Slovo vol. 21.1 by SLOVO Journal

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SLOVO

SLOVO VOLUME 21

NUMBER 1

SPRING 2009

Contents

Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring 2009

ISSN 0954–6839

slovo

PAGE

EDITORIAL

ANNA REBMANN

An Inter-disciplinary Journal of Russian, East-Central European and Eurasian Affairs

ARTICLES

The Shared Experience of the Imperial Past: The Era of Tsarist Russian Rule in Polish and Finnish Historical Perspectives JUSSI JALONEN Russian-Greek Relations during the Crimean War LUCIEN J. FRARY From Popular Front to Political Radicalization: The Croatian Press and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 VJERAN PAVLAKOVIC´

29–43

BOOK REVIEWS

44–45

FILM REVIEWS

46–48

4–15

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16–28

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Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring 2009

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www.maney.co.uk Maney Publishing for the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

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SLOVO EXECUTIVE EDITOR: Anna Rebmann MANAGING EDITOR: Mark Griffiths For editorial addresses and submissions, see inside back cover. BOOK & FILM REVIEW EDITOR: Masha Volynsky PUBLIC RELATIONS EDITOR: Lauren Angius GENERAL EDITORS: Jakup Azemi Katya Balan Oliwia Berdak Claudia Ciobanu Andreea Gavriliu Clare Jackman Nicole Kunzik Briane Stone Anna Szasz Filip Tarlea MANEY PUBLISHING: Lisa Johnstone, Managing Editor Sabrina Barrows, Production Editor Slovo discusses and interprets Russian, Eastern and Central European, and Eurasian affairs from a number of different perspectives including, but not limited to, anthropology, art, economics, film, history, international studies, linguistics, literature, media, philosophy, politics, and sociology. Slovo is a fully refereed journal, edited and managed by postgraduates of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Each year a new Editorial Board is selected from the postgraduate community to produce two volumes of academic depth and rigour, considering articles, book, and film review submissions from both established and emerging academics. Indexing and Abstracting Slovo is indexed in MLA International Bibliography and the Directory of Periodicals. Slovo (ISSN 0954–6839) is published for the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. Subscriptions are entered by the volume and include postage (air-speeded outside the UK). Subscriptions must be pre-paid at the rate appropriate to the location of the subscriber.

Volume 21, 2009 (2 issues) Institutional rate: £108.00; North America: US$207.00 Individual rate*: £30.00; North America: US$54.00 *Subscriptions are welcomed from individuals if prepaid by personal cheque or credit card and if the journal is to be sent to a private address. All orders must be sent to Publication Sales, Maney Publishing, Suite 1C, Joseph’s Well, Hanover Walk, Leeds LS3 1AB, UK (fax: +44 (0)113 386 8178; email: subscriptions@maney.co.uk). Maney Publishing North America, 875 Massachusetts Avenue, 7th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Tel (toll-free): 866 297 5154; Fax: 617 354 6875; email: maney@maneyusa.com. All cheques must be payable to Maney Publishing. Advertising and general enquiries should be sent to Maney Publishing. Copyright © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for such permission must be addressed to permissions@maney.co.uk or Permissions Section, Maney Publishing, 1 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AF, UK. Disclaimer Statements in the journal reflect the views of the authors, and not necessarily those of the University, editors, or publisher. Photocopying For users in North America, permission is granted by the copyright owner for libraries and others registered with the Copyright Clearance Centre (CCC) to make copies of any article herein. Requests should be sent directly to Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In the UK, the Copyright Licensing Agency, cla@cla.co.uk is mandated to grant permission to make copies. Maney Publishing is the trading name of W. S. Maney & Son Ltd, Suite 1C, Joseph’s Well, Hanover Walk, Leeds LS3 1AB, UK.

Notes for Contributors Slovo welcomes original contributions that match the aims and scope of the journal (as described on the inside front cover) on the understanding that their contents have not previously been published or are currently submitted for publication elsewhere. All submissions will be sent to independent referees. It is a condition of publication that papers become the copyright of the School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London. All editorial correspondence should be sent to the Executive Editor, Slovo, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. Email: slovo@ssees.ac.uk Deadlines Deadlines are normally September for the spring issue and March for the autumn issue. Presentation and Style Two complete copies should be submitted printed double-spaced with ample margins and not normally exceeding 6–8000 words. All pages should be numbered: the first page should state only the title of the paper, name(s) of the author(s) and, for each author, a short institutional affiliation, and an abbreviated title (for running headlines within the article). At the bottom of the page give the full name, address and e-mail address to which all correspondence, including proofs, should be sent. The second page should contain an abstract in English of not more than 200 words. Contributions should follow the MHRA Style Guide (2008) and the house-style of the journal. Words should not be hyphenated at the end of a line. Use single inverted commas for short quotations (double for quotations within quotations), but quotations over fifty words should be indented and single-spaced without inverted commas. Translations are not generally needed for quotations from the Slavonic languages, although it is left to the author’s discretion if they wish to include the original. Where a passage presents particular difficulty, translation may be offered, either in parentheses in the text, or in an endnote. Transliterations should follow the Library of Congress system without diacritics, which must be used except where conventions for alternative transliterations exist. Quotations in languages other than Slavonic will require translation. Non-English words in the text, apart from names, should be italicized. Notes and References Contributors should adhere to MHRA and the journal’s house-style in the presentation of numbered footnotes and references. Any general note on the article (e.g. personal acknowledgements) should appear as a first unnumbered note. Within the text, references and notes should be indicated by a superscript Arabic numeral. Articles and publications cited in the text should then be listed in full in the footnotes: for books: Bernard Comrie and Gerald Stone, The Russian Language since the Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 2. for articles in books: George Schöpflin, ‘The Functions of Myth and a Taxonomy of Myth’, in Myths and Nationhood, ed. by Geoffrey Hosking and George Schöpflin (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1997), pp. 31–33. for periodical articles: Lubomir Dolezel, ‘Poststructuralism: A View from Charles Bridge’, Poetics Today, 21 (2000), 640–41. For particular text(s) repeatedly cited, full bibliographical reference should be given in an initial footnote, with author/page references thereafter in parentheses in the text (Schöpflin, p. 31). Consistent abbreviations may be used in such references where appropriate. Authors are responsible for ensuring the accuracy of references. Tables and Illustrations These should be submitted on separate sheets, and numbered sequentially using arabic numerals for Figures (illustrations, i.e. photographs, diagrams, and graphs) and Tables. Each must have a caption, source, and where appropriate, a key. The position in the text must be clearly shown (e.g. Figure 1; Table 1). Images should be submitted electronically in CMYK format as good-quality TIFF or EPS files, suitable for printing. As a guide images should be submitted at a minimum input scanning

resolution of 300 dpi for full colour; 350/400 dpi for halftones; 600 dpi for slides or transparencies, 800 dpi for simple line drawings; and 1200 dpi for fine line illustrations. Please note that the final reproduction quality is dependent on original supply of correct format and resolution. The author must obtain written evidence of permission to reproduce images (in all formats, in perpetuity and in all geographical regions worldwide) from the copyright owner for the use of any illustrative matter in the journal and will be liable for any fee charged by the owner of the image. The caption should include relevant credit of the permission of the copyright holder to reproduce the image. For more information please see www.maney.co.uk/authors/copyright. Online Colour It is now possible for colour illustrations to be published in the online version of free of charge. Images submitted in colour will be published in greyscale in the printed journal (unless otherwise agreed with the journal editor) but will be posted online in colour. Authors should consider the use of colour within their article carefully to ensure meaning is not lost in the translation of images from colour to greyscale for the printed volume. Authors should note that eprints are produced as screen resolution PDFs, so the printed quality will not match that of the print copies of the journal. For more information please see www.maney.co.uk/ authors/copyright. Submission on disk On notification by the Editors that a paper has been accepted, a final version of the article should be submitted on disk in Microsoft Word. Submission on disk will improve typographical accuracy and accelerate publication. The filename and software must be indicated on the disk. In preparing the disk version, there is no need to format articles: please include italics or bold type where necessary, but not style or footnote codes. Footnotes should be typed at the end of the file as part of the text, or supplied in a separate document. In the main text, numbering of notes should be indicated by superscript numbers. References and captions should be placed at the end of the file, or in separate files. Please use hard returns only at the end of paragraphs; switch auto-hyphenation off; do not justify text; and do not use automatic numbering routines. Consistency in spacing, punctuation, and spelling will be of help. Tables should be submitted as separate files and keyed horizontally from left to right using a tab between columns, not the space bar (or keyed in Table mode in Word). Proofs Proofs will be sent to the author-nominated e-mail address for correspondence. Proofs are supplied for checking and making essential typographical corrections, not for general revision, alteration, or changes to illustrations, which will not be allowed. Proofs must be returned to the editor within 5 days of receipt. Copyright Authors who wish to reproduce material from previously published sources or where the copyright is owned by a third party, such as sections of text, tables or images, must obtain written permission from the copyright holder (usually the publisher) and the author(s)/artist(s) of the original material. A line giving the full source of the material should be included in the manuscript. Copyright is required for use in all formats (including digital), in perpetuity and in all geographical regions worldwide. For more information and advice please see www.maney.co.uk/authors/copyright. Permissions Any reproduction from Slovo, apart from for the purposes of review, private research or ‘fair dealing’, must have the permission of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Requests for such permission must be addressed to Permissions Section, Maney Publishing at permissions@maney.co.uk, who act on behalf of the School. In all cases, acknowledgement must be made to Slovo. Complimentary copies Contributors will receive a free copy of the journal in which their article is featured. Authors can also access a PDF of their article for distribution, obtainable from the Executive Editor at slovo@ssees.ac.uk.

SLOVO Volume 21

Number 1

Spring 2009

CONTENTS Editorial Anna Rebmann

Articles The Shared Experience of the Imperial Past: The Era of Tsarist Russian Rule in Polish and Finnish Historical Perspectives Jussi Jalonen

Russian-Greek Relations during the Crimean War Lucien J. Frary

From Popular Front to Political Radicalization: The Croatian Press and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 Vjeran Pavlakovic´

Book Reviews D. A. Norris, Belgrade: A Cultural and Literary History (Charlotte Johnson)

Film Reviews The Lives of Others (Sharon Boak); Tulpan (Marijeta Bozovic´)

slovo, Vol. 21 No. 1, Spring, 2009, 3

Editorial Anna Rebmann Executive Editor, Slovo, 2008–09 Slovo is a journal which prides itself on creating opportunities for the publication of work from both emerging and established academics in the field of Eastern and Central European, and Eurasian studies. Our editorial policy is to encourage interdisciplinary work and we welcome contributions from different disciplinary perspectives including, but not limited to, anthropology, art, economics, international relations, philosophy, politics, and sociology. To maintain academic rigour, all submitted papers are refereed by established academics. This issue contains a range of interesting articles from a historical perspective. In the first article ‘The Shared Experience of the Imperial Past: The Era of Tsarist Russian Rule in Polish and Finnish Historical Perspectives’, Jussi Jalonen explores how the mutual experience of Russian rule influenced relations between Poland and Finland. In the second article ‘Russian-Greek Relations during the Crimean War’, Lucien J. Frary argues that the Russia’s attempts to help the Greeks during Crimean War marked a significant turning point in Russian foreign policy in the Balkans, as well as in Greek politics. Finally, in ‘From Popular Front to Political Radicalization: The Croatian Press and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939’, Vjeran Pavlakovic´ examines the impact of ideological discussions of the Spanish Civil War on the ‘Croatian national movement’. Slovo is an unusual journal as its annually changing editorial board is made up of postgraduate students, who are studying at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Consequently, each issue relies on help and advice from numerous people who willingly give their time and expertise. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Prof. Alena Ledeneva, Dr Peter Duncan, Prof. Janet Hartley, Dr Zlatko Sabic´, Dr Dejan Djokic´, Dr Eric Gordy, Prof. Simon Dixon, Dr Richard Butterwick, Dr Tatiana Kostadinova, Boris Popiranov, and Mariya Ivancheva. I would like to express my appreciation of support I have received from the editorial board and the previous Executive Editor Zachary Rothstein. I also would like thank Sabrina Barrows and Lisa Johnstone at Maney Publishing.

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The Shared Experience of the Imperial Past: The Era of Tsarist Russian Rule in Polish and Finnish Historical Perspectives Jussi Jalonen1 University of Tampere, Finland

From 1815 to 1915, Poland and Finland shared the experience of imperial Russian rule, and the period brought Poles and Finns into closer contact than ever before. This shared fate has prompted comparisons of the Polish and Finnish experiences under the Russian rule, with the usual emphasis on the contrast between the opportunistic Finnish loyalism and the idealistic Polish defence of national self-determination. However, as the nineteenth century passed, Russian rule also forced both nations to re-evaluate their experiences and learn from each others. The Polish positivists began to use Finland as a showcase for their conciliatory ideology, whereas the Finnish resistance activists started to build contacts with their Polish colleagues for a mutual front against Tsarism. The Russian rule can thus be regarded as the formative period for the Polish-Finnish relations. For both nations, the imperial past left corresponding traces on the historical memory, and in both countries, the inter-war historiography attempted to treat the imperial past in a similar manner. This connection was a testimony to the fact that the mutual experience of the Russian rule had granted Poland and Finland a special consciousness of each others. For a period of one hundred years, from 1815 to 1915, Poland and Finland shared the experience of being under the suzerainty of the Russian Empire. The century of imperial Russian rule brought Poles and Finns into closer contact than ever before since the era of the Vasa monarchs in the sixteenth century. In the multi-national Russian Empire and its cosmopolitan capital, people of Polish and Finnish descent could encounter one another from the highest echelons of the imperial administration to the lowest ranks of the urban proletariat. This mutual experience between two nations that otherwise have not had much in common during their written history 1

Jussi Jalonen is a Licentiate of Philosophy and PhD fellow, affiliated with Department of History and Philosophy, University of Tampere, Finland.

ÂŠ School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2009

SHARED IMPERIAL PAST

has provided ample material for scholars interested in comparative historical analysis.2 Inevitably, questions have arisen about the differences and contrasts in the Polish and Finnish experiences, especially about the fact that the Grand-Duchy of Finland was able to retain its precarious autonomous status all through the nineteenth century, whereas the Congress Kingdom of Poland lost its own self-government after two violent insurrections. Writing in his book God’s Playground, re-published a few years ago, British historian Norman Davies attempted to put forth an answer to the question why the Finnish autonomy survived whilst that of Poland was destroyed.3 Criticizing the stereotypic descriptions of Finns as ‘jovial, law-abiding subjects’ as opposed to the ‘trouble-making’ Poles, Davies tries to present a more even-handed analysis on the causes for the contrasting Polish and Finnish experiences, under four separate headings.4 The first one was the difference in the strategic location; by Davies’ reasoning, Finland lay in the insignificant periphery of the Empire, outside all immediate Russian attention, whereas Poland, located in the heart of Europe and guarding the vulnerable western frontier of Russia was more liable to be singled out for imperial pressure. In addition, Davies presented the factor of irredentism from the Austrian and Prussian partitions of Poland, the inherent pan-Slavism of the Russian authorities and their inclination to treat the Slavonic Poles differently from the non-Slavonic Finns, and finally, the Russian ressentiment towards Poland as the homeland of ‘irritating, freedom-loving noblemen’ whose ‘dangerous, western-oriented democratic worldviews’ were diametrically opposed to the fundamental principles of Tsarist autocracy.5 Most of the contentions made by Davies can be easily challenged. Located next to St. Petersburg and guarding the maritime entrances to the imperial capital, the strategic location of the Grand-Duchy of Finland was probably more important to Russia than that of Poland, especially in light of the British naval assault on Finland during the Crimean War.6 Pan-Slavism was not an overwhelming factor in the Russian politics until the late nineteenth century, by which time the Polish autonomy had already been abolished, and the traditionally proud and independent Finnish yeomen-farmers were hardly any less alien to the Russian class structure than the freedom-loving Polish noblemen. What, then, explains the different fates of Poland and Finland in the Russian Empire? Why were the Finns able to accommodate the imperial Russian interests better than the Poles, and for a longer period? What were the common factors and the distinguishing features of Poland and Finland vis-à-vis the Russian Empire? And how did the Poles and the Finns come to regard each others during their time under tsarist Russian rule, and how have they looked on their imperial past later on? 2

4 5 6

For one of the most concise examples, see Finland and Poland in the Russian Empire: A Comparative Study, ed. by Michael Branch, Janet M. Hartley and Antoni Mączak (London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, 1995). Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, rev. edn, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ii, pp. 270–1; see also Davies’ prologue to Finland and Poland in the Russian Empire: A Comparative Study (1995), pp. ix–xi. In the latter text, Davies admitted having written his original comparison between Poland and Finland in God’s Playground ‘somewhat off the cuff’. Davies, God’s Playground, ii, pp. 270–1. Ibid. Basil Greenhill & Ann Giffard, The British Assault on Finland: A Forgotten Naval War (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1988), p. 339.

JUSSI JALONEN

The fundamental differences in Polish and Finnish political thought can be traced back to the eighteenth century. The Age of Reason had already witnessed the birth of a special national awareness within the Finnish intellectual classes, but this consciousness of separate national character and interests was still heavily characterized by the pragmatic utilitarianism of the Scandinavian Enlightenment. In this context, the legitimacy of the ruling government, whether domestic or foreign, was to be judged by the human needs that it fulfilled, rather than on the basis of history or tradition. For the educated section of the Finnish society, this attitude made the eventual change-over of 1808–1809 relatively easy to accept, especially since the Russian Emperor was more than ready to meet his new Finnish subjects half-way. Accustomed to the shrewd, cold, and rational political opportunism inherited from Sweden’s Age of Liberty and indoctrinated to the traditional Lutheran obedience to higher authority, the Finnish upper classes were thus well prepared to compromise with imperial Russia.7 In the case of Poland, these same currents of European Enlightenment had given birth to a more principled and less opportunistic position. The contractual conception of state had already been an integral feature of the old Rzeczpospolita, and was successfully reformulated into modern guise in the writings of eighteenth-century Polish political theorists such as Hugo Kołłątaj and Stanisław Staszić. The demands for political reform on the historic republican traditions included the principled assertion of national sovereignty, culminating in the reforms of the Four Years Sejm (1788–1791) and the Constitution of 3 May in 1791. Taking place in defiance of the depredations and pressure of the neighbouring states, this process left the nation convinced of its right to independent existence and denied the subsequent partitions of Poland of all legitimacy.8 Thus, the accomplishments of the Polish Enlightenment had already entailed the principled rejection of all foreign domination, and after all, unlike Finland, Poland had a long history as an independent European great power on its own right. The Napoleonic Wars proved to be the determining milestone in the development of both Finnish as well as Polish nationalism. While Finland was separated from its centuries-old link with Sweden by Russian conquest and ‘raised to the ranks of the nations’9 by the manifesto of the Russian Emperor, the Polish soldiers of the Duchy of Warsaw formed the vanguard of the Napoleonic armies, carrying the standard of the White Eagle side by side with the French Tricolour. The national legends of the era show curious similarities in the Polish and Finnish relationships with their respective imperial masters. The famous and tragic figure of countess Maria Walewska surrendering her body and soul to the French Emperor in the hope of saving her homeland is mirrored by the more innocent and conventional image of virginal Ulla Möllersvärd dancing quadrille with Emperor Alexander in the ball 7

Hildor Arnold Barton, Scandinavia in the Revolutionary Era, 1760–1815 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 300; Juha Manninen, Valistus ja kansallinen identiteetti: aatehistoriallinen tutkimus 1700-luvun Pohjolasta, Historiallisia Tutkimuksia, 210 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2000), pp. 115–24, pp.247–48. Jerzy Lukowski, Liberty’s Folly: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century, 1697–1795 (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 266–7; Joan S. Skurnowicz, ‘Polish Szlachta Democracy at Crossroads, 1795–1831’ in Polish Democratic Thought from the Renaissance to the Great Emigration: Essays and Documents, ed. by M. B. Biskupski and James S. Pula, East European Monographs CCLXXXIX, 289 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 73–92 (pp. 75, 91). A phrase used by Emperor Alexander in his speech to the Finnish Estates in 1809. See Robert Castrén, Skildringar ur Finlands nyare historia, Första Samlingen, (Helsingfors: G. W. Edlunds Förlag, 1882), p. 222.

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that celebrated the Diet of Borgå in 1809, later immortalized in the novel of Mika Waltari.10 Eventually, the Napoleonic Wars were to provide both countries with their national epics: Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz recalled the Polish and Lithuanian hopes in the 1812 campaign against Russia, whereas Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s The Tales of the Ensign Stål commemorated the Finnish soldiers who had fought under Swedish colours for the last time in the War of 1808–1809. In spite of the past defiance and resistance, the partial restoration of the Polish state under Russian auspices in the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was nonetheless accepted and even welcomed by the majority of the Polish population.11 The government of the Congress Kingdom was partly based on the pre-existing example of the Finnish autonomy, and Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski’s role in the establishment of the Congress Kingdom, the Kongresówka, was essentially a counterpart of the earlier efforts of Swedish-speaking Finnish patriots such as Göran Magnus Sprengtporten and Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt, who had laid the foundations of the Grand-Duchy of Finland with the consent of the Tsar. The supposedly internationally-guaranteed constitutional status of Poland was more extensive than the Finnish autonomy, but in one respect, Finland managed to gain more than Poland. Already in 1812, Alexander I had returned the Karelian lands conquered by Russia in 1720 and 1743 back to the Grand-Duchy, but the historic Kresy, the old eastern territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth annexed by Russia in 1772, 1793, 1795, and 1807 were never reunited with the Congress Kingdom.12 The paths of Poland and Finland diverged quickly. In the context of the ‘political night’ that reigned supreme under the Congress System and the Holy Alliance, the Finnish ruling elites soon acknowledged that no further concessions from Russia were to be expected in short notice. The Emperor’s decision not to convene the Finnish legislature again after 1809 was quietly accepted as a fait accompli, and the authorities of the Grand-Duchy concentrated on safeguarding the already-existing autonomous administration, as well as courting the imperial favour often by rather egregious demonstrations of loyalty. The reaction of the Poles to Alexander I’s angry dissolution of the second Sejm in 1820, on the other hand, was completely different, and within a few years, an underground extra-parliamentary opposition had formed in the Congress Kingdom, based on radical conspiratorial societies on the Continental European model. By the time of the Decembrist Uprising of 1825, the fault lines between Poland and Finland were already drawn. Disgruntled Polish military officers such as colonel Seweryn Krzyżanowski were ready and willing to conspire together with the Russian Decembrist leaders against the Emperor, but their Finnish colleagues such as colonel Anders Edvard Ramsay and captain Johan Reinhold Munck, remained steadfastly loyal to the Tsar, to the extent that they actually participated in the suppression of the riots in St. Petersburg and supervised the executions of the imprisoned Decembrists.13 10 11

Mika Waltari, Tanssi yli hautojen (Porvoo: WSOY, 1944). Barbara Grochulska, ‘The Dependence of the Polish State on the Russian Empire’ in Finland and Poland in the Russian Empire: A Comparative Study (1995), pp. 29–40 (p. 30). Kalervo Hovi, ‘Miksi Aleksanteri I ei palauttanut Puolan itäalueita Puolan kuningaskuntaan?’, Faravid: Pohjois-Suomen historiallisen yhdistyksen vuosikirja, 8 (1984), pp. 161–74. Helge Pohjolan-Pirhonen, Kansakunnan historia, 3 vols (Porvoo: WSOY, 1973), iii: Kansakunta löytää itsensä, 1808–1855, p. 412; Marian Zgórniak, ‘Polska w czasach walk o niepodległość (1815–1864)’ in Wielka Historia Polski, ed. by Stanisław Grodziski, Jerzy Wyrozumski and Marian Zgórniak, 5 vols (Kraków: Świat Książki, FOGRA Oficyna Wydawniczna, 2003), iv, pp. 13–348 (pp. 54–6).

JUSSI JALONEN

Ironically, the outbreak of the Polish November Uprising in 1830 worked to Finland’s benefit, as it provided the country with a rare and splendid opportunity to prove its loyalty to the Emperor by the force of arms. As it was, the small northern Grand-Duchy played its own part in the violent suppression of the Polish liberation struggle. The Life-Guard’s Finnish Sharp-Shooter Battalion, the so-called ‘Finnish Guard’, was included among the military units that participated in the Russian punitive expedition against Poland in 1831, and was personally decorated by Nicholas I with the Banner of St. George after the campaign. Loyalty towards the Emperor and participation in the battle against the Polish ‘rebels’ both strengthened the autonomous status of the Grand-Duchy as well as provided the obedient Finns with a modest source of national pride.14 Thirty-three years later, history repeated itself as the Finnish General Anders Edvard Ramsay assumed the command of Russian forces in the suppression of the Polish January Uprising. On the same year, Alexander II convened the Finnish Diet after fifty-five years of dissolution, starting the process that was to eventually transform the Grand-Duchy into a modern constitutional state. In the end, the strengthening of the Finnish autonomy took place partly at Poland’s expense, and as a direct side result of the destruction of Poland. The contrasting relationship with Tsarist Russia had an effect also on the perceptions that Finns and Poles came to have on each other. For the first half of the nineteenth century, the image of Finland and Finns still occupied an extremely marginal position in the Polish viewpoint. The most substantial reference to the obscure northern nation was made by Adam Mickiewicz, who regarded the Finns as one of the barbarous foreign peoples who, together with the Tatars, were responsible for the corruption of the original Slavonic character of Russia; according to the Polish national poet, Finns were ‘born as slaves, loving their yoke and blindly following orders’.15 The Finnish opinion of the ‘rebellious’ Poles was hardly any more generous, although a few Finnish writers were occasionally able to render admiring judgements. One such author was Fredrik Cygnaeus, who, in the aftermath of the November Uprising, wrote a poem commemorating Tadeusz Kościuszko; another one was Zachris Topelius, whose second volume of the Tales of the Army Surgeon portrayed the Poles as a ‘frivolous and light-hearted, but chivalrous nation’, and included a chapter on the romance of the young Finnish cavalryman Bertelsköld and the Polish Princess Lodoiska during the Swedish-Polish War of 1655–1658.16 The aftermath of the January Uprising marked the start of a more substantial interaction and exchange of ideas between Finland and Poland. The tragic failure of the insurrections fuelled the conciliatory forces in the Polish political life, turning the last decades of the nineteenth century into a period characterized by the commitment to national reconstruction and peaceful national development, the so-called ‘organic 14

Jussi Jalonen, ‘Keisarin puolesta — Suomen kaartin sotaretki Puolaan 1831’ in Itämeren itälaidalla — näkökulmia identiteetin ja yhteistyön historiaan, ed. by Kari Alenius, Anita Honkala and Sinikka Wunsch, Studia Historica Septentrionalia, 48 (Rovaniemi: Pohjois-Suomen Historiallinen Yhdistys, 2006), pp. 121–35; see also Jussi Jalonen, ‘Aż do gorzkiego końca: Finowie przeciw polakom’, Tygodnik Powszechny, May eighteenth, 2008, pp. 26–7. Stanisław Eile, ‘The Image of Russia and the Russians in Polish Romanticism’ in Finland and Poland in the Russian Empire; a Comparative Study (1995), pp. 179–89 (pp. 188–9). Fredrik Cygnaeus, ‘Fragmenter ur Kosciuszko: Hieltedik i Romancer’ in Samlade Arbeten, ed. by E. Nervander, 11 vols (Helsingfors: G. W. Edlunds Förlag, 1864), vii, Lyriska Dikter, pp. 259–72; Zachris Topelius, Fältskärns berättelse, 5 vols (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1899), ii, p. 101. Romantic liaisons between Finnish military officers stationed in the Vistula provinces and the local Polish noblewomen were fairly common during the 19th century; the marriage of Lieutenant General Clas Gustaf Robert Charpentier and Countess Anna Porzedowska was but one of the many.

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work’. Interestingly enough, this new Polish positivist school chose to present the Grand-Duchy of Finland as its showcase of successful conciliatory politics. According to the positivist reasoning, formulated most coherently by Bołesław Prus, the Finns had succeeded in the assertion of their status as an autonomous, constitutionallygoverned realm through a skilful combination of negotiation and compromise with the Russian Emperor, and consequently even managed to strengthen their self-government within the Empire; meanwhile, in contrast, the Poles had chosen the path of armed insurrection not only once, but twice, and lost everything.17 This comparison worked also vice versa; while the Polish positivists cited the Finnish politics of compromise as an example to be followed, conservative Finnish statesmen such as Yrjö Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen often defended their own conciliatory ideology by pointing to the sad fate of Poland as a class example of meaningless, counterproductive, and futile defiance. The Finnish nobleman did not hesitate to condemn the November Uprising eloquently as a ‘pointless gamble undertaken at the instigation of mad agitators, whom the true patriots were unable to constrain’, while damning the January Rising simply as ‘wild insanity’.18 The year 1899 marked the watershed both in the relationship between Finland and Russia as well as between Finland and Poland. The autonomous status of Finland became suddenly questionable as the famous February Manifesto issued by Emperor Nicholas II sought to integrate the administration of the Grand-Duchy more closely to the centralized imperial framework. Interpreted as an attempt towards the de facto abrogation of the Finnish self-government, the manifesto made the previous traditions of loyalty and conciliation no longer feasible, and the politically aware Finns now turned towards passive resistance. The February Manifesto had an impact also on the Polish political discourse, as the positivist showcase of Finland as the success story of conciliatory approach was no longer viable.19 Simultaneously, the Polish interest in the embryonic Finnish resistance movement began to increase, creating prospects for Polish-Finnish cooperation against the Tsarist government. During the years 1900–1901, the Polish underground press in the Vistula provinces, as well as the émigré press and the Polish newspapers in the Kingdom of Galicia, published several articles on the political situation in the Grand-Duchy of Finland, agitating for a multi-national common front against Tsarism. Among the many Polish newspapers that published articles on Finland were the Varsovian Głos and Prawda, the Cracovian Krytyka, the émigré publication Przedświt, the famous socialist Robotnik, the left-wing socialist periodical Wiedza as well as also Czerwony Sztandar and Przegląd Socjaldemokratyczny — the organs of the SDKPiL, the Social Democratic Party in the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania.20 17

Bołesław Prus, Pisma Wybrane, 6 vols (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1981), iii, p. 472; see also Janusz Kuczyński, The Changing Picture of Warsaw Positivism in Polish Historiography 1918–1989, University of Turku: Publications of the Department of Political History, 22 (Turku: Department of Political History, University of Turku, 2001), pp. 5–6. Yrjö Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen, Puolan kapinat vuosina 1831 ja 1863 (Porvoo: Werner Söderström, 1900), pp. 31–2, 59. Kalervo Hovi, ‘Suomi Puolan sosialistien tsaarinhallituksen välisissä yhteistyökaavailuissa’, in Venäjän vähemmistökansallisuudet tsarisminvastaisessa taistelussa 1800-luvulta vuoden 1917 vallankumouksiin, Neuvostoliittolaisten, puolalaisten ja suomalaisten historiantutkijain seminaari Tampereella 17.–18. marraskuuta 1979, Tampereen yliopisto: Historiatieteen laitoksen julkaisuja, 5 (Tampere: Historiatieteen laitos, Tampereen yliopisto, 1979), pp. 75–86 (p. 80). Walentyna Najdus, ‘Suomi puolalaisessa edistyksellisessä ja sosialistisessa lehdistössä ennen ensimmäistä maailmansotaa’, in Venäjän vähemmistökansallisuudet tsarisminvastaisessa taistelussa 1800-luvulta vuoden 1917 vallankumouksiin (1979), pp. 87–99 (pp. 89–92).

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The most active proponents of Polish-Finnish cooperation hailed from the ranks of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). The party program of the PPS aimed at the establishment of an independent Poland in the old federalist, multi-national framework, envisioning close collaboration and national consensus with Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians. The idea of equally close cooperation with Finland was thus a natural offspring of the pre-existing federalist ideals. The PPS gained its first Finnish contacts from the members of the ‘Finnish Active Resistance Party’, a small, hardcore group of radical, revolutionary members of the bourgeois intelligentsia who had broken away from the constitutionalist passive resistance movement in 1904. Ironically, in the same year, the Finnish activist leader Konni Zilliacus had unintentionally worked against the Polish Socialists by assisting the Polish National Democratic leader Roman Dmowski on his journey to Japan to thwart Józef Piłsudski’s simultaneous mission in Tokyo. However, shortly afterwards Zilliacus met with the representatives of the PPS in the two successive conferences of all-Russian revolutionary and opposition parties in Paris and Geneva. These first tentative Finnish-Polish contacts culminated in Józef Piłsudski’s historic visit to Finland and his attendance in the Kirkkonummi Conference in the spring of 1907.21 Outside a few unique individuals such as Zilliacus, however, the Finns remained lukewarm to the Polish initiatives. The active resistance gained few followers in Finland, and the Polish insurrectionary tradition was never cited as a historical precedent in the struggle against russification; instead, the Finnish constitutionalists and advocates of passive resistance preferred to model their stance after the example of the previous Hungarian resistance against Austria and the achievement of the Ausgleich.22 Certain shared features between Finland and Poland nonetheless emerged, the most disturbing one being the intensification of political violence in both countries. Political assassinations as a method of active resistance had not been unheard of in the nineteenth century Poland, but in Finland they were an entirely novel concept. Suitably enough, the first such act in the history of Finland, the murder of Governor-General Nikolai Bobrikov in Helsinki in June 1904, was committed by a man who had personal connections with Poland: Eugen Schauman, the assassin, had spent his childhood in a military family stationed in the Vistula provinces, and even spoke Swedish with a slight Slavic accent.23 In the years that preceded the Great War, Finland and Poland started to follow parallel courses. The similarities became especially apparent in the revolutionary events unleashed by the Russian military debacle against Japan in the Far East. Starting from November 1904, the Vistula provinces were torn by a surge of terror and counter-terror that was to last for almost four years, occasionally assuming fratricidal tendencies as the newly-established battle squads of the PPS, the so-called bojówki, directed their actions against their domestic Polish adversaries as well as the 21

Kalervo Hovi, ‘Suomi Puolan sosialistien tsaarinhallituksen välisissä yhteistyökaavailuissa’, in Venäjän vähemmistökansallisuudet tsarisminvastaisessa taistelussa 1800-luvulta vuoden 1917 vallankumouksiin, (1979), pp. 75–86 (pp. 83–4). Steven Duncan Huxley, Constitutionalist Insurgency in Finland: Finnish ‘Passive Resistance’ against Russification as a Case of Nonmilitary Struggle in the European Resistance Tradition, Studia Historica, 38 (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1990), pp. 5–9. The case of Eugen Schauman is interesting also because his father, General Waldemar Schauman, had participated in the suppression of the Polish January Uprising in 1863–1864, something that Eugen himself felt personal shame over later on. Seppo Zetterberg, Viisi laukausta senaatissa: Eugen Schaumanin elämä ja teko (Helsinki: Otava, 1986), p. 81.

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Russian authorities. The simultaneous unrest in Finland in the context of the Great Strike of 1905 raised a similar possibility of internal strife as the initial solidarity of the national resistance soon eroded. Within two months, the Finnish ‘National Guard’ that was established to preserve order during the Strike had split into the bourgeois ‘Whites’ and the socialist ‘Reds’, and an armed confrontation between the two factions was prevented only by the end of the strike after the capitulation of the Tsarist regime. The concessions made by St. Petersburg were, however, temporary, and after 1908 reaction reigned supreme both in Finland and Poland once again. The First World War testified the last outburst of Finnish and Polish loyalism towards Russia. The ‘imperial attitude’ that was observed in Helsinki and Warsaw in the autumn of 1914 was extremely ambiguous, partly based on the hope of securing Russian favour through pronounced loyalty during the war, and partly on the fear of potential Russian reprisals. Thus, the civilian population of Helsinki and the Finnish State Railways gave a friendly treatment to the mobilizing Russian 22nd Army Corps and organized its transport with speed and efficiency in July 1914, gaining public expressions of gratitude from the Russian military. A month later, when the first regiments finally reached Warsaw, the local Polish population lined the streets to welcome the arrival of Russian troops.24 To some extent, the Great War did mark a genuine strengthening of loyalty, mostly because, at least on the surface, it forced the Russian government to adopt a more receptive attitude towards the interests of both borderlands, and indeed, in Finland there even emerged a substantial loyalist volunteer movement of young men who were ready to fight for the Russian Empire in the name of Finnish interests.25 However, the conflict also re-ignited the concept of active resistance, which was to gain more importance as the fortunes of war were to turn against the tsarist Empire. The methods chosen by the Polish and Finnish independence activists during the First World War were identical both in execution and outcome. Already two years before the war Józef Piłsudski, Kazimierz Sosnkowski and Władysław Sikorski had started to organize their so-called ‘Riflemen’s Clubs’ for Polish volunteers in the Kingdom of Galicia. During the war, these pre-existing military formations gave birth to the famous ‘Polish Legions’ fighting against the Russian Empire under Austro-Hungarian command. At the same time, the approaches of activist Finnish university students towards the German general staff resulted in the creation of the legendary 27. Königlich-Preußisch Jäger-Bataillon, a Finnish counterpart to Piłsudski’s Legions. Neither the Polish Legionaires nor the Finnish Jägers represented the mainstream of the national sentiment in their countries at the time, but after the war, they both were to pass to the national mythology as embodiments of the national independence struggle. The song of the Polish Legions, Marsz Pierwszej Brygady, ‘March of the First Brigade’, became a classic in the independent Poland, and in Finland, the same position was occupied by Jääkärinmarssi, ‘Jägers’ March’, composed by Jean Sibelius himself. The final termination of Russian rule was a complicated process both for Poland as well as for Finland, and briefly turned both countries into satellites of the Central 24

Davies, God’s Playground, ii, p. 278; Pertti Luntinen, F. A. Seyn, 1862–1918: A Political Biography of a Tsarist Imperialist as Administrator of Finland, Studia Historica, 19 (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1985), p. 237. Tuomas Hoppu, Historian unohtamat; suomalaiset vapaaehtoiset Venäjän armeijassa 1. maailmansodassa 1914–1918, Bibliotheca Historica, 100 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2005), p. 314.

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Powers. In August 1915, the German army entered Warsaw, and a year later, Berlin announced its intention to restore the old Congress Kingdom under German and Austrian protection. In April 1918, Germany completed its conquest of the Baltic littoral by intervening in the Finnish Civil War and capturing Helsinki from the Finnish Red Guards. The German plans for Finland were more or less similar to the ones already deployed in Poland, envisioning the establishment of the ‘Kingdom of Finland’ ruled over by the Kaiser’s nephew. In the eyes of the victorious Western Allies, this brief Finnish and Polish association with the Second Reich was enough to taint both countries as unwilling German vassals not to be relied upon, something that was to have unwelcome repercussions later on during the inter-war era. Curiously enough, both in Finland and Poland, the leading figures of the day responded to the imposition of German rule in a roughly analogous manner. When Józef Piłsudski was presented with the demand of an oath of allegiance to the Kaiser, he refused, and was imprisoned; when General C. G. E. Mannerheim was faced with the necessity to recognize German supremacy over his Finnish White Army, he resigned from his post as the commander-in-chief. In the autumn of 1919, the paths of the two generals crossed as Mannerheim arrived in Warsaw and met with his Polish colleague. The talks between the two men revolved around the possible Finnish-Polish cooperation against the threat of the resurgent Bolshevik Russia.26 The Polish-Soviet war of 1919–1920 was eventually paralleled by the abortive Finnish expedition to the Aunus Karelia in 1919 and in the participation of a substantial number of Finnish volunteers in the Estonian War of Independence. A handful of Finnish volunteers who had served in the ‘tribal wars’ in Estonia and Latvia also reached Poland, where they joined ataman Stanislau Nikadzimavich Bulak-Balakhovich’s White Russian forces, fighting side by side with Piłsudski’s troops and witnessing the ‘Miracle of Vistula’.27 With the achievement of national independence in the aftermath of the First World War, the new successor states were determined to break away from all reminders of their imperial past. Finland and Poland were no exceptions. The Citadel of Warsaw and the sea fortress of Sveaborg in Helsinki were stripped of all imperial Russian symbols and taken over by the military forces of the newly-independent nations. Similar removal of former imperial symbols from most public buildings was swift and complete in both countries, sparing only a few monuments of historic value such as the statue of Emperor Alexander II at the Senate Square of Helsinki. The program of ‘de-russification’ extended even to the religious life, as the Orthodox Christian congregations in Poland and Finland also became targets of government action. For reasons of ‘national concord’ the Finnish Orthodox Church was separated from the Patriarchate of Moscow and placed under the authority of the Ecumenical 26

Kalervo Hovi, ‘Mitä Mannerheim teki Varsovassa syksyllä 1919?’, Faravid; Pohjois-Suomen historiallisen yhdistyksen vuosikirja, 3 (1979), pp. 132–47. C. G. E. Mannerheim had served in Poland as a cavalry commander in 1909–1916, and had gained a deep, personal knowledge of the country; his intimate correspondence with Princess Maria Lubomirska is well-known and elaborated in research literature. The exact number of Finnish volunteers who fought in the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 is unknown, and to this day, no detailed, extensive research has been done of them. For a description by one individual Finnish volunteer, see Kaarlo Kurko, Puolalaisten mukana bolsheviikkejä vastaan: suomalaisen muistelmia Puolan-Venäjän sodasta v. 1920 (Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Säilä, 1933); see also Mirko Harjula, Suomalaiset Venäjän sisällissodassa 1917–1920 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2006), pp. 242–3 and Jussi Jalonen, ‘Przypadki porucznika Kurko: o finie, co walczył w wojnie polsko-bolszewickiej’, Tygodnik Powszechny, August seventeenth, 2008, pp. 24–5.

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Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1923, and a year after Poland followed suit as the local Orthodox Church was declared completely independent.28 Since the national independence marked the triumph of the activist resistance tradition, it was self-evident that the previous traditions of loyalism and conciliation towards Russia would be subjected to a political and intellectual assault. Both in Poland and Finland, the historiography aimed to present the newly-found sovereign statehood as the culmination of national history and the inevitable outcome of everything that had taken place before. In this context, the nineteenth-century Polish positivism and the Finnish compliance tradition, both of which had sought a modus vivendi with Russia, were singled out for a negative appraisal as ‘historical aberrations’. In Poland, historians, such as Wilhelm Feldman and Wacław Sobieski, launched the attack against positivist legacy and the vindication of the romantic insurrectionary tradition. The criticism further intensified in the atmosphere that followed Marshal Piłsudski’s coup d’état in 1926.29 Simultaneously, the Finnish historiography experienced a corresponding process in the exultation of the post-1899 resistance against russification, as well as in the official recognition of the ‘War of Liberation’ of 1918 as the ultimate fulfilment of national destiny.30 The presentation of the nineteenth-century conciliatory politics as ‘slanted’ and ‘wrong’ orientations did not remain completely unchallenged. The Polish historiography of the inter-war years found its critics among historians such as Karol Krzewski, who sought to stress also the beneficial effects of the positivist program on the Polish society. The rivalry between the followers of Marshal Piłsudski and Roman Dmowski’s National Democratic camp — the heirs to the positivist tradition — ensured that the debate on proper historical interpretations remained constant in the Polish academia until the Second World War, however, this debate was uneven. Although the Polish historiography remained relatively free in the sense that it did not become monopolized by any single theory imposed by the authoritarian regime, the majority of the historians nonetheless approached the era of the Russian rule from a viewpoint that was more or less orthogonal to that of the positivists and their defenders.31 The process of historiographic revision became far more complete in Finland, where the past loyalism and obedience could become not only targets of scorn, but even candidates for amnesia. One such example was the participation of the Finnish Guard in the suppression of the Polish November Insurrection of 1831, barely mentioned in any of the histories of the Guard published in this period. Virtually the only description of the war could be found in a Swedish-language newspaper article written on the eve of the Guard’s centenary in 1927, which passed over the Polish campaign with one single mention ‘it is not pleasant today to remember that Finnish soldiers were helping to suppress a people fighting for their liberty’.32 Curiously, five years later, the tercentennial of the Battle of Lützen and the Finnish participation in the Thirty Years’ War were magnificently celebrated in Helsinki. But in the context 28

29 30 31 32

Max Engman, ‘Finland as a Successor-State’ in Finland: People, Nation, State, ed. by Max Engman and David Kirby (London: Hurst & Company, 1989), pp. 102–27 (pp. 112–3). Kuczyński, pp. 37–42. Huxley, pp. 5–9. Kuczyński, pp. 57, 107. Teuvo Laitila, The Finnish Guard in the Balkans; Heroism, Imperial Loyalty and Finnishness in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 as recollected in the Memoirs of Finnish Guardsmen, Annales Academiæ Scientiarum Fennicæ, Humaniora, 324 (Helsinki: The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 2003), p. 83.

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of the attempts at the Finnish-Polish alliance in the 1920s, triggered by the mutual fear of the USSR, the Finnish Guard’s campaign in Poland had become a forbidden topic. When comparing the Polish and Finnish treatment of the domestic conciliatory traditions and the Russian rule, it is interesting to note that the repudiation of the imperial past and the imposition of new historiographic orthodoxy was perhaps more thorough in Finland. Paradoxically, the academic conformism and unitary culture became more pervasive in the country that actually did manage to retain its parliamentary democracy and open society more or less continuously during the inter-war era, whereas the authoritarian regime in Poland did not pose an insurmountable obstacle to the emergence of dissenting voices within the academia. On the other hand, this was completely natural: in contrast to Poland, Finland had more to forget, and as a country with no previous history of independent statehood, was more hard-pressed to deliver a historical justification for her past and present existence. The imperial past and the autonomy under the Russian rule had laid the foundations for the subsequent independence, but since the independence had entailed a separation from Russia, it was difficult to simultaneously regard the Russian rule as any kind of a first step towards national sovereignty. For Poland, it was easy to portray the independence of 1919 as the continuation of the process that had been interrupted in 1795, just as it was later on easy to regard the end of the People’s Democracy in 1989 as the continuation of the process that had been interrupted in 1939 and 1947. Although this viewpoint had its defects, it may have also facilitated a more balanced treatment of the intervening eras as a separate periods on their own right, and the sudden and radical political changes that have repeatedly occurred in the twentieth-century Poland may have also allowed a more swift and radical historical reopening and reinterpretation after the collapse of each authoritarian regime. But in Finland, the independence of 1917 was not a restitution of an earlier status, since the Russian rule had been an essential precondition for the separate national existence to begin with, and in the context of this political continuity and status quo, the process of reviewing the past has, by necessity, been a good deal more cautious, more careful, and more gradual. One of the regularlysurfacing features of the re-evaluation of the nineteenth century has been the question of whether Russian rule was a beneficial factor initiating the evolution of Finland into a nation-state, or instead an unwelcome deviation from Finland’s natural progress towards Scandinavian democracy as part of Sweden.33 To this day, it can be problematic to accept, even for supposedly professional historians, that the origins of the present-day Finland date back to the manifesto issued by the Russian Tsar in 1808. For better or for worse, Poles have had no such reason to question their identity. For the relationship between Poland and Finland, the Russian rule was the formative period. Even though historians such as Davies have usually focused on contemplating the differences between the Finnish and Polish experiences, it is more striking to notice how often these two nations were faced with similar predicaments and actually ended up pursuing parallel courses, either deliberately or by coincidence, and very often, these experiences also left near-identical traces on the historical memory of both nations. The shared experience of Russian rule prompted Poles and Finns to 33

For the most recent examples of the latter viewpoint, see Martti Häikiö, Historia ja väärät profeetat; kirjoituksia Suomen historian kipupisteistä (Helsinki: Kleio, Edita, 2003), pp. 33–41, and also Tauno Karonen, Pohjoinen Suurvalta: Ruotsi ja Suomi 1521–1809 (Helsinki: WSOY, 1999), pp. 430, 436.

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pay attention to their mutual situations and created prospects for an exchange of ideas that otherwise would have never existed between these two nations. By the late nineteenth century, the Polish positivists were presenting the Grand-Duchy of Finland as a model for their own conciliatory ideology, and by the early twentieth century, the Finnish Independence Activists were opting for methods of active resistance formerly employed by Poland. These liaisons may have been secondary, marginal occurrences for both nations, but even so, the fact that they even took place outside of the regional contexts in which these two countries had traditionally operated made them special and unique. Thus, the century of the Russian rule brought Poland and Finland one inadvertent, but undeniable benefit. Having started their journey within the Russian Empire from similar positions but with different pasts, the two countries had briefly ended up on opposing sides. However, eventually, their paths converged and laid basis for mutual understanding and cooperation. The Russian rule had granted Poland and Finland a special consciousness of each other, a sense of having something in common, and whatever other judgements might be made of the imperial past, there is no doubt that this, at least, was certainly a positive consequence. As far as the relationship of these two countries with Russia is concerned, the lessons of the past remain important to this day. The experiences of the nineteenth century were repeated again in the twentieth century, as Poland went through another period of upheavals and national uprisings while Finland opted once more for conciliation and compromise. But by the 1990s, the paths of the two nations converged yet again and today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, both countries have found themselves in another common, shared political context as member states of the European Union. The echoes of the past Russian rule and the traditionally precarious position of Finland between the two Slavic nations have still featured in the political clashes of our times, as testified in the quarrels between Warsaw and Moscow during the Finnish EU presidency in the autumn of 2006. A more dramatic situation occurred during the South Ossetian war in the late summer of 2008, when Finland, as the head of the OSCE, attempted to use her good relations with Russia in the mediation of the conflict, while Poland opted to openly side with Georgia. Both occasions indirectly revealed not only the latent Polish-Russian antagonisms, but also the Finnish inability to understand their potential depth and intensity, in spite of all the ample precedents in the past. Just as before, the present-day difficulties in the Finnish-Polish political cooperation are often based on the different political attitudes towards Russia, resulting from categorically different experiences. Given that the said attitudes can historically be traced back to the era of the Tsarist Russian rule, a new, systematic historical, and historiographic approach reviewing the experiences of both nations under imperial Russia appears as the logical step towards closer understanding. Even though the historic experiences of Finland and Poland were different, they did by no means stand in complete contrast. In the long run, even the most troublesome and uncomfortable past can be developed from a historical burden into a historical advantage.

slovo, Vol. 21 No. 1, Spring, 2009, 16–28

Russian-Greek Relations during the Crimean War Lucien J. Frary1 Rider University, USA

The Tsar’s desire to protect Orthodox Christians in Ottoman domains contributed to Russia’s going to war in 1853. Russian agents and consuls in Greek space encouraged the Tsar’s sentiments by reporting on oppressions against Orthodox Christians and an impending revolt in the Balkans. When Russian forces crossed the Danube, a tremendous outpouring of sympathy in Greece ensued, and with Russian moral and material backing, Greek insurgents waged war against Ottoman armies for unredeemed territories. Thus, in defence of Orthodoxy Russia pursued a new course by supporting revolution against legitimacy. The ﬁnal outcome was unfavourable to Greece, in part due to the arrival of allied ships and troops, which forced King Othon to declare neutrality. The allies transformed the Piraeus into a gigantic garrison, which led to an outbreak of cholera that claimed the lives of over 30,000 people. While examining these issues, this essay illustrates a new course in Russian policy towards the Balkan peoples in 1853.

Introduction Tsar Nicholas I’s (1825–55) desire to protect Orthodox Christians and religious sites in the Orthodox East (Pravoslavnyi Vostok) was a major cause of the Crimean War. Russian consular reports in the early 1850s of persecutions against Balkan Orthodox Christians and of an impending revolt against Ottoman rule helped to encourage aggressiveness among foreign policy makers in St Petersburg. When diplomatic relations with the Ottomans and the European powers deteriorated late in 1853, the Tsar and his ministers became convinced of the need to intervene actively. In this instance Russia assumed a completely new course with respect to the Balkan peoples and attempted to substantiate it ideologically. After a quarter century of dedicated adherence to the principles of legitimism and conservatism, Russia made a significant alteration in its course of action in the Balkans.2 1

Lucien J. Frary is an Assistant Professor. Support for the research of this essay was provided by the American Councils. With the exception of a passing comment in J. LeDonne, The Russian Empire and the World, 1700–1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 260, this interesting question does not appear to have been explored in histories of Russian foreign policy.

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Multiple studies of the origins of the Crimean War stress the role of religion in Tsar Nicholas’s decision making, yet Russian consular reports promising a panOrthodox uprising once Russian troops crossed the Danube remain an unexplored element of the casus belli. In the winter of 1853, instead of discouraging rebellions in Ottoman domains, Russia supported the actions of Greeks who attempted to liberate their co-ethnics from Ottoman rule. Since 1829 Russian policy had been directed towards supporting the Ottoman Empire. Russia did not wish to increase its territory in Europe and Tsar Nicholas realized that Russia could not acquire Constantinople. Yet, if Russia was not to have the Ottoman capital, neither was any other power, and preponderant influence in the Ottoman capital could be advantageous. Central to this strategy was the maintenance of good relations with Great Britain. The eventual breakdown of Russian-British relations in October 1853 marked the turning point that drew Russia closer towards a war against an enemy coalition. Once relations with the other powers reached an impasse, Russia’s Foreign Minister, Karl R. Nesselrode, began to consider other options. One of these was to support an uprising in the Balkans, the liberation of Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria, and the aggrandizement of Greece. This essay is a preliminary test of such a hypothesis, namely that Russian policy backed an uprising of Greek Christians in Ottoman territories once war with the other powers appeared inevitable. If such an interpretation is correct, it marks a turning point in Russian foreign policy that entailed significant consequences for politics and society in the Greek kingdom.3 Once Russian-Ottoman hostilities commenced, a tremendous outpouring of sympathy in Greece for the Russian cause ensued, which posed a serious challenge to the influence of the western powers in the region. In keeping with the new Russian policy, during the first months of 1854 an open rebellion of big proportions erupted in Epirus, Thessaly, western Macedonia, and Chalhidiki just after the Ottoman fleet was destroyed at Sinope and Russian troops crossed the Danube. As one of two independent Orthodox states in the world, Greece naturally sided with Russia in the subsequent conflict. Backed by Russian moral and material assistance, Greek insurgents attempted to claim terra irredenta by waging war against Ottoman armies. The outcome ultimately proved unfavourable to the Greek rebels due to a whole series of factors, above all the arrival in May 1854 of British and French gunboats in the Piraeus and the coasts of mainland Greece and Epirus. The western allies forced King Othon to declare neutrality and subsequently occupied Greece, an act which constituted an infringement of the international treaties the western powers purported to defend. In turn, they transformed the Piraeus into a provisioning post for forces en route to fight the Russians and forced Othon to accept a new pro-British ministry headed by his old enemy, Alexander Mavrokordatos.

Contrast the present hypothesis with a published circular by Nesselrode, 2 March 1854, in A. M. Zaionchkovskii, Vostochnaia voina, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg: Ekpeditsiia zagotovleniia gos. bumag., 1908–13), ii, Prilozheniia, pp. 327–8. B. Jelavich in Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 1806–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 137, writes that the spontaneous uprisings of 1854 in Thessaly, Epirus, and Chalhidiki ‘did not have Russian backing’.

LUCIEN J. FRARY

Russia and the Megali Idea Greece became an independent state in 1830 after a protracted struggle against the Ottoman Empire. Russia, Great Britain, and France — the so-called protecting powers — played a crucial role in the final shaping of independent Greece. The first sovereign of Greece, Prince Othon, the son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, arrived in his new domain in 1833 and set about establishing a modern government, bureaucracy, financial, and educational infrastructure based on western models. The myriad of problems facing the new state included the condition of the church, an important institution and the bastion of national identity, religious connections to the ecumenical patriarch, who still owed allegiance to the Sultan, and thousands of now demobilized freedom fighters. The country, moreover, after more than ten years of bitter struggle was in ruins and much had to be built from scratch. Although the great powers supported the idea of Greek independence, when the final borders were determined the new kingdom was limited to the Peloponnesus, a narrow strip of mainland, and many Aegean islands. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greeks were thus left outside the confines of the kingdom. From the beginning, the problem of irredentism loomed large in Greek society and proved impossible to suppress. A whole spectrum of Greeks, in both the Ottoman Empire and the independent state, ardently desired for an extension of the kingdom’s borders. By the early 1840s the irredentist movement became a bona fide ideology with its own name: the Megali Idea or the Great Idea. Depending upon the individual’s ambition and sense of reality, the Great Idea meant the expansion of the Greek state until all Greek speakers, all Orthodox Christians, ‘and any other country where Greek history or the Greek race was present’, would be united.4 Almost unlimited claims to Ottoman territory were advanced, and the logical conclusion was the reconstruction of the Byzantine Empire with its capital at Constantinople.5 The quest for unredeemed territory brought Greece into conflict with Europe ever since the revolution against the Ottomans began. Russia, since at least the time of Peter the Great (1682–1725), had been sympathetic to the condition of Orthodox Christians under Muslim domination. On coming to the throne in 1825, Tsar Nicholas shared his predecessors concern for their co-religionists and, despite his conservative convictions, energetically endorsed Greek independence. Although sympathetic to the issue of Greek unity, he was also a strong proponent of the status quo in the Near East. Russian policy thus can be considered somewhat contradictory, for while sensitive to the plight of Christians, the Tsar and his ministers worked to suppress efforts to create or enlarge independent Balkan states. For example, during the famous visit of British Ambassador Sir Hamilton Seymour to St Petersburg in 1853, Nicholas purportedly proclaimed ‘I would prefer to lose the last Russian soldier and to give my last ruble, than to permit the aggrandizement of Greece in the Near East’.6 4

E. Driault and M. Lhéritier, Histoire diplomatique de la Grèce de 1821 à nos jours, 5 vols. (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1925–26), ii, pp. 252–3. A. Papadopoulos-Vretos, De l’idée dominante des Grecs sur la conquête de Constantinople (Athens: Oikos Proton, 1854). Driault and Lhéritier, Histoire diplomatique, ii, pp. 384–5.

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The direction of Russian policy in Greece can be traced to two important documents: the Minister of Justice Dmitrii V. Dashkov’s memorandum on RussianOttoman relations (1829), and the Minister of Education Sergei S. Uvarov’s proclamation of official philosophy Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality (1833).7 Dashkov’s position paper convinced the Tsar of the advantages of maintaining the territorial integrity of a weak Ottoman Empire under Russian protection. Uvarov’s troika of interdependent values likewise represented conservative views, and acted as a sort of rebuttal to the revolutionary slogan Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, at least when applied in Russia. In Greece, however, the ideas of official philosophy could be inspiring to individuals who dreamed of reclaiming territories occupied by Greek-speaking Christians. It may have been no accident, for example, that the newspaper the Aion, the main Russophile publication in Greece, used the slogan ‘fatherland, religion, and king’ (patridha, thriskeia, kai vasileia) on its front-page header and its authors, including the editor and historian Ioannis Philemon, consistently spread ideas about uniting territories inhabited by Greeks under Ottoman rule. Despite the Tsar’s outward eschewal of Greek expansion, Russian sympathy towards the union of Orthodox people promoted the hopes among the Greeks for salvation from the north. Furthermore, government officials in St Petersburg as well as Russian civil society were not completely adverse to irredentist movements among Balkan Orthodox Christians. When Russian military conflict against the Ottomans occurred, it was naturally advantageous for Russian agents to support forces that would weaken the Ottoman armies and divert their resources. This is precisely what happened when war broke out in the fall of 1853.

Russia, the Crimean War, and the Megali Idea Even though Greece’s official relations with the Ottoman Empire began to stabilize during the 1840s, Greek nationalists’ clamouring for the need for expansion remained a trouble spot for Europe. As the attempts of the Ottoman state to reform proved inadequate, a combination of Greek politicians, intellectuals, merchants, and adventurers — often supported by the crown — conjured up serious plans for enlarging the state’s frontiers. The first such opportunities for national gains came during the Near Eastern crises of 1831–33 and 1839–41, when the Egyptian vassal Mehmet Ali attempted to overthrow the Sultan and carve out his own personal domain.8 During these episodes Greek rebels worked to liberate Thessaly, Crete, and other territories, yet the intervention of the great powers stifled their endeavours. Nevertheless, the passion for enosis or union with unredeemed lands endured. While the opportunities offered by the Egyptian crises could not be exploited, the promise of another Russian-Ottoman war in 1853 was immensely tempting to 7

Ministerstvo inostrannykh del SSSR, Vneshniaia politika Rossii XIX i nachala XX v.: Dokumenty Rossiiskogo ministerstva inostrannykh del, 17 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1960–2005), xvi, pp. 287–94; T. C. Prousis, RussianOttoman Relations in the Levant: The Dashkov Archive (Minneapolis: MMEEM, 2002), pp. 123–33; N. Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959); and C. Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786–1855 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984). M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1774–1923: A Study in International Relations (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966), pp. 53–109.

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virtually all Greeks. ‘Nine-tenths of the Greek nation’, according to one contemporary witness, sincerely sympathized with Russia in its quarrel against the Ottomans.9 Although the Greeks did not know of the Tsar’s aversion to the creation of a new Byzantine state, they continued to hope for Russian succour. The circumstances in this case were uniquely alluring, for the crisis coincided with the fourth centenary of the fall of Constantinople. According to Ivan E. Persiany, the Russian Ambassador at Athens, the dispute between Russia and France over the rights of churches in Jerusalem caused considerable anxiety among the Greeks, who supported the Russian cause wholeheartedly, claiming that it coincided with their own interests.10 A contemporary observer, the Greek writer Panayotis Soutsos, addressed the British government in an article published in Aion ‘We love the Russians, because they knock down the Turk, whom you wish to revive and perpetuate’.11 The crisis over the Holy Places led to the discussions between the Tsar and Seymour. At this time the Tsar emphasized his desire to work in concert with the British government, and Viscount Aberdeen, the British foreign minister, accepted the Russian advances favourably.12 In Athens, Ambassador Persiany attempted to inform influential Greeks of the Tsar’s intentions regarding the Holy Places and his concern for stability in Ottomangoverned provinces. In February 1853, the Tsar dispatched Prince Alexander Menshikov to Constantinople, where he worked to resolve the issue of the Holy Places, although the Porte refused the Russian demand for a protectorate over all Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire. The Menshikov mission produced an excellent impression on the Greeks, according to Persiany, and fuelled their hopes for energetic Russian intervention in Ottoman affairs.13 The visit of Admiral Kornilov and General Nikapotchinskii to Greece in connection with the Menshikov mission served to encourage trouble among the Greek masses early in 1853. Kornilov, a Russian subject of Greek extraction, explained that the reason for his visit was his interest in antiquities. While in Athens he also made time for an interview with King Othon and the Prime Minister of Greece, Païkos, and he gathered information about the movements of the French fleet. Based on the report of Sir Hugh Rose, the Secretary at the British mission in Constantinople, Kornilov ‘had made assurances to the Greeks respecting the ample protection which Russia would give her coreligionists in all matters relating to their religion; that Admiral Kornilov had besides secretly endeavoured to induce the Greek Government to send armed bands, or banditti, from Greece into the neighbouring Turkish provinces for the purpose of exciting troubles and revolt among their Greek inhabitants’.14

9 10

11 12

13 14

W. Miller, The Ottoman Empire and Its Successors (London: Cass, 1966), p. 219. Persiany to Nesselrode, 3 Feb. 1853, A[rkhiv] V[neshnei] P[olitiki] R[ossiisskii] I[mperii], f[ond]. 133, op[isi]. 469, d[elo]. 1 (1853), ll[isty]. 31–4. J. V. Kofas, International and Domestic Politics in Greece during the Crimean War (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1980), pp. 37–9. Driault and Lhéritier, Histoire diplomatique, ii, p. 376. D. Goldfrank, The Origins of the Crimean War (London: Longman, 1994), pp. 115, 125–9; J. Curtiss, Russia’s Crimean War (Durham, N.C., 1966), pp. 58–83; N. Rich, Why the Crimean War? A Cautionary Tale (New York: Mcgraw-Hill, 1991), pp. 28–33. Persiany to Nesselrode, 5 March 1853, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 1 (1853), ll. 59–65. Rose to Clarendon, 11 April 1853 (n.s.) in Englische Akten zur Geschichte des Krimkriegs, ed. by W. Baumgart (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005), Bd. i, p. 184.

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According to the Athenian press, Kornilov’s visit inspired the enthusiasm of all Greek patriots, who eagerly awaited the outbreak of a war between Russia and Turkey.15 Acting out directives from Nesselrode, Persiany tried to persuade the Greek government of the Tsar’s pacific intentions.16 In a March report to the Russian Foreign Ministry, Persiany claimed that he ‘did not cease from repeating to men of influence that not only England, but all the powers agreed to consider the integrity of the Ottoman Empire as indispensable to the maintenance of the general peace, and that they [the Greeks] are squarely wrong if they believe that Russia contemplates hostile actions against Turkey’.17 As war fever seized Athens, Greek-Ottoman relations began to worsen as brigands ran rampant on both sides of the frontier. In response, the Turkish army under Hussein Pasha began preparing border fortifications under the pretext of discouraging banditry.18 Once each side strengthened its forces, the chances of them colliding increased. Pressured by various factions to take more vigorous measures, King Othon attempted to lay claim to two Greek villages — Paleomouha and Karitza — along the northern boundary and sanctioned the increase of the frontier guard by five hundred men equipped with cannon. The dispute over the two villages further envenomed Greek-Ottoman relations and the protecting powers attempted to diffuse the crisis by forcing the Greek government to relinquish its claims to the two villages and recall its troops from the frontier. The British Ambassador Wyse warned that, ‘If a single drop of blood should be shed, no one, in the present temper of the two countries, could calculate what might be the fatal results’.19 Persiany endeavoured to persuade the Greek government to respect Ottoman territory and reported to St Petersburg that the discrepancy in troops on the frontier was so large that Colonel Soutsos, the leader of the Greek forces, would not be so foolish as to commit acts of aggression.20 When Menshikov left Constantinople in May, Persiany reported that ‘the enthusiasm that animates the Greeks towards the power that generously protects their co-religionist interests defies description’.21 The Tsar’s address of 20 May 1853 calling on all ‘religious brothers’ to defend ‘the integrity of the Orthodox Church’ intensified the already charged emotions. Newspapers in Athens echoed the Tsar’s proclamation with bombastic statements such as: The day has arrived! Prepare your swords and your rifles, with the fustanella of six folds. . .We will lunch in Larissa and have supper on Mount Olympus. There, we will meet the Great Father with all of our compatriots holding laurels in hand, and priests will bless us and our standards with the cross, [. . .] on the second day we will go and sing the liturgy in the church of Saint Sophia with Prince Menshikov.22 15

16 17 18

19 20 21 22

D. Dontas, I Ellas kai ai dynameis kata ton Krimaïkon Polemon (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1973), pp. 23–4; Driault and Lhéritier, Histoire diplomatique, ii, pp. 374–5. Persiany to Nesselrode, 5 March 1853, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 1 (1853), ll. 59–65; Dontas, I Ellas, p. 23. Persiany to Nesselrode, 15 March 1853, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 1 (1853), ll. 59–73. Ibid., pp. 75–6; E. A. Kyriakides, Istoria tou synchronous ellinismou, 1832–1892, 2 vols. (Athens: Estias, 1898), i, p. 639. Cited in Tatsios, The Megali Idea, p. 23. Persiany to Nesselrode, 5 April 1853, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 1 (1853), ll. 100–5. Persiany to Nesselrode, 15 May 1853, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 1 (1853), ll. 150–1. Driault and Lhéritier, Histoire diplomatique, ii, p. 376; P. Karolides, Synchronos istoria ton ellinon kai ton lipon laon tis Anatolis, 1821–1921, 7 vols. (Athens: A. Vitsikounaki, 1922–29), iv, pp. 452–3; Tatsios, The Megali Idea, pp. 157–8.

LUCIEN J. FRARY

By July a Russian army had crossed the Prut and occupied the Danubian Principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia). This action coupled with the aspirations of Napoleon III of France to claim rights over traditionally Orthodox territory made many Greeks believe that the time had come for expansion once and for all. King Othon’s Russian-orientated policy revived his popularity and Greek historians have generally agreed that Othon encouraged a Greek-Ottoman war and territorial expansion.23 In the waning months of 1853, Greek bands near the border began collecting gunpowder and other war supplies and speaking of a ‘Second Greek-Turkish War’.24 Outwardly professing an attitude of peaceful coexistence with Turkey, King Othon ordered even more troops to the northern frontier. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Païkos emphasized the need to maintain domestic tranquillity, yet the royal couple appeared less inclined to express diplomatic pleasantries. In September Persiany reported that: A bellicose spirit animates the entire nation at this moment. Secret societies are in full activity. The prelates, military chiefs, and prominent individuals, who comprise a party, devote themselves to a lively propaganda against the government of the Sultan. They maintain an underground correspondence with the Ottoman provinces, and their emissaries travel throughout Thessaly, Epirus, [and] Macedonia to spy on the capacity of the Turks and to prepare the Christian populations of the provinces for a general uprising. They suggest to them that it is Russia who has been called by the God of the Greeks to chase out the infidels from Byzantium and to open the doors of St. Sophia to the Orthodox religion.25

Persiany added that members of these secret societies were sending an agent to St Petersburg and that the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire were preparing for war. ‘In a word, everything is ready for an explosion, and the crossing of the Danube by our troops will be the signal’.26 The Russian Ambassador queried how the Greek government would respond if war broke out stating ‘I suppose that it will remain neutral’, yet he doubted its ability to prevent a crowd of adventurers from attempting to re-conquer their homeland and hoped that the Greeks would not threaten Ottoman territories.27 At this moment the Russian Ambassador continued to oppose the brewing Greek rebellion. Nevertheless, despite the remonstrance of the protecting powers, the national fervour was overwhelming and King Othon became only too aware of his popularity as the nation’s redemption crusade awakened. In the present context the material necessary for the re-establishment of the Byzantine Empire seemed near. The relations between the Russians and Ottomans steadily deteriorated in the summer of 1853. Intervention at Vienna and other efforts at mediation ultimately failed to produce positive results and hostilities began in late October. The imperial manifesto of 20 October proclaimed that Russia was forced to resort to arms against 23 24 25 26 27

See the historiographical review in Kofas, International and Domestic Politics, pp. 51–7. Kofas, International and Domestic Politics, p. 51; Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause, p. 142. Persiany to Nesselrode, 18 Sept. 1853, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 1 (1853), ll. 389–92. Ibid. Persiany to Nesselrode, 16 Oct. 1853, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 1 (1853), ll. 434–5.

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the Ottomans in order to protect ‘the sacred rights of the Orthodox Church’.28 No doubt the Russian manifesto reached the bands of Christian irregulars in the frontier zone. Then, by subtle increments Russian policy towards Greece began to change. Nesselrode instructed Persiany to inform the Greek government that ‘Russia wants to avoid an offensive war’ and that the intentions of the Tsar were pacific. Now, however, Russia maintained ‘a more firm attitude that would permit the Greeks to realize their projects against Turkey’.29 In other words, once war broke out Nesslerode’s instructions to Persiany became curiously ambiguous regarding the Greek preparations for an insurrection. The Greeks unsurprisingly welcomed this sort of attitude. Meanwhile, the Greek government, press, and Ambassador Persiany complained about the mistreatment of Christians by Ottoman authorities. As soon as news of Russia’s declaration of war reached Athens, a throng of Greeks staged a pro-Russian demonstration outside the Russian embassy and Greek newspapers assumed an open hostility towards Turkey.30 In November, a Russian squadron annihilated the Ottoman fleet at Sinope and the chances of localizing the conflict ended. Soon enough hundreds of Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, and Vlachs residing in Russia and the Balkan region volunteered for service in the Russia army.31 In a generous act of religious patriotism Gregorios Maraslis, a wealthy Greek merchant of Odessa, donated 550,000 rubles to the Tsar for the purpose of repairing St Sofia as soon as it returned to Orthodox hands.32 In January 1854, British and French squadrons arrived ready to sweep the Russian presence from the Black Sea. Russia thus faced a coalition of British, French, and Ottoman forces. At the same time, in Greece the popularity of Russia, King Othon, and his ‘Russian consort Amalia’33 surged as various publications advocated, predicted, and envisioned the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. Queen Amalia wrote a personal letter to Tsar Nicholas wishing him all the best and referring to the common and sacred cause between the two coreligionist nations.34 In a personal meeting with Persiany, an overjoyed Othon expressed his satisfaction with the Russian victory at Sinope: ‘[T]he Emperor is the organ of Providence. He protects the rights of religion and of humanity, and God will therefore bless his noble efforts’.35 While Othon and the Greek government continued to insist that the reinforcement of Greek troops along the frontier was purely defensive in nature, the queen spoke more frankly about the need to profit from the current situation by expanding the borders of the kingdom.36 The government and public

29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

The manifesto circulated widely via the Russian press. See, for example, Severnaia pchela, 22 Oct. 1853. Odesskii vestnik, 17 Oct. 1853 printed a detailed essay on the activity of the Greek government. See also, M. T. Florinsky, Russia: A History and Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1953), ii, p. 867. Persiany to Nesselrode, 6 Nov. 1853, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 1 (1853), ll. 453–5. Kofas, International and Domestic Politics, pp. 57–8. M. N. Todorova, ‘The Greek Volunteers in the Crimean War’, Balkan Studies, xxv (1984), 539–63. Karolides, Synchronos istoria ton ellinon, iv, p. 467; K. Papoulidis, Gregorios G. Marasles (1831–1907). I zoi kai to ergo tou: symboli sti drastiriotita tou ellinismou tis Rosias (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1989). J. Campbell and P. Sherrard, Modern Greece (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 91. Persiany to Nesselrode, 13 Nov. 1853, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 1 (1853), ll. 460–3. Persiany to Nesselrode, 4 Dec. 1853, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 1 (1853), ll. 482–9. Ibid.

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demonstrated their zeal on 6 December, the birthday of Tsar Nicholas I, when the leading members of the government as well as legendary leaders of the War of Independence joined the throng of attendees at the celebration in the Russian chapel in Athens.37 As Russia and the four powers went to war in the winter of 1853–54, thousands of Greek volunteers, regular army units, students, and even prisoners released from Greek jails infiltrated Epirus, Thessaly, western Macedonia, and Chalhidiki. Ottoman commanders dispatched their forces to the Danubian front, making the temptation of Greek insurgents to ‘liberate’ unredeemed villages overwhelming. According to Persiany, a host of secret societies began organizing men and material inside the Greek borders. In January, villages in Epirus began to revolt against Albanian mercenaries. Soon afterward more than four thousand Greek insurgents led by veteran captains of the Greek War of Independence and their sons, including Demitrios Grivas, Hadgi-Petro, and Kitsos Tzavellas, besieged Arta, Ioannina, and other strongholds.38 In response, Ottoman authorities expelled Greek nationals from Constantinople and Smyrna.39 As the Greek government continued to express a formal condemnation of the rebels, the patriotic zeal among the Greeks worked itself up to a fever pitch. The western allies looked upon the rebellion with dismay and began to threaten the Greek government, which continued to sanction the concentration of troops on the frontier under the pretext of maintaining security.40 In February, the French government informed Greece that an attack on Ottoman forces would be considered as an attack on France and threatened occupation. Persiany in the meantime continued to advise the Greek government to remain neutral.41 However, the general danger remained unabated and King Othon, as the only Christian sovereign in the Near East, claimed a sacred right to support the struggle against Muslim domination: I am a Christian, I am the King of Greece. I can only sympathize with my people and with the Christians who groan under the yoke of the enemies of Christianity. I hope that all governments, all Christian people will share in my sentiments.42

At this point Persiany praised Othon’s patriotic and religious enthusiasm and congratulated the King on his independent character and bravery. As the struggle in Ottoman territories intensified, the Russian attitude toward the conflict shifted from insisting on neutrality to tacit support of rebellion, although the British fear that Russia caused or handled the revolts is unsubstantiated.43 In March, Persiany sent word to St Petersburg of the Greek successes in Thessaly. Despite the Greek irregulars’ lack of munitions and cannon, Persiany wrote, ‘[H]ere we hope that soon enough all of the country will be up in arms’.44 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44

Persiany to Nesselrode, 11 Dec. 1853, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 1 (1853), ll. 491–5. Persiany to Nesselrode, 5 Feb. 1854, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 5 (1854), ll. 54–62. R. Clogg, A Short History of Modern Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 80. P. Schroeder, Austria, Great Britain, and the Crimean War. The Destruction of the European Concert (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1972), pp. 172–5. Persiany to Nesselrode, 5 Feb. 1854, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 5 (1854), ll. 69–74. Persiany to Nesselrode, 19 Feb. 1854, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 5 (1854), ll. 115–21. Schroeder, Austria, Great Britain, and the Crimean War, p. 173. Persiany to Nesselrode, 5 March 1854, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 5 (1854), ll. 155–60.

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Most interesting are Nesselrode’s instructions to the embassy in Athens. Despite a quarter century of opposition to the Megali Idea, the Russian government suddenly changed its posture, although the geographic distances involved and the interference of the allied powers prevented it from dispatching weapons and other military material, which was precisely what the Greek bands required most. Previously, during the months of negotiations that preceded the outbreak of hostilities, Nesselrode worked hard to diminish irredentist passions, and insisted that Russia desired the maintenance of peace in the Near East and the conservation of the Ottoman Empire. With respect to events that could occur in Turkey in the event of war against Russia, Nesselrode urged the Greek government to remain tranquil. While sanctioning the reinforcement of the guard along the frontier, the Russian foreign minister in clear terms condemned the Greek press and attempted to discourage the government from abandoning a strictly neutral policy.45 Even after war broke out, Nesselrode called for the Greek government to remain calm and not to take any actions in Ottoman domains. In November 1853, Persiany was instructed to inform the Greek government of the Russian attitude: In whatever manner that contingencies present themselves, Greece will not lack the effective backing of Russia in the desires which it should form, justified through moderation, uniform in firmness, and avoiding impetuous demonstrations and adventurous enterprises that will do nothing but compromise its government in downright defeat.46

Therefore, Russia initially maintained its traditional policy of restraining proponents of the Greater Greece. This attitude changed just over a month later, when the Russian cabinet expressed warm admiration of Queen Amalia’s patriotism and loyalty. Nesselrode referred vaguely to how much Russia desired that Greece profit from the current crisis. ‘Assure anew the Greeks’, Nesselrode instructed Persiany, ‘that whatever becomes of these events, we will not lose sight of their interests as long as they proceed united in the conservation of the throne and their holy religion’.47 Mirroring the values of official philosophy, such were the beginnings of Russian support for the Greek cause. St Petersburg’s actions became clearer in January 1854, when Nesselrode received authorization from the Tsar to send the Greeks a ‘quantum’ of money ‘to buy, either in England, or in Belgium, the arms and other equipment of which they prove to be in desperate need. The aid is fixed for the moment at 120,000 rubles, which constitutes more than a half a million drachmas’.48 Persiany was ordered to use great caution regarding these funds and to inform the Greek royal couple in a personal audience of the Russian aid, which eventually ended up in an account in the Greek National Bank in Athens. In February, Nesselrode claimed that the mass of the Greek nation and particularly the veterans of the War of Independence could not be expected to contain their patriotic and religious élan, and that sooner or later the uprising of the ‘Greek-Slavic’ populations of the Ottoman Empire will be impossible to resist. Moreover, the events in the region preoccupied Tsar

45 46 47 48

Nesselrode Nesselrode Nesselrode Nesselrode

to to to to

Persiany, Persiany, Persiany, Persiany,

7 Feb. 1853, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 1 (1853), ll. 507–11. 5 Nov. 1853, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 1 (1853), ll. 519–21. 17 Dec. 1853, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 1 (1853), ll. 524–6. 14 Feb. 1854, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 5 (1854), ll. 183–4.

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Nicholas who encouraged King Othon to lead the movement in Epirus and Thessaly while outwardly retaining neutrality. In keeping with the principles of Uvarov’s official philosophy, Russian policy makers such as Nesselrode and Tsar Nicholas considered that the price to pay for reprisal on behalf of Britain and France would be less onerous than if Othon began to act contrary to the wishes of the mass of his subjects and their religion. Furthermore, Nesselrode indicated the desire that Thessaly and Epirus ‘become naturally and necessarily annexed by the Hellenic Kingdom’, but that the new enlarged state must respect its neighbours. ‘The other populations, and notably those of Slavic origin, will without doubt join up with this movement which will have from then on a greater following and more chance of success’.49 Thus, during the opening months of the war, Russia made a major reversal in its Balkan policy and backed the move ideologically, as ministers in St Petersburg expressed their desires for Christian uprisings in the Balkans led by both Slavs and Greeks.50 A barometer of the Tsar’s seriousness in this matter can be seen in March 1854, when the Russian government dispatched a total of 180,000 rubles to aid the Greek insurrectionaries.51 Nesselrode hoped that the struggle then taking place in Epirus would be favourable for the Greeks and reasoned that if the combat taking place in Thessaly and Macedonia proved unsuccessful, at least the Greeks would be able to maintain their current position until the opening of the Russian summer campaign. Such a statement suggests the intention to link arms with the insurgents once Russian troops descended towards the Ottoman capital. Nesselrode warned of the possibility of Anglo-French forces occupying Athens, but hesitated for the moment to offer Persiany any concrete advice in case of such an eventuality, other than recommending the use of reserve and discretion with the allied diplomats. By the end of March, Nesselrode completely supported the movement for Greek unification and noted that ‘Russia would never place an obstacle to this reunion’.52 Plans began to be formulated in St Petersburg regarding an expanded Greek state, which, according to the Russian designs, should not extend past the Slavic principalities in northern Rumelia. Meanwhile, the Foreign Ministry sent Persiany 100,000 drachmas from an anonymous rich Greek in Russia.53 In late March, thousands of Greeks penetrated deep into Ottoman territory and the Sublime Porte severed relations with the Greek government, which had evaded peremptory demands to disavow the revolt and help suppress it.54 By April the Ottomans sent an army of three thousand to reinforce the garrisons at Preveza and other fortresses.55 The uprisings and deployments of Ottoman troops drew the interest of the British and French governments, which sent naval forces to gather intelligence along the Adriatic coast. Soon enough, Albanian recruits under Turkish leadership began to turn the Greeks rebels back. The difference between a mob and

49 50 51 52 53 54

Nesselrode to Persiany, 14 Feb. 1854, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 5 (1854), ll. 189–96. Based on press reports, the Russian reading public also actively pressed for Greek victories. Nesselrode to Persiany, 9 March 1854, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 5 (1854), ll. 200–1. Nesselrode to Persiany, 23 March 1854, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 5 (1854), ll. 204–5. Nesselrode to Persiany, secret, 30 March 1854, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 5 (1854), ll. 209–14. Kofas, International and Domestic Politics, p. 74; Schroeder, Austria, Great Britain, and the Crimean War, p. 173. D. Dakin, The Unification of Greece, 1770–1923 (London: Benn, 1972), p. 83.

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an army is leadership and organization, both of which the Greeks lacked, and thus they lost the chance to present the European powers with a fait accompli. While the Ottoman forces successfully stifled the revolt, British and French squadrons occupied the Piraeus in May 1854.56 The Western ambassadors at Athens issued clear threats regarding Greek aggression and forced Othon to declare strict and complete neutrality. Hopes for special aid from Russia were abandoned, although Nesselrode urged King Othon to maintain his courage.57 The Russian reaction to the allied occupation was predictably negative, and St Petersburg hoped that Vienna and Berlin would act to restrain the British and French from violating the independence of a kingdom recognized by all of Europe.58 Nevertheless, Othon was compelled to accept a new ministry under the English Party leader Alexander Mavrokordatos. Subsequently, Ottoman regulars routed the Greeks in two battles and by June the revolt had petered out altogether. The affair thus ended rather pathetically. The presence of British and French ships in the Piraeus humiliated the Greeks and their government. The occupation, which continued until February 1857, was not without serious consequences. Cholera broke out almost as soon as the foreign troops arrived and developed into an epidemic that would claim over 30,000 lives. Athens became a veritable ghost town by the summer of 1855, and the allied occupation forces converted the Piraeus into a hospital.59 Persiany remained at his post nonetheless and derided the occupying powers for spreading misery among innocent Greek civilians. Despite the abandonment of the Russian alliance, sympathy for the Tsarist cause remained strong. The fall of Sevastopol in September 1855 caused widespread grief among the Greeks, who considered it equivalent to their own national disaster.60

Conclusion Since the kingdom’s inception in 1830, the foreign presence in Greek affairs endured. During the Crimean War, the three European powers took advantage of the international and domestic situation in order to reap the greatest advantage. The lack of concern for the Greek population is most evident by the allied occupation of the Piraeus, which was an obvious violation of international law and the Russians cannot be entirely absolved from seeking to benefit from the border incidents. However, the Russian support for Greek irredentism was popular among the Greeks and coalesced with the general defence of Orthodoxy in Ottoman domains. Despite the actions of the rebels, the Greek frontier remained the same, yet the national fervour for irredentism continued undiminished. The revolts of 1854 marked the high-water point of Othon’s popularity and the allied occupation made him appear as a martyr. As long as the foreign powers remained in the Piraeus, the King 56

57 58 59 60

The British government created a precedent for such a procedure in 1850, when British and Greek antagonism over the so-called Don Pacifico affair culminated in Palmerston’s decision to blockade the Piraeus. For a concise account, see C. M. Woodhouse, Modern Greece: A Short History (London: Faber, 1968), pp. 164–5. Nesselrode to Persiany, 12 May 1854, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 5 (1854), ll. 220. Nesselrode to Persiany, 12 May 1854, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 5 (1854), ll. 231–3. Campbell and Sherrard, Modern Greece, p. 92. Persiany to Nesselrode, 9 Sept. 1855, AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 11 (1855), ll. 68–9.

LUCIEN J. FRARY

could take advantage of the discontent that it provoked. After the occupation, old antagonisms as well as new forms of opposition would emerge. Othon’s support for the Megali Idea, paradoxically, led to his downfall, as many of his subjects increasingly viewed him as an impediment to national aspirations.61 For instance, he remained without an heir, and there was uncertainty about succession, especially since none of his brothers had converted to Orthodoxy.62 Moreover, Othon had supported Austria during its struggle against Italian nationalists and this, in addition to the perennial problems with finances, incurred widespread dissatisfaction. Improved communications and education had increased the independent sentiments of a new generation of Greeks, who now looked to take the reigns of government into their own hands. Russia’s attempt to help the Greeks during the Crimean War marked a significant departure in its foreign policy, which previously aimed at maintaining the status quo in Europe and the Near East. When exactly this shift took place is demonstrated through analysis of Russian foreign office documents. Nesselrode’s attitude appears to have changed incrementally beginning in October 1853. Once war broke out, Russian ministers continued to warn the Greeks against irredentist movements. By February Nesselrode and the Tsar had abandoned their efforts to support the Sultan and maintain an alliance with the Western powers, and Russia began to enthusiastically support the Greek war against the Ottomans. Whereas Russian aid was substantial in terms of cash, due to the distances involved and allied intervention, the aid was insufficient to guarantee the success of the purported ‘Second Greek-Turkish War’. Furthermore, the inability of the Greek rebels to work in concert spelled the end to this phase of the Megali Idea. Thanks to Russia’s support for the Greek cause, in subsequent years Russophilia characterized the temperament of the Greek masses, government, and periodical press. Whereas before 1853 politically minded Greeks had been divided between the so-called French, English, and Russian Parties, the events of the Crimean War helped to bring an end to these factions. Therefore Russian intervention marks a turning point in Greek politics as well. This essay has aimed at shedding new light on the development of Russian foreign policy during an early phase of the Crimean War, as well as on the movement for Greek unification. It is hoped that future research will provide a clearer understanding of Russian-Greek ties in the period and of the development of civil consciousness among educated Russians in response to Greek-Slavic freedom struggles in the Balkans.

61 62

Campbell and Sherrard, Modern Greece, p. 94; R. Clogg, A Short History of Modern Greece, p. 81. According to the law of succession of 1844, all future Greek monarchs must be Orthodox. Many Greeks feared that foreign intervention would once again leave them with a sovereign of an alien religion.

slovo, Vol. 21 No. 1, Spring, 2009, 29–43

From Popular Front to Political Radicalization: The Croatian Press and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 Vjeran Pavlakovic´1 University of Rijeka, Croatia

This article examines the ideological debate over the Spanish Civil War in the Croatian print media, and the impact it had on the leading domestic issue, i.e. the ‘Croatian question’. Although the war in Spain was debated across the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, especially in the more liberal press in Belgrade for example, the focus here will be on the impact in Croatia. The parallels between Spain and Croatia (the important role of the Catholic Church, the large peasant populations, the presence of ‘national questions’) meant that the events in the Iberian Peninsula resonated strongly among politically conscious Croats. Numerous domestic factors and the unstable international situation of the late 1930s contributed to the radicalization of the Croatian political scene, but the Spanish Civil War was arguably one of the major events that accelerated the polarization of the ‘Croatian national movement’ into left and right extremism. During this period the Communist Party of Yugoslavia attempted, and ultimately failed, to create a Popular Front in Croatia (and Yugoslavia more generally) modelled on the French and Spanish Popular Fronts.

The war waged by the Catholic Spanish people against domestic anarchists and communists, united with foreigners, does not only have the features of a struggle to save Christian civilization, but it has the pure character of a religious war. Nedjelja (18 July 1937)2 1

Vjeran Pavlaković is an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka, Croatia. He received his Ph.D. in History in 2005 from the University of Washington. He has published articles on refugee issues in the former Yugoslavia, war criminals and war crime tribunals, and democratization in Croatia, and co-edited the book Serbia since 1989: Politics and Society under Milošević and After, published by the University of Washington Press. Nedjelja, (Zagreb), 18 July 1937, p. 5. Nedjelja was one of the leading newspapers published by the Catholic Church in Croatia.

VJERAN PAVLAKOVIC´

The recent events in Spain need to awaken not only the proletariat, but the general population and all of the oppressed peoples of Yugoslavia, so that from the struggle of the Spanish people, Spanish democracy, and the legal Spanish government against the fascist insurgents and igniters of war, they draw important lessons for their own struggles. Milan Gorkić, General Secretary of KPJ3 . . . Many of our greatly esteemed and accountable officials believed that the Republican red army would win . . . On the other hand, all Croatian nationalists were certain that Franco would be victorious. Mile Budak, editor in chief of Hrvatski narod4 [Our towns and villages] do not want to sacrifice any victims for ideas which have rent apart bloody Spain. We have our worries and our needs, we have our own struggle, in which the entire Croatian nation is participating, and before which all others must be placed in the background. Hrvatski dnevnik (18 April 1937)5

Although nearly all political activity in Croatia6 in the 1930s, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, revolved around the ‘national question’, the internationalization of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) captured the attention of the reading public and exerted an influence on political parties across the spectrum. As in many European countries political rivals in Croatia polemicized domestic issues through the lens of the Spanish war. While the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS — Hrvatska seljačka stranka),7 the strongest Croatian political organization and fierce opponent of Belgrade’s centralist policies, tried to minimize the impact of the bloody conflict in distant Spain, the illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ — Komunistička partija Jugoslavije) and Ante Pavelić’s terrorist Ustaša movement maximized the mobilizing potential of the ideological battles being waged in the trenches and in the press. Right-wing Croatian nationalists benefited the most from the Spanish Civil War in the short run since the victory of General Francisco Franco, backed by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, seemed to herald the dawning of a new, fascist 3

‘What Spain Teaches Us’, Proleter, XII (1936), no. 8, p. 1. Proleter, although published abroad (at various times in Brussels and Vienna), was the official organ of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ). Hrvatski narod (Zagreb), 21 April 1939, p. 1. This weekly was the main mouthpiece for the Ustaša movement, whose leaders were mostly still interned in Italy. Mile Budak (1899–1945), a writer and later education minister in the NDH, was one of the few émigrés who returned from exile in 1938. Editorial in Hrvatski dnevnik (Zagreb), 18 April 1937, p. 5, the daily newspaper of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS). After unification with Serbia in 1918, the territorial autonomy enjoyed by Croatia under the Habsburgs ceased to exist in the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The internal structure of the state, renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after King Aleksandar declared a royal dictatorship in 1929, was reorganized into a series of ‘banovinas’ named after rivers in an attempt to erase national identity. What is today Croatia was divided more or less between the Savska (central Croatia and Slavonia) and Primorska (Dalmatia and its hinterland) banovinas. Nevertheless, the idea of a Croatian political unit remained firmly entrenched; political parties, cultural organizations, publications, etc. all retained the word ‘Croatian’ in their names. For the purpose of this article, the term ‘Croatia’ will be used to denote the political activities that effectively took place in the Savska banovina of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The brothers Antun and Stjepan Radić founded the HSS in 1904.

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Europe. Even though the Ustaše did not get any direct experience in the Spanish conflict, media coverage and propaganda laid the foundation for support of the Ustaša regime when they were installed by the Axis forces in April 1941, particularly among the Church establishment and the right-wing of the HSS. The communists, while suffering an initial setback with the loss of the Republic and Popular Front movement, gained considerable experience in the Spanish Civil War both in terms of military skills and in mobilizing antifascist groups in Yugoslavia. Meanwhile for the HSS, seemingly at the apex of power in 1940, the Spanish Civil War signalled the beginning of its disappearance from the political stage as Croats and other Yugoslavs turned to increasingly radicalized political options as Europe became engulfed in war. This article examines the ideological debate over the Spanish Civil War in the Croatian print media and the impact it had on the leading domestic issue, i.e. the ‘Croatian question’. Although the war in Spain was debated across the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, especially in the more liberal press in Belgrade, the focus here will be on the impact in Croatia. The parallels between Spain and Croatia (the important role of the Catholic Church, the large peasant populations, the presence of ‘national questions’) meant that the events in the Iberian Peninsula resonated strongly among politically conscious Croats. Numerous domestic factors and the unstable international situation of the late 1930s contributed to the radicalization of the Croatian political scene, but the Spanish Civil War was arguably one of the major events that accelerated the polarization of the Croatian national movement into left and right extremism. During this period the KPJ attempted, and ultimately failed, to create a Popular Front in Croatia (and Yugoslavia more generally) modelled on the French and Spanish Popular Fronts. Croatia’s population was divided between a pro-fascist regime and antifascist resistance during the tragedy of World War II, while the once powerful HSS became marginalized by both the Ustaša movement and the communists. This division however was already evident in the years before the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), when the Spanish Civil War inspired a political discussion much broader and more vigorous than previously seen in Croatia. Despite Croatia’s progress towards integration into the European Union since 2000, these historical divisions continue to characterize contemporary political debates and the rhetoric used in the press. Reacting to the raising of a monument in honour of NDH minister Mile Budak in his birthplace of Sveti Rok on 21 August 2004, the spokesman of the governing HDZ party lamented that ‘[f]or too long, over fifty years, Croatia has been the hostage of the ghosts of certain past ideologies’.8 Although the government dismantled the controversial monument a week later, the debate over Croatia’s fascist and antifascist past continues, especially during annual commemorations of World War II. The Spanish Civil War, considered to be the prelude to World War II, was instrumental in shaping that ideological schism in Croatian society that can still be felt today. 8

Statement by Ratko Maček, the HDZ’s spokesman, in Vjesnik (Zagreb), 23 August 2004. In the 1990s, Croatian President Franjo Tuđman proposed transforming the Jasenovac memorial, honouring the victims of the NDH’s most notorious death camp, into a site where all Croatian war dead regardless of ideology would be jointly buried. This would have been modelled on Spain’s Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos) built by Francisco Franco, which is not a monument of reconciliation but rather a symbol of Franco’s dictatorship.

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The Croatian press and politics in the 1930s In this period, newspapers were the main source of information about international and local news, and each political party distributed one, if not several, publications that outlined their position on a broad range of topics. After the declaration of the royal dictatorship on 6 January 1929, King Aleksandar banned many papers along with all political parties, while heavily censoring others. The elections of 5 May 1935, still rigged by the Yugoslav regime and by no means restoring a true parliamentary democratic system, nonetheless signalled the thawing of Aleksandar’s authoritarian solution to Yugoslavia’s interminable crises. Regent Pavle, who ruled in place of young King Petar after the assassination of his father in Marseilles in 1934, sought a compromise with the Croats and lifted the ban on political parties. Some, notably the Croatian Party of Rights (HSP — Hrvatska stranka prava) and the KPJ, remained illegal under the Obznana, a law against anti-state activity dating back to 29 December 1920.9 Since the extreme left and right parties could not function openly many individuals became active in the ‘Croatian national movement’, the broad organization headed by the Croatian Peasant Party that was formed during the earlier ban and continued informally throughout the 1930s.10 With the return of political activity the number of political publications flourished. Many were directly linked to a specific party, such as Hrvatski dnevnik (HSS), Nova riječ (SDS), and Glasnik (the mouthpiece of the regime’s Yugoslav Radical Union), while others were fronts for illegal organizations or groups that were not associated, at least officially, with any political party. The Catholic Church, along with a number of Catholic organizations, also published numerous newspapers and journals which addressed a wide range of domestic and international political issues, the most prominent being Hrvatska straža, Katolički list, and Nedjelja. Papers that were overtly pro-fascist or pro-communist were often shut down after a few issues, but would later pop up under a different name with the same content. Despite the restrictions by the regime the newspapers contained animated debates between, and at times scathing attacks on, political and ideological opponents. The articles written by leading members of political parties and transcriptions of important speeches are at times the only source historians have to analyze the positions of certain parties on key events such as the Spanish Civil War, since other evidence simply does not exist.11 Although most newspapers in Croatia were published in Zagreb, they were by no means read only in the capital city. Newspapers, particularly those associated with a 9

Even though communist historiography typically portrayed the Obznana as being used exclusively against the KPJ, this law was applied against any anti-state political activity. This ‘Croatian national movement’ included the main party of Croatia’s Serbs, the Independent Democratic Party (SDS — Samostalna demokratska stranka). However, the SDS goals were directed primarily at restoring true parliamentary democracy in Yugoslavia, while their coalition partners in the HSS focused more on Croatian national rights. Political parties rarely published their official ‘platforms’, and to my knowledge documentation on party meetings and internal decisions were never made. Police agents who attended political rallies often made reports on the content of speeches, which gives insight into how the politicians were communicating with their constituents. Croatian historians who have done extensive work on the HSS, such as Ljubo Boban and Fikreta Jelić-Butić, cite party newspapers extensively, followed by diaries, memoirs, and personal letters between politicians.

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political party such as the HSS, could be found in most Croatian cities and towns, and even villages, where a literate peasant could read the articles aloud to his neighbours. Many newspapers featured small advertisements that encouraged people to ‘read and pass on’ the paper once they were finished, ensuring a greater distribution. This was the case especially for illegal publications, some of which had to be smuggled into the country, such as the KPJ’s main organ, Proleter. In the villages, the HSS and SDS worked to set up reading rooms and libraries, which naturally carried their party publications, while workers could read about world events in the left-wing press that would often be pinned up on bulletin boards in the factories. Activists from both the right and the left distributed their publications directly to the villagers, their propaganda threatening the HSS grip on the peasantry. The seriousness of this activity is evident in a letter sent out to HSS representatives from Vladko Maček regarding the duties of the party’s paramilitary force, the Croatian Village Defence. ‘You must not let various agitators and other swindlers out of your sight’, ordered Maček, ‘who for whatever reason come into villages to create mischief or to spread various news, newspapers, flyers, and similar things which are not in accordance with the Croatian peasant movement’.12 The police were also aware of the power of the written word, and the Croatian State Archives contains numerous orders to censor, ban, destroy, or be on the lookout for newspapers, books, pamphlets, journals, and other publications which had overtly pro-communist or pro-fascist positions, especially on an issue such as the war in Spain. Discussion of the Spanish Civil War was not limited to just newspapers, political speeches, and journals. It is difficult to evaluate the impact the media had on the broader population, especially in an era without public opinion polls. Nevertheless, letters written to the editors of publications devoted to the peasantry, such as Seljački dom or Seljački svijet, which featured practical information dealing with rural life, often make references to debates and arguments in village meetings or between neighbours over the Spanish issue. Other newspapers likewise published letters from their readers who responded to articles covering international events, and the editorial columns were filled with polemical debates between numerous journalists and pundits about the war in Spain. Due to the spate of anticlerical attacks in the early stages of the war and the characterization of the Republic as being a front for ‘Godless communists’, the Catholic Church in Croatia issued numerous warnings about the dangers of the Spanish conflict in both official and unofficial publications, and Archbishop Alozije Stepinac held several sermons about the suffering of Catholics and peasants in Spain.13 The Spanish Civil War thus had an impact beyond the Croatian intellectual and political elite, affecting the average citizen who likely had only a vague notion of where Spain actually was. For both the revolutionary left and militant nationalist right-wing, the war in Spain presented an ideal situation to promote a more radical solution to Croatia’s ‘national question’. The communist movement had been active in Croatia since the end of World War I, and Croatian right-wing nationalists had adopted openly fascist

Letter from Vladko Maček (25 January 1937), Croatian State Archive (HDA), fond 145 (SBODZ) box 21, spis 21. See Stepinac’s circular published in Katolički list (Zagreb), 24 September 1936, p. 1.

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tendencies after Ante Pavelić established the Ustaše Croatian Revolutionary Organization in exile in Mussolini’s Italy. However, both groups remained marginal in the mid-1930s despite their publicized attacks on the Yugoslav authorities, including the Ustaša involvement in the assassination of King Aleksandar in 1934.14 The transformation of the Spanish Civil War into an international conflict changed all of that. According to a monograph on the ideological and political activities of the interwar Croatian intelligentsia: The politicization of society followed the strong politicization of the intelligentsia, and the dramatic world events directly influenced that. The right got a more realistic ally in fascism and national-socialism, and so its ideological and political theories were imposed ever louder, allowing the process to continuously increase.15

Even though the ‘national question’ was the dominant issue of the second half of the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War was the leading international event that featured prominently in nearly every Croatian paper regardless of ideological persuasion, at least until the Munich crisis of 1938, when significant international events were transpiring much closer to Yugoslavia’s border. Regent Pavle was aware of Yugoslavia’s precarious international position, surrounded by enemy states that considered his country an artificial creation of Versailles and weakened by domestic political strife. He increasingly showed a willingness to seek a deal with the Croatian political leaders, knowing that if democratic options failed, there was danger of pushing the HSS to seek a separatist solution with Yugoslavia’s enemies. Consequently, the Spanish conflict threatened the stability of Yugoslavia by bolstering the polarization of Croatian political forces at a time when the international situation exerted considerable influence on the country.16

The KPJ and the Popular Front Following the decisions of the 7th Comintern Congress and the Plenum of the Central Committee of the KPJ in Split in 1935, the communists in Croatia reversed their earlier opposition to cooperating with the other political forces and attempted to create a Popular Front.17 While in the early 1930s KPJ publications liberally referred to both the HSS and social democrats as fascists, after 1935 the communists made strong efforts to cooperate with both of these forces on the model of the Popular Fronts in France and Spain. Since 1927, the HSS had been in a coalition with Svetozar Pribićević’s Independent Democratic Party (SDS, which received most of its support from Croatian Serbs), known as the Peasant-Democratic Coalition, but the KPJ 14

16 17

For example, the so-called Lika Uprising in September 1932, subsequently mythologized by Pavelić’s followers, was in reality a bungled attack on one gendarme guard post by a few Ustaše and misguided locals, while the KPJ’s premature call for armed revolution resulted in the decimation of many of its cadres and the flight of its central committee out of the country. See Ivica Abramović, ‘Istina o tkz. Ličkom ustanku 1932 godine u Brušanima’, Časopis za suvremenu povijest, 22 (1990), pp. 194–6; and Povijest Saveza komunista Jugoslavije, ed. by Ljubiša Vujošević, (Belgrade: Izdavački centar Komunist, 1985), pp. 112–4. Zorica Stipetić, Komunistički pokret i inteligencija: Istraživanja ideološkog i političkog djelovanja inteligencije u Hrvatskoj, 1918–1945 (Zagreb: Centar za kulturnu djelatnost, 1980), p. 222. Ljubo Boban, Sporazum Cvetković–Maček (Beograd: Institut za društvenih nauka, 1965), p. 379 The press referred to it alternatively as a Pučki or Narodni Front.

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rejected this as a true Popular Front since the working class was not involved.18 Communists began actively trying to co-opt members of the HSS and influence its left-wing. Peasant Party supporters, recruited by the KPJ while in the regime’s prisons (Lepoglava and Sremska Mitrovica became known as communist training schools), infiltrated the HSS, and assassinated leader Stjepan Radić was given positive press in communist publications.19 Ivan Supek, active in the Communist Party as a youth in the 1930s, recalls being excited about the declaration of the Popular Front since the communists in Croatia had already established connections with the HSS and the SDS.20 The main publication of the KPJ, Proleter, argued that the KPJ and HSS had similar goals: they both fought for democracy, for the freedom of the Croatian people, and against imperialism and war.21 The article also suggested that Maček should stop attacking the KPJ and instead unite with them against the ‘military-fascist dictatorship and Greater Serbian supremacy’.22 In August 1935, Ivan Krndelj (representing the KPJ) met with HSS leader Vladko Maček, who privately agreed to work with the KPJ to help make the communist party legal, but continued to denounce the KPJ in public.23 Although the left-wing of the HSS remained sympathetic to the communists, the party leadership was ultimately anti-communist. The KPJ also tried to increase its activities in the countryside, even publishing the newspaper Seljačka misao, although the strength of the HSS among the Croatian peasantry led to few communist successes. The social democrats, once the brunt of the KPJ’s attacks, became potential allies after 1935. According to Proleter, ‘Democratic people do not have enemies on the Left. That has to be the basis for forming a Popular Front’.24 However, the social democrats resisted forming any coalition with the communists because they feared losing their leadership position in the leading union, Ujedinjeni radnički sindikalni savez, while maintaining the hope of eventually forming their own party.25 The social democrats also proposed forming a ‘third bloc’ of the working class, opposed to both the government bloc and the opposition bloc (the Peasant-Democratic Coalition). The KPJ criticized this tactic as only helping the enemy, since the only successful possible tactic is the formation of ‘a broad front of the entire nation’.26 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Proleter, XII (1936), no. 7. Ivan Jelić, Komunistička Partija Hrvatske, 1937–1945, 2 vols (Zagreb: Globus, 1981), I, p. 178. Both HSS and KPJ publications and articles also frequently made references to Matija Gubec, the sixteenth century leader of a peasant revolt in Zagorje, as the predecessor to both of their political movements. The HSS and KPJ interpreted the Gubec narrative in a way to mold him into their own political programs, and use him as a symbol to mobilize Croatia’s peasantry. The HSS claimed that they inherited Gubec’s struggle to create a ‘peasant democracy’. The communists, meanwhile, emphasized the peasant revolt of 1573 as a class struggle, which would be won by the KPJ through an alliance of the workers and peasants. Proleter even called on the ‘sons of Matija Gubec to volunteer to fight in the International Brigades’. See Proleter, XIII (1937), 15; and Vjeran Pavlaković, ‘Matija Gubec goes to Spain: Symbols and Ideology in Croatia, 1936–1939’, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 17 (2004). Ivan Supek, Krivovjernik na ljevici (Zagreb: Globus, 1992), p. 43. Proleter, XII (1936), no. 6. Ibid. Jelić, Komunistička Partija Hrvatske, p. 81. Proleter, XIII (1937), no. 2. Jelić, Komunistička Partija Hrvatske, p. 48. Mladen Iveković, Hrvatska lijeva inteligencija, 1918–1945, 2 vols (Zagreb: Naprijed, 1970), I, p. 338.

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Catholic Church organizations, such as Catholic Action and the Križari (Crusaders), as well as the extreme nationalist Ustaša movement remained virulent opponents of the KPJ, especially since the Popular Front movement was envisioned as an antifascist coalition. Even though all of these had influence on the right-wing of the HSS and were actively fighting for Croatian national liberation, they were outside of the possible boundaries of a Popular Front. During this period it was the other forces of the left, as well as the bourgeois parties, which ceased to be enemies of the KPJ, while the right, especially as the fascist threat became more imminent, became identified not only as an ideological enemy but as a danger to the oppressed peoples of Yugoslavia.

The press, the Spanish Civil War, and ideological divides (1936–1939) The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 had an immediate impact on both the left and right throughout Europe, and served as the first stage of the conflict which was to engulf the continent in 1939. Despite the unsolved national question in Croatia, the polemical debates became more heated in the publications of the various political forces, as the war in Spain increasingly took over the front pages of the daily and weekly papers. It can be argued that the attacks against political enemies within Croatia exceeded those against the Yugoslav regime as the war in Spain progressed and it became clear that the war had considerable international significance. The public debate over the war in Spain also became a forum for either supporting or denouncing the attempts to create a Popular Front in Croatia, and both left and right clearly saw that the conflict in Spain could teach important lessons. Ultimately, the Spanish Civil War revealed that the political differences among the leading political forces in Croatia were too vast, despite the common platform of solving the ‘national question’, for the creation of the Popular Front as envisioned by the communists, at least under the conditions present in the 1930s. Nevertheless, for the KPJ, the war in Spain seemed to justify the immediate need to create a Popular Front; ‘the struggle of the Spanish people — that is our struggle’.27 Not only would the Popular Front secure a solution to the Croatian question, it would be a shield against fascism. As the war progressed, the KPJ became very active in organizing aid for the Spanish Republic, sending volunteers to fight in the International Brigades (over 1600 Yugoslavs, many of them émigrés in Western Europe, and nearly half ethnic Croats),28 holding public demonstrations and protests, and helping volunteers return from prison camps in France after Franco’s victory, which became the ‘most important public activity of the Communist Party of Croatia’.29 The communist press, in particular Radnik and Proleter, devoted a large number of articles to the war in Spain, both to counter right-wing propaganda as well as 27 28

Proleter, XII (1936), no. 10. The number of Yugoslavs in Spain was initially estimated at between 1200–1300 soldiers (see Aleš Bebler (ed.), Naši Španci (Ljubljana: Španski borci Jugoslavije, 1962)), and then increased to 1664 after access to Comintern archives was granted to Yugoslav researchers; see the five-volume collection by Čedo Kapor (ed.), Španija 1936–1939 (Belgrade: Vojnoizdavački zavod, 1971). Jelić, Komunistička Partija Hrvatske, p. 333.

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mobilize support for the Spanish Republic. However, these newspapers rarely explicitly mentioned a communist revolution in Spain, claiming that the conflict was not between ‘the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat, but a struggle between fascism and democracy’.30 The pro-Republican press also glossed over the constant political struggles being waged within the Popular Front government and the intricacies of the tenuous alliance between Spanish anarchists, socialists, communists, and liberals, factors which greatly undermined the war against Franco.31 Radnik published articles which used the Spanish example as a positive reason to create a Popular Front in Croatia. In an article on 25 September 1936, Radnik described how the Popular Front had carried out reforms for the peasantry and the poorest levels of society, and that ‘the victory of the Popular Front was the same as opening the doors of a dungeon for the Spanish people’.32 It was the fact that the workers of Spain were united which allowed for the creation of a broad Popular Front, unlike the divided workers of Croatia. Furthermore, Radnik emphasized that the Popular Front did not antagonize the situation in Spain, but it was the ‘reaction’ which decided to attack since the Popular Front was a deadly danger for fascism.33 Proleter warned that ‘only the formation of a Popular Front is capable of stopping and preventing the plotting of fascist headcutters [glavoreza]’.34 In its publications the KPJ drew many comparisons between Spain and the situation in Croatia and Yugoslavia, stating: [T]he fate of Spain today is the fate of Yugoslavia tomorrow. Yugoslavia should be interested in the victory of the Spanish people since those same attackers want to destroy the supporters of freedom and democracy in Yugoslavia.35

The connections between Spain and Croatia were also made in order to appeal to the unsolved national question, by portraying the Popular Front in Spain as the defender of autonomy for Catalans and Basques. In the November 1936 issue of Proleter, Milan Gorkić, at the time the general secretary of the KPJ, wrote ‘What Spain Teaches Us’, claiming: Today Catalonia is free and equal, because the Catalan national movement, under the leadership of [Luis] Companys, collaborates with the Popular Front along with the communists and socialists. It is also not a coincidence that the oppressed Basques received, for the first time in centuries, full autonomy under the initiative of the Madrid government, in which socialists and communists sit along with other Popular Front parties.36

In a response to coverage of the Spanish Civil War in Hrvatski dnevnik (the main paper of the HSS) — which attempted to maintain a neutral position towards the war 30 31

32 33 34 35 36

Proleter, XII (1936), no. 6. For an in-depth analysis of the political situation of the Republican side during the war, see Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Radnik (25 September 1936), p. 1. Radnik (21 August 1936), p. 2. Proleter, XII (1936), no. 2. Proleter, XII (1936), no. 3. Proleter, XII (1936), no. 2.

VJERAN PAVLAKOVIC´

in Spain yet was fervently anti-communist — Radnik published an article which asked: Aren’t the sympathies of the Croatian people on the side of the Catalan people, who rose up for the defence of freedom, which they received from the legal Spanish government, and can’t the national question of the Catalans, which remained unsolved for years, be tied in any way to the Croatian question? The Catalan national question was legally solved by precisely that government which Hrvatski dnevnik judges and attacks so furiously.37

Communist publications often carried letters and articles from Yugoslav volunteers who were fighting in Spain on the side of the Republic. In a transcript from a radio address on Radio-Madrid given by a Croat volunteer in the International Brigades there is a call for all ‘oppressed minorities and nationalities’ to join the fight in the defence of the Republic. He goes on to describe how ‘Catalans and Basques received autonomy with the help of the united struggle of all working class and democratic forces, after the legal victory of their Popular Front’.38 The example of the Popular Front in Spain served the KPJ in countering the claims that communists in Croatia were not willing to support the national rights of Croats, as their opponents alleged, but that ‘communist Croats struggle in the first place for the needs of the Croatian people’.39 Proleter also gave information on Croatian communists in Spain, such as Vladimir C´ opić, proclaiming that those who ‘today fight for Madrid also defend . . . our white Zagreb’.40 Seljački dom, which resumed publication in October 1936 after being banned for six years, was a weekly newspaper of the HSS dealing directly with peasant issues, including articles on farming techniques, activities of the HSS in Croatia, and historical essays about peasant leaders. As far as the war in Spain was concerned, Seljački dom carried articles mostly lamenting the tragedy of the Spanish peasant and offered Spain as an example of what could happen in Croatia if the Croatian peasantry was to fall under the influence of ‘foreign ideas’. Furthermore, in the dominant HSS narrative, the Spanish Civil War was not caused by the internal political and historical problems of Spain; rather, it was a battleground between foreign ideologies (communism and fascism), where the peasantry, caught in the middle, suffered the most.41 The Spanish peasant, illiterate and easily manipulated by foreign powers, would in the end be exploited regardless of which side won in the war.42 According to Seljački dom: A bitter war is being waged in Spain over who will rule the Spanish people, where the peasantry is most numerous but which lacks a movement that the Croatian people have. That is why the Spanish lords do what they want.43

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Radnik (4 September 1936), p. 2. Proleter, XIII (1937), no. 5, transcript of a speech given on Radio-Madrid on 20 December 1936. Proleter, XIII (1937), no. 4. Ibid. Seljački dom (Zagreb), 25 December 1936, p. 13; and ibid., 14 January 1937, p. 1. Seljački dom (8 April 1937), p. 2. Seljački dom (15 April 1937), p. 7.

CROATIAN PRESS AND SPAIN

In contrast to the Spanish peasant the Croatian peasant had the good fortune to have a peasant movement such as the HSS, which was against tyranny of either the left or the right, and relied on Croatian democracy and humanism.44 One article stated that ‘if only poor Spain had Radić there wouldn’t be so much blood spilled there’.45 The theme that communism was a foreign idea and therefore dangerous for the Croatian national movement was repeated in article after article — including headlines such as ‘Before the Croatian Peasant movement foreign ideas fall’, ‘The Croatian Peasant movement and relations with foreign ideas’, and ‘The Croatian nation goes its own way’ — with Spain as the example of what happens when a nation turns to foreign ideologies to solve its problems. Had the Spanish peasants organized around the principles of the Croatian peasantry, they would not serve foreign interests.46 The HSS offered Croatian peasants a social program ‘based on the principles of humanity’ and democracy, unlike the forces fighting in Spain.47 The editors of Seljački dom concluded: Therefore, we don’t need any imported ideas such as communism or fascism, because the Croatian nation has its own ideas, developed in its own Croatian peasant movement, which can meet the needs of not only the peasant, but those of the civil servant, worker, and citizen.48

To counter the influence of the HSS among the peasantry, the Communist Party published its own journal, Seljačka misao, which supported the HSS on the surface but offered a different view towards the events in Spain. While Seljački dom never mentioned any of the internal political or social developments in Spain, characterizing the war solely as a struggle between foreign ideas and powers, Seljačka misao argued that it was the desires of the people that were expressed in the election of the Popular Front in 1936, and it was ‘when the agrarian reforms began in Spain is when the generals began their uprising’.49 The conflict in Spain was presented as a social struggle: Peasants and workers, republican citizens, and all the nations of Spain will persist until the end in the struggle against hunger, slavery, and terror, which is what the general’s rebels are bringing, and in the defence of their national freedom against foreign occupiers!50

Since Seljačka misao was not overtly communist, there was no use of the term Popular Front in any of the articles, but the editors did call for the peasants in Croatia to ‘form a strong front with other nations’, and to create a ‘peasant-worker democracy’.51 Contrary to the claim that the communists were against solving the national question, Seljačka misao argued that ‘Fascism is therefore nothing other

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Seljački dom (25 March 1937), p. 3. Seljački dom (11 March 1937), p. 4. Seljački dom (14 January 1937), p. 1. Seljački dom (8 April 1937), p. 4. Ibid. Seljačka misao (Zagreb), 3 April 1937, p. 2. Seljačka misao (22 October 1937), p. 2. Seljačka misao (16 November 1937), p. 1.

VJERAN PAVLAKOVIC´

than rigid centralism, the smotherer of all national ideas, spreader of hatred among nations, and organizer of another bloody war’.52 Thus, while this journal was not nearly as comprehensive as Proleter or Radnik in its coverage of Spain, it did attempt to provide an alternative news source for the peasantry about the character of the Spanish Civil War, as well as encourage the Croatian peasants to form a front with the working class. Hrvatski dnevnik, Obzor, and Jutarnji list were all daily newspapers published in Zagreb, and for the most part they characterized the Spanish Civil War as an attempted revolution by the ‘reds’. news of the conflict in Spain received considerable coverage, and for the most part relied on nationalist news sources. Political analysis was not common in any of these papers (unlike Proleter, Seljački dom, or Hrvatska straža), since they were more concerned with transmitting news, even though much of it was Franco’s propaganda (which Proleter constantly criticized). Nonetheless, the war in Spain did sharpen the political divisions in Croatia, which could be seen in the daily papers. Hrvatski dnevnik quoted Petar Baković, the president of the Union of Croatian Private Employees, who claimed that ‘Croatian people do not recognize any directives from red Jewish communist Moscow’, nor any other Internationals, whether Amsterdam or Vienna.53 Obzor constantly referred to the defenders of Madrid as ‘red militants’ and alleged that the anarchists were ‘ready to set the city on fire and kill all enemies of the Popular Front’.54 While the communists argued that the Popular Front had solved the ‘national question’ in Spain, by giving Catalans and the Basques considerable autonomy in the Republic, this was not mentioned at all by the daily papers and HSS officials. Obzor, for example, argued that a Popular Front on the Spanish model would actually ‘bury the Croatian question’, since the communists were internationalists.55 The same article claimed that ‘in Spain it began with a Popular Front and it is going to end with anarchism’.56 The Spanish Civil War thus made clear the HSS’s stance towards the Popular Front and the decision to not cooperate with the communists at all, despite earlier collaboration between communists and certain left elements of the HSS. In fact, the war in Spain heightened the opposition to the KPJ, since they were seen as the greatest political challenge to the HSS within Croatia, although the influence of the right would also continue to increase in the late 1930s. Unfortunately, in the 1930s the political options in Croatia were limited, since those who did not want to ‘become peasants’ by supporting the HSS, only had the extreme right or left as alternatives,57 and as the conflict in Spain continued, public opinion became more polarized. Since the HSS and the mainstream press took an increasingly pro-Franco stance, any chance for the creation of a Popular Front as envisioned by the left evaporated. The most extreme right-wing and nationalist Croatian organization, the Ustaše, did not begin publishing Hrvatski narod in Croatia until 1939, after the Spanish 52 53 54 55 56 57

Seljačka misao (16 March 1937), p. 1. Hrvatski dnevnik (Zagreb), 14 December 1936, p. 1. Obzor (Zagreb), 6 November 1936, p. 1; and ibid., 5 November 1936, p. 2. Obzor (13 November 1936), p. 3. Ibid. See Supek, Krivovjernik, p. 40.

CROATIAN PRESS AND SPAIN

Civil War had ended. Nonetheless, throughout 1939 and 1940 this paper published several articles praising the ‘New Spain’ created after the nationalist victory, as well as emphasizing the economic successes of fascism in Germany and Italy. Other papers, however, published by individuals with pro-Ustaša sympathies or even connections, extensively commented on the war in Spain. Perhaps the most wellknown publication of the clericalist faction of the Catholic Church in Croatia, the weekly Hrvatska straža, followed the Spanish Civil War closely and typified the conservative position towards the conflict and its implications for Croatia. Not surprisingly, Hrvatska straža had a very negative opinion of the Popular Front and the Republic because of the high number of attacks on the Church in Republic territory. There was not much subtlety in the articles about the events in Spain: headlines such as ‘Bloodthirsty communists in Spain’,58 ‘Communists are crucifying people on the cross’,59 ‘Communism means war’,60 and ‘Thousands of women hostages of the reds’61 were typical in Hrvatska straža. The events in Spain quickly took over the front page every week, and the paper always described the forces of the Republic as reds, Marxists, communists, or anarchists. Hrvatska straža also claimed to expose who was really behind the war in Spain, arguing that ‘the bankrupt Popular Front can’t hide only the reds, but also the main initiators of that political conglomerate — freemasons, who were once again preparing massacres and killings in Europe’.62 Other articles claimed that ‘in Spain the butchery was started by Jews’,63 who along with communists and freemasons were identified as the greatest enemies of the Church. The war in Spain became an argument against the Popular Front in Croatia, and more broadly Yugoslavia. In the article ‘Popular Front dangerous for peace’, Hrvatska straža alleged that if the elected government won the war, a ‘pure Marxist regime’ would be established in Spain, and the implication was that similar things would happen in Croatia.64 Another article declared: Let Spain teach us! Let it be an eternal warning, to not offer the communists one small finger, because they will cut off our entire arm . . . We don’t want communism in any form! Not as Bolshevism, not as Marxism, not as socialism as this or that colour, not as a Popular Front; we don’t want it!65

The same article also concludes that the communists are anti-national and antiChurch, and ‘if they destroy the Croat’s Catholic faith . . . they would destroy the entire cultural tradition of the Croatian people’.66 Numerous articles, under headlines such as ‘Horrifying persecution of priests in Spain’,67 were also published describing 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

Hrvatska Hrvatska Hrvatska Hrvatska Hrvatska Hrvatska Hrvatska Hrvatska Ibid. Hrvatska

straža straža straža straža straža straža straža straža

(Zagreb), 2 August 1936, p. 2. (23 August 1936), p. 1. (18 October 1936), p. 2. (25 October 1936), p. 1. (30 August 1936), p. 3. (18 October 1936), p. 2. (2 August 1936), p. 3. (11 October 1936), p. 9.

straža (6 September 1936), p. 2.

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the destruction of churches and the killings of the clergy in Spain, often relying exclusively on nationalist sources of those atrocities. Photos often accompanied such articles, including one showing nuns being ‘forced’ to smile and raise their fists in the communist salute,68 and another depicting female communists aiming rifles at a church.69 In order to avoid a similar fate, Croats would have to remain faithful to the Catholic Church and reject communism at all costs. In the article ‘New Paths for our Croatian Peasant Youth’, Hrvatska straža argues that the youth must work in the spirit of Catholic Action, otherwise Croatia would end up like ‘that unfortunate land Spain’.70 The HSS remained the only political choice for Croats, and although the Catholic Church at times clashed with the HSS because of the party’s anti-clericalism, Hrvatska straža often quoted articles from Hrvatski dnevnik and reported on the political activities of the HSS. However, Hrvatska straža did warn that Marxists were trying to infiltrate the HSS, but the two (HSS and communism) ‘are conflicting in their foundation and between them there can be no compromise’.71 Thus the Church stood firmly against the formation of the Popular Front, and through its publications painted an exclusively negative picture of the Republican government in Spain. With an overwhelming number of legal publications in Croatia either tacitly or implicitly supporting the nationalists in Spain, and denouncing the Popular Front, it is not surprising that the attempt of the KPJ in this endeavour was a complete failure. The war in Spain reaffirmed the HSS leadership’s refusal to compromise with the communists and kept the Croatian left isolated even after the Bloc of National Agreement (October 1937) created a political coalition between the Peasant-Democratic Coalition (HSS and SDS) in Croatia and the United Opposition in Serbia.

Failure and resurrection of the Popular Front (1939–1945) In 1939, the Comintern ordered the KPJ to cease cooperating with the democratic parties in Croatia. Geoffrey Swain has convincingly argued that Tito subsequently decided to ‘Bolshevize’ the KPJ after the negative experience of the Popular Front in Spain and Yugoslavia; in other words, attempts to negotiate a coalition with existing democratic parties and governments were abandoned, and in the future the Party would create a ‘Popular Front from below’ that they would completely control.72 The KPJ returned to its underground, illegal activities. However, the war in Spain did give the Yugoslav communists considerable experience in organization as well as real combat experience for the cadres which had fought in the International Brigades. After the war ended with the Republic’s defeat in 1939, the KPJ, especially in Croatia,

68 69 70 71 72

Hrvatska straža (23 August 1936), p. 4. Hrvatska straža (6 September 1936), p. 1. Hrvatska straža (6 September 1936), p. 7. Hrvatska straža (29 November 1936), p. 9. Geoffrey Swain, ‘Tito and the Twilight of the Comintern’, in International Communism and the Communist International, 1919–1943 ed. by Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 205. Swain lists the underground Party organization, proletarian hegemony, and armed insurrection as ‘Bolshevik’ characteristics of the KPJ.

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focused on giving aid to the volunteers imprisoned in camps in France and getting them back into Yugoslavia. At this time Tito also strengthened his hold on a more disciplined and united party, dedicated to Yugoslavism.73 Even though it seemed that the left had been divided and considerably weakened by the end of the 1930s, the KPJ was sufficiently organized by the outbreak of the World War II to survive the purges under the Ustaša regime installed in April 1941 and build a national liberation movement. It was only after the destruction of Yugoslavia by Axis forces that the communists were successfully able to create an antifascist Popular Front, which mobilized resistance around the KPJ against the foreign occupiers and domestic collaborators. Spanish Civil War veterans, such as Marko Orešković Krntija, Franjo Ogulinac Seljo, and Maks Baće were sent by Tito to organize the first partisan units in Croatia as well as place spontaneous uprisings of Serbs, who were being systematically persecuted by the Ustaša regime, under the control of the communists. As the Croatian population grew increasingly disappointed with the NDH, more Croats flocked to the banner of the National Liberation Movement (Narodnooslobodilački pokret), which was the only organization offering true resistance against fascism. A key event was a declaration on 12 October 1943 by a number of HSS leaders who had joined the communist-led Partisans, calling on all HSS members to reject further collaboration with the Ustaše and fight for the liberation of Croatia.74 While the failure to form a Popular Front in the 1930s and the war in Spain seemed to be fatal defeats for the left in Croatia, the experiences of the KPJ during the period of the Spanish Civil War were crucial for the ultimate victory of the communists in 1945. The Croatian population was deeply divided, however, from the late 1930s and especially during World War II. Those factions which had supported Franco and the Nationalists in Spain had enthusiastically greeted the Ustaša regime. The HSS, which had encouraged neutrality during the Spanish Civil War, likewise remained passive after the destruction of Yugoslavia in 1941. The seeds of the sharp ideological divisions had been sown already during the distant war in Spain that resonated strongly in Croatia, reflected by the coverage of the Spanish Civil War in the Croatian press.

Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919–1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 93. Hrvatski državni arhiv, Fond 1451 (HSS), box 1, number 2.

slovo, Vol. 21 No. 1, Spring, 2009, 44–45

Book Review Belgrade: A Cultural and Literary History. By David A. Norris. Cities of the Imagination Series. Pp. xx–255. Oxford: Signal Books. 2008. £12.00, (PB). ISBN 978-1-904955-43-6. With ‘the spatial turn’ the city has become not just a site for research, but a focus of research. We are urged to keep in mind Léfèbvre’s maxim that space is ‘perceived, conceived and lived’ by writers from anthropology, geography, sociology, and cultural studies. The series Cities of the Imagination provides rich content for students from all these disciplines. The books are not written for an academic market, but are authored by academics with various area specialisms. Celia Hawkesworth wrote the Zagreb edition and this edition on Belgrade has been written by David Norris, Professor of Serbian and Croatian studies at Nottingham University. With such authors, the books fulfil a joint purpose of guide to the city and to cultural and historical sources on the city. Norris has structured the book chronologically. Each chapter describes a period of the city’s history and links it to a section of the city. Sometimes these links follow the city’s historical development, for example, the strategic role of the city’s fortress in the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, or the Europeanization of the city during the nationalist project at the end of the nineteenth century. However, it is more interesting when these links are not made through the political projects behind the urban forms, but through the role played by an area during a particular period. Dedinje, which became the most exclusive address in Belgrade in the 1930s, is introduced through its experience of the turbulent 1990s when ‘old-style leaders of criminal gangs became new-style businessmen, hiding their origins behind a Dedinje villa’ (p. 173). When Norris makes these anachronistic links, he includes the area’s origin and its development as well as its significance in today’s Belgrade. In this way the city avoids appearing as a malleable surface through which different regimes have constructed their ideologies. Neighbourhoods take on identities with changing political or cultural values. Freed from an academic context, Norris does not engage explicitly with debates on how to ‘read the city’ or perform ‘contemporary archaeology’. Instead he can indulge in anecdotes that will appeal to his armchair audience. He explains the origin of Mackenzie Street, named after a Victorian Scotsman with a penchant for doing good. Mackenzie imposed some stringent urban development principles combining design and social welfare, but was taken to court over an attempt to ban the sale of alcohol in his corner of Belgrade. Norris admits that ‘there are not many citizens today who know who Mackenzie was or why he should be remembered’ (p. 195) but in seeking out the obscure, we are shown the changing detail of everyday life. This detail is not frozen in an ethnographic present and acknowledges that absence is an important part of the city’s material record. Source material is drawn from literature, travel accounts, and histories written by academics, observers and artists from the region and outside. The text is unreferenced, but includes a guide to further reading divided into these genres and split between English and Serbo-Croatian sources. History writing in Serbia remains controversial, however, Norris refrains from any detailed discussion of the political use of history. The brief section titled ‘reinterpreting the past’ covers the reappraisal of the communist use of history by Yugoslav artists and academics in the 1980s. Other acknowledgements of instrumental uses of history appear, but are not structural to the book’s narrative. Instead, the book engages more broadly with the politics of representation. Norris writes ‘art does not just reflect what exists in reality, but [. . .] it actually constructs an © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2009

BOOK REVIEW

idea of the current possibilities of the imagination’ (p. 144). Artistic movements and works are politically and historically contextualized and embedded in the city. For example, Belgrade became a destination for Serbs split between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires wanting to produce expressions of a national culture (p. 108). The city provided space for the pan-slavic movement and, in the 1920s, modernist language experiments gave rise to the ‘Belgrade style’, a form of language ‘capable of more flexible expression, more urban and more urbane, an instrument fit for a complex social organization’ (p. 115). Unfortunately there is a lack of visual media in the book and its bibliography, although Norris’s detailed knowledge of this field is evident in his discussions of Belgrade’s visual arts and film industry. Norris makes use of Makavejev’s diary extracts to animate Belgrade, rather than images from the director’s films, while the section on turbo-architecture could have benefited from more than the accompanying monotone line drawing. The entire series is marked by an absence of photography. In spite of this, Norris succeeds in portraying a living and dynamic city. His Belgrade is populated by artists, thinkers, and writers. Political projects and histories are shown to be created and contested on the ground, rather than imposed by an abstract state. We are shown evidence of alternative and erased histories. In this way, the city is presented as a stimulus for cultural innovation and political change. It is this approach that makes the book relevant not just as a guide, but also as a form of analysis that takes the city as its research object rather than just its setting. School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

Charlotte Johnson

slovo, Vol. 21 No. 1, Spring, 2009, 46–48

Film Review The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen). Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Lions Gate Films, 2007. The Lives of Others is simultaneously an intense character study and a compelling political thriller. The film begins in 1984 in East Berlin with the juxtaposing of scenes between a real interrogation and a training session where this same interrogation technique is being explained to a class of aspirant Stasi policemen. Here we are introduced to Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mu˝ he), code name ‘HGW XX/7’. Mu˝ he’s portrait of Wiesler initially seems to border on caricature: disciplined and proud of his work, Wiesler is convinced that his contribution to the working of ‘the System’ is essential to creating a better socialist society. However, Wiesler’s convictions are fundamentally challenged when he begins to monitor a celebrated East German playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), and his girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), herself a respected actress in the German Democratic Republic. Although Dreyman appears the faithful socialist, Wiesler suspects his party loyalty to be external, dependent upon the maintenance of Dreyman’s comfortable lifestyle and position as intermediary between the government and dissident artists. However, in the process of spying on his victims’ everyday lives, including their sex lives, Wiesler is unconsciously drawn into their world and becomes increasingly aware of his own pathetic existence. His determination to bring his assignment to a successful completion — the incrimination of Dreyman as an enemy of the state — further wavers when he realizes that ‘Operation Lazlo’ (the operation’s codename) might have more to do with the sexual conquest of Christa-Maria Sieland by the Culture Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thierne), who also happens to be a member of the ZK (Zentralkomitee) with ultimate authority over the Stasi, and less about Dreyman’s potential threat to the state. When Dreyman’s friend, the renowned theatre director Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert), commits suicide after many years of being blacklisted by the government, the playwright undertakes a campaign against the regime. As a result of Dreyman’s actions, Wiesler is forced to decide where his allegiances lie: to the German Democratic Republic and his hitherto concrete principles as a leading Stasi officer, or to Dreyman, whose honest lifestyle he has come to rate highly. Working on the premise of ‘finding significance in small things’, the director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, draws the viewer’s attention to the subtle details of the plot and the often extraordinarily compressed emotions of the main protagonists. Often the tensest moments in the film occur at times of minimal action — Wiesler sat listening to Dreyman’s conversation through headphones, or a neighbour looking through a peephole in a door, her future life dependent on what she witnesses and her response to these happenings. In various interviews von Donnersmarck cites his inspiration in an anecdote by Maxim Gorky about Lenin listening to Beethoven’s Appassionata. The beauty of the music threatens Lenin’s determination to ‘finish the revolution’. Von Donnersmarck told a New York Times reporter: ‘I suddenly had this image in my mind of a person sitting in a depressing room with earphones on his head and listening to what he supposes is the enemy of the state and the enemy of his ideas, and what he is really hearing is beautiful music that touches him’.1 It was, therefore, important that von Donnersmarck convinced renowned composer Gabriel Yared to write the 1

Alan Riding, ‘Behind the Berlin Wall, Listening to Life’, New York Times, 7 January 2007. <http://www. nytimes.com/2007/01/07/movies/awardsseason/07ridi.html>

FILM REVIEW

original score for the film. Yared’s theme, ‘Sonata for a Good Man’, stands as a centrepiece within the film; it encapsulates Wiesler’s personal journey from someone formerly anathema to the lives of the artistic ‘others’ he observes to ultimately protecting them from the state which he previously believed in. While some reviewers have been critical of the film for supposedly ‘soft-pedalling’ the oppressiveness of the German Democratic Republic,2 others cite the authenticity in the film’s overall tone, as if ‘the seductive mass of details were lifted from my own past’.3 Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, is critical of some of the plot lines, stating how it would not have been possible for Stasi operatives to have hidden information from their superiors as employees were themselves watched. Nevertheless, Funder describes the film as ‘superb’ despite its shortcomings.4 The Lives of Others expresses hope in the power of individuals to rise above the moral corruption in which they are sometimes placed. It is a mature film which dares to disclose some of the controversial realities of life in the German Democratic Republic and look beyond the wall of 1989 with brave optimism. School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

Sharon Boak

Tulpan. Director: Sergei Dvortsevoi. 46th New York Film Festival, 2008. Kazakh director Sergei Dvortsevoi’s steppe fable Tulpan, the most ambitious film to come from Central Asia this year, has walked away with Cannes, Zurich, and recently, Tokyo Film Festival prizes. After the New York Film Festival screening, Dvortsevoi fielded questions about special effects and the film’s remarkable visuals and sounds: ‘Maybe it sounds very silly, but we were waiting for everything’, he explained. ‘We didn’t make anything on the computer. It’s all original, what you saw on screen’. The first scene that Dvortsevoi filmed was the birth of a lamb in the Betpak-Dala, known as Kazakhstan’s Hunger Steppe for reasons that quickly become apparent. Ten excruciating minutes, sans cut, track an inept young shepherd midwifing a highly anthropomorphic sheep. Bracing a foot against the heaving mother, Asa (Askat Kuchinchirekov) drags out a mucus-encased and barely twitching mass, then scrapes away enough sticky substance to give the newborn animal mouth-to-mouth. The camera moves to frame the ewe’s palpably anguished face and then equally evident relief when all is over and the baby is brought to the other end of her body. Birth-room clichés are applied so innocently here that the entire scene comes across as sincere. Dvortsevoi, a documentary film-maker before he ventured into fiction with Tulpan, challenged his actors not to be weaker than the animals. In pursuit of that ‘same level of truth’, the director had the cast (children included) live in the yurt for a full month before filming, to acclimatize to steppe life. Stanislavskii might shudder. A fairy tale with touches of Sergio Leone, the film is, ostensibly, about a young man who has just returned from Russian naval service. (Asa speaks a good deal of Russian throughout, establishing a curious diglossia: political news is received in Russian, animals are addressed in Kazakh, but Asa and his sister often speak to each other in Russian, sometimes in Kazakh.) He wants a bride, property, and the old way of life. For nomadic shepherds, that translates into a flock, a yurt, some domestic animals, children, and maybe a vehicle. But as his fierce

Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Dreams of Others’, In These Times, 18 May 2007. <http://www.inthesetimes.com/ article/3183/the_dreams_of_others> Wolf Biermann, ‘Die Gespenster treten aus dem Schatten’, Die Welt, 22 March 2006. <Page: 2 http://www.welt. de/print-welt/article205348/Die_Gespenster_treten_aus_dem_Schatten.html> Anna Funder, ‘Tyranny of Terror’, Guardian, 5 May 2007. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/may/05/ featuresreviews.guardianreview12>

SLOVO, Vol. 21 No. 1, Spring, 2009

brother-in-law points out, no one will trust Asa with sheep until he finds a wife to do the female half of the work necessary for survival. The only girl in the vicinity, the eponymous Tulpan (‘tiulpan’, Russian for tulip, an unlikely steppe flower), remains hidden while Asa and his brother-in-law propose. Perhaps because she dreams of college and city life, or because she does not like Asa’s protruding ears, Tulpan turns him down. For the rest of the hundred-minute film, sheep are tended or we watch Asa’s sister simultaneously handle the children, her brother, a very touchy husband, and the yurt. Tragedy could be around any corner; it is difficult to know which horizon to watch. Samal Esliamova, nineteen at the time of filming, steals the film. In one scene she stops working and sings with her daughter: as both girls alternately trill melodies and laugh with delight, flashing gold teeth, the hearth goddess is revealed to be a child herself. It is another cliché, but a lovely scene nonetheless. Children sing and yell, the wind blows, sheep bleat. Diegetic sound, the pacing, and the camera’s unabashed hunt for accidental moments and ethnographic detail constantly underscore Tulpan’s documentary roots. Dvortsevoi finds fertile territory between fiction and ethno-documentary, a borderland which Werner Herzog has popularized in the past, but which is still only beginning to reveal its possibilities. The exploration of this borderland is arguably Dvortsevoi’s only real accomplishment. A refreshing lack of point saves Tulpan from banal sentimentality (traditional society is disappearing as Kazakhs urbanize; the solution is a synthesis of the old and the new); instead, the film courts its own existential otherness. Watching, we enter into a strange new relationship with space, with animals, and with the interior/exterior binary. While imperfect, Tulpan is one of the few feature films to capture some of the texture and alterity of more experimental Central Asian art. Why is such interesting film and video work emerging from this part of the world right now? Tension fuels Central Asian film, a paragone duel between word and image. Pascale Casanova’s groundbreaking World Republic of Letters provides a theoretical frame for a problem immediate to our region: languages and literary cultures struggle for power as much as nations.5 For the individual ‘minor-language’ writer, the choice of language exposes all the traps of post-colonialism. If a contemporary Kazakh avant-garde poet writes in Kazakh, she limits herself to a tiny readership of like-minded artists, academics, and friends. If she writes in Russian, she knows her primary market will be non-Kazakh, Russian. (The aporia is more harshly felt in smaller Central Asian nations.) Does she then write what Moscow will want to read about Kazakhstan? Does she write in English, in French? She might decide to make movies. Casanova’s book is about literature: it does not address the imperfect but workable solutions of film. Moving images — the ‘international language of cinema’ as Dziga Vertov might have dreamed — offer an escape from language. Central Asian film hums with the excitement of that possibility. Characters speak in local dialects, hybrid mixes, and then acquire subtitles as necessary. Dvortsevoi’s diglossia in Tulpan falls on deaf ears to most audiences, but there is no need to translate the drama of the steppe and the wind. Columbia University

Marijeta Bozovic

Pascale Casanova, World Republic of Letters, trans. by M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).