionary coup from above.
Đurić states blankly that the 1921 Vidovdan Constitution bore “no traces of the great struggle that took place during and after the war.” It codified private property as sacrosanct, established a reactionary bicameral parliament, and buried the aspirations of the poor and the oppressed. “Only a Soviet-style constitution,” declared the communist deputy Filip Filipović at that time, “where all power and all wealth belong to the working people, could reflect the real will of the masses.”
From the Green Cadres of Slavonia to the Red Republics of Vojvodina, from the mutinous ships of Kotor to the factories of Ljubljana, Đurić chronicles how the great Lenin’s revolutionary spirit ignited the South Slavs, only to be crushed by a coalition of royalist gendarmes, liberal traitors and foreign bayonets. The result: a fragile, repressive and deeply unequal Yugoslav monarchy primed for its destruction in two decades’ time — far removed from the Soviet republic the people desired.
About the Author
Momčilo “Momo” Đurić (1912-1980) was born into a poor peasant family in Komirić, western Serbia. Orphaned young, he rose through great challenges in life to become a lawyer, then a veteran of the Yugoslav National Liberation War and finally an historian at Moscow State University. He earned the 1941 Partisan Commemorative Medal, signifying his participation from the first to the last day of the war as a partisan. Momo was a lifelong defender of the Soviet Union and Russia, and for his loyalty to the liberators of Yugoslavia, he suffered two and a half years in solitary confinement and eight in the notorious Goli Otok concentration camp at the hands of the criminal Tito clique. Momčilo Đurić’s life combined deep patriotism with unshakable proletarian internationalism, and therefore, his writing is marked by immense clarity and conviction.