The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement

by Alexander Petrunkevitch; Frank Alfred Golder; Samuel N. Harper; Robert Joseph Kerner

I

When the Jugo-Slavs first occupied the western half of the Balkan peninsula, they were one in speech, in social customs and ancestry, and were divided only into tribes. The Slovenes, who settled in the northern end of the west Balkan block, were not separated from their Croat and Serb kinsmen by the forces of geography, but rather by the course of political evolution. On the other hand, the Croats became separated from the Serbs by forces largely geographical, though partially economic and political, in nature.

The Slovenes gave way before the pressure of the Germans who swept through the Alps and down the Danube and forced the Slovene vojvodes to acknowledge their suzerainty and accept their religion. The Germans would doubtless have succeeded in obliterating them had not the Magyar invasion weakened their offensive. The Slovenes, however, were left a wrecked nationality whose fate became blended with that of the Habsburg possessions and who against the forces of geography—which firmly bound them to the Croats—were politically riveted to the Habsburg north. This division was therefore the result of forces created by man and changeable by him. The Croats settled in the northwestern half of the territory south of the Slovenes; the Serbs roughly in the southeastern part of it. Here geographical influences—the direction of the rivers and the Dinaric ridges—combined with divergent political and economic possibilities, produced a dualism. The Croats on the Save and its tributaries naturally expanded westward and aspired to closer connection with the sea where their struggle with the remnants of Roman civilization and a superior culture absorbed their energies. They developed out of their tribal state more quickly, while the Serbs, further inland and amid more difficult surroundings, developed more slowly. The people who lived along the Save aspired to control the Dalmatian coast which military and geographical authorities claim can best be held from the mainland. The people who lived in Montenegro or along the Morava, which was the gateway to the peninsula, would naturally expand south and east toward the other cultural center, Constantinople, and thus seek to dominate the Balkan peninsula. In both cases, the attraction proved too much for feudal kings and led to the formation of cosmopolitan empires instead of strong national monarchies.

The kingdoms of Croatia and Serbia thus parted company politically. The former became a separate kingdom attached to Hungary in 1102 and to the Habsburg dynasty in 1527, while the Serbs began their expansion under the Nemanja dynasty late in the twelfth century and almost realized the dominion over the Balkans under Stephen Duan in the fourteenth century.

This political, geographical, and economic dualism became still greater when in 1219 the Serbs cast their lot with orthodoxy. The Croats, like the Slovenes, adopted Roman Catholicism, the Latin alphabet, and the culture of Rome. The Serbs accepted Greek Orthodoxy, the Cyrillic alphabet, and the culture of Constantinople.

The Slovenes became a part of the Austrian possessions of the Habsburgs; the Croats fell under the dominion of the Hungarian crown and the republic of Venice; and the Serbs succumbed to the Turks by the middle of the fifteenth century. The loss of political independence brought with it ultimately the loss of the native nobility, the sole guardians of the constitutional and historical rights of the nations down into the nineteenth century in central Europe. In addition, many towns were Germanized and the middle class disappeared. The Jugo-Slavs, like the Czecho-Slovaks, appeared in modern times as a nation which had lost its native nobility and had been reduced to a disarmed, untutored, and enserfed peasantry. In the absence of these leaders, the nation turned to its clergy who in order to retain their hold on the peasantry must needs ever remain national. But here again the misfortune which awaited the Jugo-Slavs was that historically three religions had taken deep root, the Catholic among the Slovenes and Croats, and the Mohammedan and Orthodox among the Serbs. We may therefore conclude the first half of the historical evolution of the Jugo-Slavs with the observation that political, economic, social, and geographical divisions led to their downfall as a nation and that if they ever desired to become one, each one of these chasms would have to be bridged. A solution for each of these problems—the most difficult which ever faced a nation—would have to be found; meanwhile the policy of the four masters, the German, Venetian, Magyar, and Turk, would always be "divide and rule," in other words, to perpetuate the divergencies.

II

The history of the evolution of the Jugo-Slavs from the sixteenth to the twentieth century has been an effort to find the means of melting down these differences until finally one—nationalism—accomplished the purpose. Unity came first in the imagination and the mind, next in literature and speech, and finally in political action. The four hundred years beginning with the fifteenth and ending with the eighteenth century will be remembered by the Jugo-Slavs as the age of humiliation. Only Slavicized Ragusa and indomitable Montenegro kept alive the imagination of the nation which was brought back to life by the half-religious, half-national Slovene poets of the sixteenth century, by the Ragusan epic poet [Gundulic], by the incessant demands of successive diets of the ever-weakening Croatia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and by the progressive and zealous Serbs of Hungary, who ever since the fifteenth century in increasing numbers made their home there, refugees from the oppression of the Turk, but who ever longed to push out from the frontier and rebuild Serbia anew. [Krizanic], a Croat Catholic Dalmatian priest, a firm believer in Jugo-Slav and Slavic unity in general, appealed to the rising Russian empire to help save dying Slavdom.

While the Turkish and the Venetian empires decayed, the Austrian and the Russian gained courage. By the end of the seventeenth century the house of Habsburg had won back all except the Banat and in the eighteenth century aspired to divide the Balkan peninsula in halves with the Russians. Along with this future foreign interference in the affairs of the Balkans came the Germanizing and centralizing "reforms" of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, whose result was to cripple still further the few constitutional and historical rights which remained to the Jugo-Slavs. But these "reforms" had nevertheless salutary effects upon the nation of peasants. The enlightened despots, spurred on by the loss of Silesia—which was at the same time a great loss in revenue as well as prestige—sought to make good the loss by the economic betterment and education of the peasantry. How else could an agrarian state increase its revenue and supply able-bodied men for the numerous armies which the overarmaments of Frederick II had brought upon central Europe? [FN: Emphasis on this fundamental fact of Habsburg history in the eighteenth century cannot be too strong. The writer of this paper hopes soon to present archival proof of the far-reaching results of the seizure of Silesia. The documents are to be found in the archives of the Hofkammer and Ministerium des Innern in Vienna.] Centralization and Germanization really helped to awaken the Slavs. Enlightened despotism gave them the weapons of political struggle—education and economic resources.

Of the Jugo-Slavs, the Serbs of Hungary were the first to achieve national and cultural consciousness. In the absence of a native nobility, but with unusual economic opportunities at their command, they developed a wealthy middle class—a rare thing among Slavs before the middle of the nineteenth century. This class came into contact with nationalized western Europe and found that the bulwark against national oppression was education for the masses. The nation must be educated and must be economically sound in order to undertake the political struggle against the Germans, the Magyars, and the Turks. That was the background of Dositej Obradovi[c]'s literary labors as he raised spoken Serbian ultimately to the literary language of the Jugo-Slavs and of Karad[z]i[c]'s efforts which resulted in that wonderful collection of Serbian national poems, and which clinched for all time the literary supremacy of the [S]to dialect. Serbian Hungary was the starting place for Kara George's revolution which brought partial freedom in 1804 and autonomy in 1830 and thus planted the germ of the modern Greater Serbia. Napoleon's Illyria, created in 1809, joined for the first time Slovenes and Croats in one political unit, and the excellent administration and the schools left an undying memory of what might be if the Habsburgs cared. Vodnik, the Slovene poet, sang of Illyria and her creator, but it was the meteoric Croat, Ljudevit Gaj, in the thirties, who so eloquently idealized it as he poured heated rhetoric into the camp of the Magyars, who after the Diet of 1825 began their unfortunate policy of Magyarization. Illyria, though short-lived, became the germ of the Greater Croatia idea, which, with Greater Serbia, existed as the two, not necessarily hostile, solutions of the Jugo-Slav problem down to the Congress of Berlin. It was as yet a friendly rivalry with the possible formation of two separate units. The occupation of Bosnia in 1878 led to actual friction between them. On the other hand, the annexation of the same province in 1908 had just the opposite effect, for from that time the ultimate ideal was no longer Greater Croatia or Greater Serbia in any selfish sense, but Jugo-slavia, because, to use a platitude, Bosnia had scrambled the eggs. Evidence of the fairly amicable relations between Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs at the time of Gaj is not lacking. It was Gaj who reformed Croatian orthography on the basis of the Serbian. Bleiweis and Vraz endeavored to do the same in Slovene.