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brill.com/fasc
War Veterans, Fascism, and Para-Fascist Departures
in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1918–1941
John Paul Newman
National University of Ireland Maynooth
johnpaul.newman@nuim.ie
Abstract
This article discusses the role played by war veterans in the various fascist and para-
fascist groups present in Yugoslavia in the interwar period. The article nds that sig-
nicant numbers of veterans and the nationalist associations to which they belonged
contributed to proposed or actual departures from the democratic norm in interwar
Yugoslavia, and were especially supportive of King Aleksandar Karadjordjevic’s dic-
tatorship of 1929–1934. In this respect, they could be termed ‘para-fascist’. The article
also notes that whilst the two groups typically identied in the literature as ‘fascist’,
the Croatian Ustashe and Serbian/Yugoslav Zbor, t into the ‘second-wave’ of 1930s fas-
cist forces not usually marked by a strong presence of First World War veterans, their
membership and ideological organisation were nevertheless signicantly inuenced
by both the traditions of the war and the men who fought in it.
Keywords
Yugoslavia – fascism – Ustashe – Zbor – Aleksandar Karadjordjevic – –
National Defence – Chetniks – veterans
Comparative studies of European fascism have until recently tended to rel-
egate Yugoslavia to the periphery. The two most obvious fascist candidates in
Yugoslavia, the Croatian Ustashe and the Serbian/Yugoslav National Move-
ment, or Zbor seem to fall into the category of fascist derivatives largely in the
shadow of German National Socialism and Italian Fascism. Neither ofered sig-
nicant ideological or programmatic departures from the fascist mainstream
in the way that Hungary’s Arrow Cross or Romania’s Legion of the Archangel
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Michael (the Iron Guard) did. Moreover, both the Ustashe and Zbor were mar-
ginal to the political culture of interwar Yugoslavia in size and in inuence (it
was not until the Second World War and the Axis occupation of the country
that they were elevated to power and prominence). Elsewhere, the dictator-
ship of King Aleksandar Karadjordjević (reigned 1921–1934, as dictator from
1929–1934) has been understood as a manifestation of conservative authoritar-
ianism, and therefore traditionally separated in the scholarship from fascism.
Thus Yugoslavia had a ‘little dictator’ whose reactive illiberalism was not the
same thing as the fringe radicalism of the Ustashe and Zbor.
Things are starting to change, however. Firstly, a new generation of scholars,
some publishing their work in the pages of Fascism, are starting to take
Yugoslav fascism seriously and are producing illuminating works on the ori-
gins, evolution, and nature of groups such as the Ustashe, (to a lesser extent)
Zbor, and their precursors. Secondly, there are new directions in fascism stud-
ies which, even when not directly concerned with local case studies, ofer po-
tential new perspectives on fascist tendencies and interactions in Yugoslavia.
The key to moving beyond the existing impasse is to broaden the denition
and the understanding of both what constitutes fascism and the way in which
fascism interacts with the international political environment in interwar
Europe. The work of Antonio Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis is especially use-
ful in this respect, expanding Roger Grin’s concept of ‘parafascism’ so that
it covers therange of ‘post-liberal, hyper-nationalist, strongly anti-democratic
and vehemently anti-socialist’ political forces at large in the interwar period.
See Antony Polonsky, The Little Dictators: The History of Eastern Europe since 1918 (London:
Routledge and Paul, 1980).
On fascism in Yugoslavia, see the recent studies by Tomislav Dulić, Utopias of Nation: Local
Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2005); Maria Falina,
‘Between “Clerical Fascism” and Political Orthodoxy: Orthodox Christianity and National-
ism in Interwar Serbia,’ in Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe, ed. Matthew Feldman, Marius
Turda and Tudor Georgescu (New York: Routledge, 2008); Emily Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945:
Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Rory
Yeomans, Visions of Anihilation: The Ustasha regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism,
1941–1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); Rory Yeomans, ed., The Utopia
of Terror: Life and Death in Wartime Croatia (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2015);
Alexander Korb, Im Schatten des Weltkriegs: Massengewalt de Ustasa gegen Serben, Juden, und
Roma in Kroatien 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, März, 2013); Goran Miljan ‘From
Obscure Beginnings to State “Resurrection”: Ideas and Practices of the Ustaša Organization,’
Fascism, 5 (2016): 3–25, accessed February 21, 2017, doi:10.1163/22116257-00501002.
António Costa Pinto and Aristotle A Kallis, ‘Introduction,’ in Rethinking Fascism and Dicta-
torship in Europe, ed. Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ;
New York, : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2–3.
fascism 6 (2017) 42-74
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Fascism in this sense is not an either/or property, which, say, the Ustashe and
Zbor have and that other political forces in Yugoslavia lack, it is rather a ‘desti-
nation’ that typically starts with a ‘departure’, proposed or actual, from liberal
democracy. This reconguration opens up an expanded ‘grey zone’ of ‘cultural
cross-overs between fascism and conventional authoritarianism’ in which op-
erate a variety of ‘hybrid’ political forces and groups. In Yugoslavia the grey
zone of anti-democratic and illiberal forces and groups within the country was
large indeed, and there are numerous points of para-fascist departure from the
supposed norm of liberal democracy in Yugoslavia. Even so, the lure of fascism
in the latter part of the 1930s, based elsewhere on the impressive successes of
German National Socialism and Italian Fascism, was not strong in Yugoslavia.
Initial and brief observations about this problem can serve as prefaces to
the lengthier discussion below. Take the Ustashe, they made full-blown territo-
rial revisionism in the form of independence for Croatia a central tenet of their
programme, in this way adhering to an eminently fascist principle. But such
radical territorialism did not connect at a mass level with Croats in Yugoslavia,
and the Ustashe never resolved the nettlesome problem of overlap between its
own territorial aspirations and those of its most important sponsor, none other
than Fascist Italy itself. As for Zbor, its leader Dimitrije Ljotić, despite being a
decorated veteran of the Balkan and First World wars, was not agile enough to
side-step the problem of hitching his party’s fortunes to those of Germany and
Italy. These states were revisionist powers par excellence, and Germany had
been a wartime opponent of Serbia. Many Serbians who had fought in the con-
icts of 1912–1918 (that is, the two Balkan wars and the First World War) found
Zbor’s international allegiances impossible to reconcile.
This brings us to veteran studies, the second point of intersection in this
article. Comparative veteran studies have to a considerable extent been
shaped by the cognate eld of fascist studies. The understandable desire to
explain the rise of right-wing politics and violence in the interwar period, and
to trace it back to its apparent origins in the battleelds of the First World
War, has led to a certain emphasis on the war experience as a facilitating fac-
tor of (especially right-wing) political violence in the interwar period. As the
editors of this special edition remark, George Mosse’s inuential ‘brutalisa-
tion’ thesis, which argues that the war habituated soldiers to violence and
barbarity and that these characteristics were carried over into the realm of
Aristotle Kallis ‘The “Fascist Efect”: On the Dynamics of Political Hybridization in Inter-War
Europe,’ in Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe, ed. Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis
(Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York, : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 17–18.
Kallis ‘The “Fascist Efect”,’ 16.
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peacetime politics, has continued to cast a long shadow over the study of
veterans and the war experience. Only recently have historians began to fully
explore the alternative routes and trajectories of veterans – in fact a majority –
who eschewed real and rhetorical violence in their collective and individual
actions after 1918.
Such caveats apply to the Yugoslav case, too. There were, of course, veteran
and nationalist associations committed to violent engagement in Yugoslavia,
and these associations will be discussed at length below. But many of the veteran
associations active in Yugoslavia in the interwar period were rst and foremost
committed to veteran care and welfare, especially for disabled veterans, or the
families of soldiers who had been killed during the war, and (at least in the case
of veterans of the Serbian army) commemoration of the war victory – their
members had returned home without sufering any apparent ‘brutalisation’ as
a result of their experiences in the war, or at least not in so far as it translated
into political violence. This is not to say that they whole- heartedly embraced
liberal democracy as the natural and rightful way of governing their country.
As Alessandro Salvador and Anders Kjøstvedt have noted, very often the ‘po-
litical dialectic between parties in the liberal democratic order were considered
by veterans as discords dividing the people’. So it was in Yugoslavia, with even
relatively benign and apolitical veteran associations and individuals bemoan-
ing the paralysis and dysfunctionality of the parliamentary system in the 1920s.
Although these associations were not para-fascist in their own right, their suspi-
cion of liberal democracy lent them a certain sympathy towards authoritarian
solutions to the country’s political crises. And despite professing a disinterest
in politics, many of these associations saw themselves as patriotic guardians
Antoine Prost and Jay Winter have used the biography of French veteran and jurist René
Cassin as an archetype for this response to the war on the part of its veterans. See Jay
Winter and Antoine Prost, René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the
Universal Declaration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
No study of war veterans and domestic violence has yet been undertaken in the Yugoslav
case.
Alessandro Salvador and Anders Kjøstvedt, ‘Introduction,’ in New Political Ideas in the
Aftermath of the Great War, ed. Alessandro Salvador and Anders Kjøstvedt (Cham: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2017), xiii.
On this, see John Paul Newman, Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits
of State-building, 1903–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
An example of this kind of veteran association would be the Serbian Association of
Reserve Ocers and Warriors, which was committed solely to its members welfare and to
commemorating the war victory, but which nevertheless spoke critically about the gov-
ernment and its approach to the veteran question in Yugoslavia. On this association, see
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who could lead the country forwards in the postwar period, veterans ‘tried to
establish a unied and patriotic political order with themselves as the forma-
tive core.’ Thus many Serbian veterans and their associations rallied around
a ‘culture of victory’ – adopting an attitude of what we could term a ‘patriotic
statism’ that sought above all else to protect the unity and the integrity of the
new state, for which they had fought in the Balkan wars and the First World War.
But the legacy of war was more complicated still. Yugoslavia sat atop a
fault-line of the war: many veterans had fought at various ranks and on vari-
ous fronts in the Serbian and Montenegrin armies, and many more had fought
in the Austro-Hungarian army, that is, on both the ‘victorious’ and ‘defeated’
sides of the war. For their part, South Slav veterans of the Austro-Hungarian
army were more ambivalent about the categories of victory and defeat after
1918, but there was certainly a signicant number who felt marginalised and
alienated by the overwhelming public emphasis on victory in the new state.
One of the most characteristic aspects of war culture in Yugoslavia is the way
in which these various meanings of the war years, defeat and victory, inter-
acted with one another to undermine postwar consolidation and to generate
authoritarian potential within the state. As we shall see, both the Ustashe and
Zbor reect, in a highly idiosyncratic manner, the fracture between cultures of
war ‘defeat’ (the Ustashe) and ‘victory’ (Zbor), even if they both fall into what
Ángel Alcalde has in the Spanish context termed the ‘second fascist wave’ of
groups that were founded in the 1930s and tended to be less inuenced by war
veterans than the ‘rst fascist wave’ of the 1920s.
The conict itself in the Balkans must be understood in an expanded sense:
it was not conned to 1914–1918, but in fact began with the rst Balkan war of
1912 and extended well into the mid-1920s. The establishment of Yugoslavia at
the end of 1918 was a demarcation point in this protracted period of war, rather
than its end. Violence continued to smoulder in the contested borderlands of
the new state: in Macedonia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Dalmatia, Carinthia; and
Danilo Šarenac, ‘Udruženje rezervnih ocira i ratnika 1919–1941,’ Istorija 20. veka 29, no. 1
(2011).
Salvador, Kjøstvedt, ‘Introduction,’ xiv.
John Horne ‘Beyond Cultures of Victory and Cultures of Defeat? Inter-war Veterans’
Internationalism,’ in The Great War and Veterans’ Internationalism, ed. Julia Eichenberg
and John Paul Newman (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, : Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), 207–222.
Ángel Alcalde, ‘War Veterans and Fascism during the Franco Dictatorship in Spain
(1936–1939),’ European History Quarterly 47 (2017), 89.
John Paul Newman, ‘Post-imperial and Post-War Violence in the South Slav Lands,
1917–1923,’ Contemporary European History 19 (2010): 249–265.
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in the hinterlands where Austro-Hungarian authority had largely broken down
by the autumn of 1918. Subsequently, the process of disentangling the state’s
politics from violence and of demobilizing and removing war veterans from
the state’s political institutions was in many cases incomplete in the rst half
of the 1920s.
War veteran associations emerged throughout the country soon after the end
of the First World War. In Yugoslavia, most of these associations were chiey
concerned with the social care of their members, especially the disabled and
families of men killed in the ghting, as well as commemoration of the war
itself. But a signicant part of these war veteran associations irted with right-
wing politics and even with continued violence in the 1920s. Three of the most
important of these associations, the Chetniks, National Defence, and ,
contributed signicantly to the undermining of liberal and democratic politi-
cal consolidation in Yugoslavia, and can serve as examples of para-fascism in
Yugoslavia in the 1920s.
The Chetniks
Some of the most ferocious violence in the post-1918 period took place in the
so-called ‘southern regions’, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia, where ri-
val groups would continue throughout the 1920s to resist the Serbian/ Yugoslav
forces and their military auxiliaries. These territories had been zones of
anti-Ottoman and intercommunal violence since the beginning of the twen-
tieth century, fought over by Balkan national states (Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia,
Montenegro) against the Ottomans, but also between rival Balkan states com-
peting for inuence in the region. Until 1912, this had been essentially a low
intensity conict waged by competing groups of irregular armed militias, so-
called Četnici (‘Chetniks’, known to the Ottomans as Komitadji). More than
Ivo Banac, ‘“Emperor Karl has become a Komitadji”: The Croatian Disturbances of
Autumn 1918,’ Slavonic and East European Review 70, no. 2 (1992): 284–305.
Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press: 1988), especially 291–327.
Mark Biondich, The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press).
The terminology is treacherous: the ‘Chetniks’ of the early twentieth century and the
interwar period are not to be confused with the same-named royalist resistance ‘Chet-
niks’ led by Dragoljub Mihailović during the Second World War. See Jozo Tomasevich, The
Chetniks War and revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press),
115–121.
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simply a matter of military conquest and control the struggle for the Ottoman
Balkans was also a struggle to shape and dene the cultural identity of the
regions in question, but violence was inseparable from attempts to nationalise
both people and geography. The wars of 1912–1918 had enlarged the military
dimension of these conicts and forcibly changed the ethnic composition of
the territories in question through ethnic cleansing and population removal.
The victory of 1918 had given the Serbian forces the upper-hand (especially
over defeated Bulgaria, Macedonian autonomists, and Albanian Kaçak bands).
The relationship between the state political and military forces of Serbia
and Serbian Chetnik irregulars in this region was a complicated one. Although,
as Mark Biondich points out, they were increasingly recruited and directed
from Serbia proper in the years before the war, the Chetniks maintained the
kind of political and military autonomy typical of Balkan militarist associa-
tions of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. And despite ghting
alongside the Serbian army in the Balkan wars and the First World War, the
Chetnik modus operandi was signicantly diferent from the regular army. The
Chetniks were territorially based ghting forces, organised into small bands
and typically under the sway of authoritative commanders, the Vojvoda [Field
Marshal]. Chetnik veterans claimed that this form of organisation – small cells
of dedicated ghters personally selected and known to the Vojvoda – resulted
in an unusually high level of morale, a claim that was readily stereotyped in
the considerable folklore surrounding the Chetniks and their role in Serbia’s
wars of ‘liberation and unication’. Other commentators, on a spectrum
First-hand accounts of this phenomenon can be found in Stanislav Krakov, Plamen
četništva (Belgrade: Vreme, 1930), and Stevan Simić, Srpska revolucionarna organizacija
– komitsko četovanje u staroj Srbiji i Makedoniji 1903–1912 (Belgrade: Duška, 1998), On the
Chetniks, Aleksa Jovanović, ‘Četnički pokret u južnoj Srbiji pod Turcima,’ in Spomenica
dvadesetpetogodišnjice oslobođenje južne Srbije, ed. Aleksa Jovanović (Skopje: Južna Srbija,
1937).
Biondich, The Balkans, 45–93.
Dimitrije Djordjević, ‘The Role of the Military in the Balkans in the Nineteenth Century,’
in Der Berliner Kongress von 1878: Die Politik der Grossmächte und die Probleme der Mod-
ernisierung in Südosteuropa in der Zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Ralph Melville
and Hans-Jürgen Schröder (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982), 318–319. See also David MacKen-
zie, ‘Serbian Nationalist and Military Organizations and the Piedmont Idea, 1844–1914,’ in
Eastern European Quarterly 16, no. 3 (September 1982): 323–343.
As an obiturist of Chetnik Vojvoda Jovan Stojković ‘Babunski’ put it ‘His [Babunski’s]
komite were not soldiers, who took an orderly attitude towards their elders, they were
more like brothers and comrades. His orders were not made in a high tone with furrowed
brow and with threats, but in a friendly conversation over cigarettes’. In Vojnički glasnik,
28 June 1921.
Krakov, Plamen četništva.
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that encompassed Leon Trotsky through to the members of the Carnegie
Endowment’s International Commission on the Balkan Wars, claimed that
the Chetnik volunteers were responsible for many of the worst atrocities that
came to be associated with the Balkan wars of 1912–1913.
After the First World War the Serbian/Yugoslav army initially continued to
use the Chetniks in their capacity as military auxiliaries in the extended post-
war operations in the south – because of the value of their local knowledge
and expertise, but also because the Chetniks could operate unbounded by the
strictures of conventional war, something that would have been dicult for
the army itself. Thus, a ‘free hand’ to operate ‘as you see t’ was extended
to Chetnik leaders in the new state’s euphemistically titled ‘pacication’ cam-
paigns at the end of the war. Ultimately, this ofer, taken up with enthusiasm
by many Chetnik commanders, including the notorious Montenegrin Vojvoda
Puniša Račić, was withdrawn by Belgrade, which sought to bring the military
and political control of these territories under their own auspices as part of the
larger state-building project after the war, ofering instead Chetnik veterans
parcels of land in the state’s programme of internal colonisation (a programme
for which the ‘southern territories’ were a key target).
The Chetniks thus faced an existential crisis in the years after the end of
the First World War, the question of purpose now begged itself to these vet-
erans: their lives’ work had been the liberation of Christian territories from
imperial Ottoman rule, the wars of 1912–1918 had essentially achieved this goal;
here, then, was the emptiness of a programme fullled. The Chetnik response
was what we might term ‘partial-demobilisation’. They re-emerged in the early
1920s as part-war veteran association, concerned with the social care of sol-
diers who had served with the Chetniks during the wars, as well as commemo-
ration of the Serbian victory (and particularly the so-called ‘Toplica Uprising’
Leon Trotsky, The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913: The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky (New
York: Pathnder Press, 1980); Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the
Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington : Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, 1914).
See Dmitar Tasić, Rat posle rata – Vojska Kraljevine Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca na Kosovu i
Metohiji i u Makedoniji 1918–1920 (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2012).
Vasilije Trbić, Memoari, knjiga 1: 1912–1918 (Belgrade: Kultura, 1996).
Puniša Račić (1886–1944) was a member of the Montengrin Vasojević clan who served as
a Chetnik in the Balkan wars and the First World War. He later turned to politics, and as
a member of the People’s Radical Party was elected into the national parliament in 1927
(see below).
Djordjo Krstić, Kolonizacija u Južnoj Srbiji (Sarajevo: Štamparija ‘Bosanska pošta’, 1928).
fascism 6 (2017) 42-74
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of 1917) – and part- political/paramilitary group with an ominous inuence
on the postwar politics of the new state.
When it came to national politics and national consolidation, the Chetniks
were a house divided. Some Chetnik leaders believed the new state’s national
identity should be a matter of Serbian historical, political, and military tradi-
tions absorbing and assimilating those of the Croats and the Slovenes; others
believed a new national identity needed to evolve, one that was based on a
new Yugoslav culture. This, in fact, spoke to a larger division in the attitudes of
many Serbian war veterans about the political path forwards for their nation
after 1918, ‘Greater Serbian’ or ‘Yugoslav’. Not incidentally, the two largest politi-
cal parties in Serbia in the 1920s, the People’s Radical Party and the Democratic
Party, took opposing stances on this, with the Radicals adopting the ‘Great Ser-
bian’ idea, and the Democrats pursuing a path towards ‘Yugoslav’ integration.
In the rst half of the 1920s, Kosta Pećanac and Ilija Birćanin, leaders of the
majority faction in the Chetniks, were by conviction Yugoslavs (Pećanac even
ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for the national parliament); whereas ri-
val Vojvoda Puniša Račić was a member of the Radicals and a vocal proponent
of the ‘Great Serbian’ agenda. These divisions were in large part a reection of
the ongoing rivalries between various Chetnik Vojvode.
There can be no doubt that the Chetniks believed in achieving political and
national goals through the use of violence. Indeed, national work and violence
The ‘Toplica Uprising’ was a mass military revolt began in protest at attempts by the
Bulgarian army to conscript Serbian men under occupation.
No other peoples were recognised as constituent in Yugoslavia.
Biondich, ‘The Historical Legacy: The Evolution of Interwar Yugoslav Politics, 1918–1941’,
in Lenard J. Cohen and Jasna Dragojević-Soso, State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe: New
Perspectives on Yugoslavia’s Disintegration (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University
Press, 2008).
Kosta Milovanović ‘Pećanac’ (1879–1944) was a gerndarme and former reserve ocer of
the Serbian army who fought with the Chetniks from the end of the nineteenth century
onwards, and as an irregular auxiliary of the Serbian army during the Balkan wars and
First World War.
Chetnik Vojvode usually took noms de guerre inspired by the regions or parts in which
they operated, thus Kosta Milovanović ‘Pećanac’ (of Peć, in the Kosovo vilayet), Ilija
Trifunović ‘Birčanin’ (from Birč, in Hercegovina) Jovan Stojković ‘Babunski’ (from the Ba-
buna mountains in Macedonia).
Ilija Trifunović ‘Birćanin’ (1877–1943) served as a Chetnik volunteer in the Balkan wars
and the First World War. He led the patriotic association National Defence (see below)
from 1932 onwards.
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had been entwined in the minds of the Chetnik leaders since the formation
of the militias at the beginning of the twentieth century. The re-assertion of
nationalist goals by the Chetniks was a response to the various challenges they
perceived in the immediate postwar period, the continued violence in the re-
gion well into the 1920s, the ambiguous and often fraught relationship with
state institutions such as the government and the regular army, the thorny
matters of party politics and indeed the parliamentary system itself. Their as-
sociation’s relationship to national politics could be described as parasitical:
rival Chetnik associations attached themselves to political parties as unocial
‘enforcers’ at election time, holding the line against the state’s enemies. Butthe
Chetniks did not generate radical new political styles or programmes of their
own – in ideological terms they were always junior partners to the parties
themselves. In this sense, the Chetniks could be described as part of the para-
fascist web of political forces that undermined liberal politics in the 1920s but
that did not ofer a full-blown, revolutionary agenda.
It is worth noting an additional point, perhaps specic to the Balkan states
of interwar Europe. Yugoslavia’s political contained traces of numerous
longer-term militarist and paramilitary traditions and institutions and irreg-
ular and semi-regular armed groups and associations, such as the Chetniks,
many of which had roots that went back to the nineteenth century and the po-
litical and military struggles against empire. The memberships of such groups
were expanded by veterans of the Balkan wars and the First World War, but
even so, their roots remained in the often violent struggles of the nineteenth
century Balkans. They t well into the parafascist camp of anti-liberal and anti-
democratic forces, but at the same time, they were perhaps too deeply-rooted
in the nationalist anti-imperial traditions of the past to move decisively be-
yond these and into the realm of full-blown fascism. In other words, there was
departure, but not destination.
National Defence
Narodna odbrana [National Defence], the patriotic militarist association
based in Serbia but active in the Habsburg lands in the pre-war period, fol-
lowed a similar path of postwar resurrection in the 1920s. Formed in 1908,
in the wake of the anxieties caused by Austro-Hungarian annexation of the
Ottoman province of Bosnia (Bosnia-Herzegovina), National Defence styled
itself as a patriotic association dedicated to (Serbian) ‘cultural work’ in the
province. National Defence was concerned with the ultimate reversal of the
annexation through the establishment of a network of anti-Habsburg cells
fascism 6 (2017) 42-74
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within Bosnia. The association had achieved considerable notoriety in 1914
when the Austro- Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia had erroneously identied it
as directly responsible for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in
Bosnia (apparently mistaking it for ‘Unication or Death’ – the Black Hand – a
group with which National Defence admittedly had numerous ties, see below).
National Defence also faced oblivion in the wake of victory – its purpose,
the liberation and unication of South Slav lands into a single national state,
achieved with the demise of Austria-Hungary in 1918. But like the Chetniks,
National Defence soon re-surfaced, its leadership claiming that true ‘cultur-
al’ unication – as opposed to simple political and institutional unication
– remained unrealised in the troubled postwar period. National Defence pos-
ited that for the new state to succeed it needed to be animated by a culturally
Yugoslav component. This new postwar project was, in a sense, a continu-
ation of their pre-war work, in which National Defence’s leaders continually
claimed that their role in national life in Habsburg Bosnia was exclusively
about the promotion of Serbian culture (rather than political and military
work – in reality, National Defence pursued all these elds).
Although not a veteran association per se, a large component of National
Defence’s membership had served in the Serbian army and the Chetniks in
the wars of 1912–1918. This was a consequence of their close ties with both the
Serbian army itself and with other militarist associations. Many of the asso-
ciation’s members were still active as soldiers or ocers of the Yugoslav army
after 1918, many were also associated with the Chetnik associations of the post-
war period (Pećanac and Birćanin were both members). Like the Chetniks,
National Defence was sceptical, even suspicious, of the parliamentary system
within Yugoslavia, and the association quickly identied the divisions of party
politics as one of the largest obstacles on the path towards authentic national
unication. These illiberal tendencies, combined with the goal of national
regeneration and an emphasis on the war years as an example for emulation,
hint at the beginnings of a fascist programme. And indeed, the association’s
proposed departure from liberal democracy also made it open to the lure of
Italian Fascism as early as the mid-1920s. National Defence discussed Fascist
ideas with (not uncritical) admiration in the pages of its journal, praising in
Ljubodrag Dimić, Kulturna politika Kraljevine Jugoslavije 1918–1941, vol. 1 (Belgrade: Stubovi
kulture, 1997), 467.
Bogomir Bogić, Ciljevi Narodne Odbrane (Belgrade: Bogić, 1934).
Velibor Jonić, ‘Narodna Odbrana,’ in Naše selo, ed. Miloslav Stojadinović (Belgrade:
Štampiranje “Tucović”, 1929).
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particular the example set by Mussolini, a robust nationalist had cured Italy of
the parliamentary sclerosis.
Such fascistizing impulses were located at the very centre of the associa-
tion, its leadership – but there was an even more radical fringe within the
association’s membership, consisting of nationalist intellectuals who would
eventually grow impatient with the lack of revolutionary élan in National
Defence and who would become leading lights of Zbor in the latter part of
the 1930s. These were men such as Stanislav Krakov, a talented if dilettantish
veteran of the wartime Chetniks who after 1918 dabbled in journalism (as edi-
tor of the nationalist newspaper Vreme in the interwar period), ction (short
stories and novels, usually about the wars), poetry, and even movie-making.
Krakov conceived and directed a would-be epic feature lm about Serbia’s
wars and revolution, For the Honour of the Fatherland (1929), an early landmark
of Balkan cinema that spliced newsreel footage of the war with re-enacted bat-
tles (featuring a large cast of extras, actually soldiers serving the Yugoslav army
leased to Krakov for the purposes of making his lm). Krakov felt that cinema
was the only medium suciently revolutionary to capture the essence of the
war; his search for revolutionary new forms was carried over into the sphere
of politics, too. Indeed, and as elsewhere in interwar eastern Europe, avant-
garde art and politics went hand in hand.
National Defence did not possess the monolithic sense of ideology and po-
litical purpose necessary to embark upon a right-revolutionary political proj-
ect. The association’s relatively uncontroversial claim to be working towards
the cultural unity of the South Slavs drew in members from across a wide spec-
trum: politically conservative army ocers, Serbian patriots – the association
even prided itself on breaking down the ethnic line by opening chapters in
‘non-Serbian’ cities, notably the Croat capital Zagreb (although the majority of
National Defence’s membership remained Serbian, or else Serbs from outside
Narodna Odbrana, 15 May 1926.
Krakov’s papers in the Archive of Yugoslavia, Belgrade (Arhiv Jugoslavije Fond 102) are a
rich and as yet largely untapped source on this intriguing and important personality of
the Serbian interwar right.
A conclusion at which he apparently arrived after watching King Vidor’s First World War
epic The Big Parade. See Krakov’s review in Srpski književni glasnik (1927) 2, 318–320.
Serbian author (and reluctant veteran of the Austro-Hungarian army) Miloš Crnjanski
was a luminary of Belgrade’s literary scene tempted by right-wing politics. See John Cox,
‘Violence, Vienna, Versailles, and Venezuela: The Efects of World War 1 on the Nationalist
Thought of Miloš Crnjanski,’ in New Political Ideas in the Aftermath of the Great War, ed.
Alessandro Salvador and Anders Kjøstvedt (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 25–40.
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of Serbia). National Defence was thus a broad church rather than a dedicated
sect.
Other kinds of divisions cleaved into the group’s membership. Importantly,
National Defence included both remnants of Ujedinjenje ili smrt [Unication
or Death] and its opponents. Unication or Death – known to its many ene-
mies as the Crna ruka [Black Hand] – was formed in 1911 by a ring of active and
reserve ocers of the Serbian army, as well as civilian supporters and headed
by Serbian chief of military intelligence, the notorious Dragutin Dimitrijević
‘Apis’. The group’s most important achievements were two fateful ‘regicides’:
that of Serbian king Aleksandar Obrenović in a palace coup in Belgrade, 1903,
and that of Franz Ferdinand, heir-apparent of the Austro- Hungarian monar-
chy, in 1914. The group had repeatedly strayed into the realm of civilian and na-
tional politics, and was eventually dealt a death blow by the parliament and the
crown in 1917, when a rigged trial at Salonika (wartime location of the Serbian
government and army) handed down a death sentence to Apis and other Black
Hand ringleaders. The treatment of this group and its supporters divided
the Serbian/Yugoslav army ocer corps and militarist associations such as
National Defence – divided, that is, between ‘Black Handers’ who had been
members or else were supportive of the group, and those who were opposed
to it. These latter were more loosely grouped around the rival ‘White Hand’, a
court camarilla loyal to Aleksandar Karadjordjević that sought to push back
against the inuence of the Black Hand. The leadership of National Defence
seemed keen to heal this wound, bestowing the association’s presidency onto
Stepa Stepanović, an elderly, retired, and politically inactive commander of
the pre-war Serbian army who had once been closely associated with the Black
Hand. Stepanović’s largely honoric position as head of National Defence
looks to be a reconciliatory gesture towards disgruntled former associates of
the Black Hand itself.
David Mackenzie, The ‘Black Hand’ on Trial, Salonika, 1917 (Boulder: East European Mono-
graphs, 1995).
David Mackenzie, The Exoneration of the Black Hand 1917–1953 (Boulder: East European
Monographs, 1998).
Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia, 146.
Stepa Stepanović (1856–1929) was an ocer of the Serbian army who served in the wars
against the Ottoman empire (1876–1878), Bulgaria (1885), and in the Balkan wars and First
World War, achieving the honoric rank of Vojvoda (Field Marshal, the highest rank in
the Serbian army, obtainable only in battle). He served as Minister of War in the pre-war
Serbian kingdom, and as president of National Defence from 1924 until his death in 1929
(see below).
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Stepanović, as we shall see, made National Defence a more passive force
in the political life of Yugoslavia: critical of the shortcomings of the parlia-
mentary system, instinctively illiberal, but unwilling as an association to
move directly into the political sphere. This, accompanied by the association’s
pre- occupation with reconciling divisions of the pre-war period, inhibited
National Defence’s ability to move beyond parafacism’s grey zone in the in-
terwar period. More positive and creative in their approach to politics than
the Chetniks, National Defence could nevertheless not alchemize its various
ideological elements a single programme, nor, in the event, did the association
show a willingness to supersede the existing political institutions of the state,
despite its trenchant criticism of them. War veterans and the war were indeed
at the heart of National Defence’s postwar incarnation, but the war was typi-
cally seen as the culmination of Serbia’s struggle for national emancipation,
rather than ground zero for a new political project.
A more radical assault on Yugoslavia’s peaceable society came from the militant
South Slav nationalist movement, the Organizacija Jugoslovenskih Nacionalista
[; Organisation of Yugoslav Nationalists], formed in Split in 1921, with
sizeable support on the Adriatic littoral (from Dalmatia to Trieste) and with
branches across the country. was a paramilitary organisation com-
prising armed groups, often members of the ‘war-youth’ generation who had
been too young to ght during 1912–1918, but backed up by war veterans who
sought to defend the war victory from real and perceived enemies.
The immediate cause for ’s formation was the assassination of
Serbian politician Milorad Drašković by a militant communist group, ‘Red
Truth’, in 1921. Anti-Communism thus formed a central tenet of ’s
ideology, but local and regional concerns were also important. It was no
coincidence that was founded in Dalmatia, a region from whence
it drew much support: the Adriatic territories were sharply contested in the
postwar period by rival territorial claims from Italy, and ’s mobilisa-
tion represented in large part a response to this threat. As Marco Bresciani has
noted, there was a dialectical relationship between and the South Slav
nationalist organisations along the Adriatic on the one hand and the Italian
On , see Branislav Gligorijević, ‘Organizacija jugoslovenskij nacionalista
(),’ Zbornik Radova veka (1963).
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Squadristi on the other, and one way of understanding the group’s identity and
actions is by thinking of the Adriatic zone as a transnational space of violent
ethno-nationalist and political confrontation involving Italian Fascists, Italian
Socialists, and South Slav nationalist militias such as . also
mobilised against supporters of Stjepan Radić’s Peasant Republican Party (a
confrontation that heightened after Radić’s decision to run in Dalmatia in the
national elections of 1923), and Croat nationalists, identied by (often
erroneously) as ‘Frankists’ (see below).
The war and war veterans were central to ’s programme.
sacralised the generation of Gavrilo Princip, assassin of Franz Ferdinand, as a
nationalist vanguard prepared to lay down their lives for the Yugoslav revolu-
tion. also claimed a lineage with the wartime volunteer movement –
those South Slavs, either from the global diaspora or else Habsburg prisoners
of war (mainly in Russia) who had volunteered to ght in the Serbian army
in the First World War. Both provided with the example of a blood
sacrice that its members were required to emulate. And indeed, some of
’s skirmishes with its various enemies resulted in deadly violence, most
notoriously a brawl with communist miners in Trbovlje, Slovenia, in 1924.
War veterans themselves were not unied over the actions of in the
early 1920s. The largest associations were often critical of ’s violence –
thus the ‘Union of Volunteers’, the veteran association that represented the
former volunteers of the Serbian army that were so fêted by , com-
plained about the nationalist association’s attacks, even whilst supporting the
group’s ideas and commitment to Yugoslav unity. On the other hand, Chetnik
leaders Kosta Pećanac and Ilija Birćanin were supportive of , seeing in
the movement a signicant crossover with their own Yugoslavism. re-
paid this compliment by making both men Veliki čelnici [High Leaders] of the
Marco Bresciani, ‘The Post-imperial space of the Upper Adriatic and the Post-war ascent
of Fascist,’ in Vergangene Räume – Neue Ordnungen: Das Erbe der multinationalen Reiche
und die Staatsbildung im östlichen Europa 1917–1923, ed. T. Buchen and F. Grelka (Frankfurt
a.d. Oder: Viadrina Universität, 2016). See also Boris Mlakar, ‘Radical Nationalism and Fas-
cist Elements in Political Movements in Slovenia between the two World Wars,’ Slovene
Studies 31, no. 1 (2009): 3–19.
The ideology and history of is set out in leader Niko Bartulović’s book
Od revolucionarne omladine do Orjune: Istorijat Jugoslavenskog omladinskog pokreta
(Split: Direktorium Orjune, 1925). It was also espoused throughout the pages of their larg-
est journal Pobeda [Victory], published in Split in the 1920s.
Bartulović, Od revolucionarne omladine do Orjune, 59.
The brawl is discussed in Nova Evropa, 1 October 1924.
Rodoljub, 15 July and 22 July 1923.
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association, and Pećanac and Birćanin occasionally spoke at ’s rallies.
There is, of course, an obvious parallel between the violent conduct of
and the Chetnik associations that Pećanac and Birćanin represented.
A convincing case for ’s fascist credentials can and has been
made. The organisation’s leadership certainly embraced ‘Yugoslavism’ as a
revolutionary ideology, claiming that its proper realisation would require a
comprehensive remaking of society and the individual. Violence was central
to this process of remaking, because the parliamentary system itself was an
inhibitor of true national integration, allowing the kingdom to be imperilled
by ‘anti-State’ forces such as Stjepan Radić, the communists, and the Italians.
These points carried more force in the febrile atmosphere of the 1917–1923
period, and they were more than just rhetorical nods, frequently en-
gaged in violence, and repeatedly called for dictatorship as a means of settling
scores with the state’s enemies.
War Veterans and Parliamentary Politics, 1921–1929
The membership and, especially, the leadership of these aforementioned as-
sociations harboured ambiguous attitudes towards the parliamentary system
in Yugoslavia, an institution that did not fully succeed in detaching itself from
the violence and divisions of the war years.
The avowed position of most veteran and nationalist associations in the
1920s was essentially ‘apolitical’, meant in the sense that no ocial party politi-
cal aliation was brooked by the associations in question. The logic behind
this decision seems to have been that the broader social and cultural concerns
of the associations would be hindered through strict adherence to a party
programme – veteran and nationalist associations instead called upon politi-
cal parties to honour the compact between state and veterans in the postwar
period, redeeming the blood sacrice of the war through social care, commit-
ment to commemoration, upholding the integrity of the new state, and so on.
Yet this avowed indiference to party politics concealed a much deeper level
of engagement. The leaderships and memberships of groups like the
and the Chetniks had denite ideas about the national question and forging
Pobeda, 17 May 1924.
See, e.g., Stevo Djurašković, ‘Ideologija Organizacije jugoslovenskih nacionalista (Orjuna),’
Časopis za suvremenu povijest /1 (2011).
Pobeda, 24 September 1921.
See, e.g., Glas ratnika, 25 September 1920.
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Yugoslavism in the postwar period, and certain parties and party leaders were
identied as conduits of these ideological goals. Thus , whilst denying
any kind of party political aliation, were in reality close to the Croatian Serb
politician Svetozar Pribićević, especially after the formation of his Indepen-
dent Democratic Party () in 1924. felt kinship to the party and its
leader on account of their shared and unwavering support for Yugoslavism and
their hard-line against dissenting voices, especially that of Stjepan Radić and
the Croatian Peasant Republican Party.
The Chetniks were similarly ambivalent. Whilst the association publically
disavowed party politics, the leadership, at least in the rst half of the 1920s,
was favourably disposed towards the Democratic Party of Ljubomir Davidović.
Davidović had been president of the Chetniks’ cultural branch in the pre-war
period, and he remained a prestigious gure in the postwar organisation. But
there was another signicant faction in the Chetniks, headed by Puniša Račić,
that sought to transform the Chetniks into a ‘Great Serbian’ association. Račić
was himself a member of the Radical party and successfully stood on its list in
the elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1920, and again in the national
elections of 1927.
The relationship between veteran associations and the representative po-
litical institutions of the state was even more complicated still. For many vet-
eran associations, irrespective of their attitudes towards individual political
groupings, the parliamentary system was identied as a corrosive inuence
on national unity. The dysfunctional way in which governments were formed
and unformed, and political deals were made and broken, seemed to inhibit
a true sense of national and cultural unication across the South Slav lands.
Many veterans expressed impatience at the manner in which politicians and
political parties were unable to establish and maintain a meaningful and last-
ing means of governing the country. Veterans were displeased at the inability
of the parliamentary system to efectively legislate for social care for disabled
former soldiers or were critical of the manner in which veteran verication
certicates were forged and passed out in order to curry political favour or to
win votes. But these criticisms often fed into a more generalised impatience
with the ways and means of parliamentary politics itself. Thus many veterans
disliked the processes of compromise and deal-making intrinsic to efective
coalition building and governing. In this sense, valid criticisms of the aws of
Gligorijević, ‘Organizacija jugoslovenskih nacionalista ().’
The Democratic Party, with its Yugoslavist platform, received the support of both Ilija
Birćanin and Kosta Pećanac.
Milivoje Erić, Agrarna reforma u Jugoslaviji 1918–1941 (Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1958), 247.
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Yugoslav party politics strayed into criticisms of liberal politics per se. An ac-
ceptance on the part of veterans of parliamentary democracy as an inviolate
principle of political organisation is not evident.
Perhaps even more seriously, veterans were concerned about the way in
which the parliamentary system allowed what they termed ‘anti-state’ factors
into the political life of the country, thus, again, threatening the integrity of the
state itself. ‘Anti-state’ was primarily taken to mean Stjepan Radić and the Croat
Peasant Republican Party, although it also came to encompass those political
parties and leaders who sought compromise with Radić in the rst half of the
1920s. Serbian veteran associations were concerned about Radić’s consistently
anti-militarist and anti-army rhetoric, underscored by his repeated – and fre-
quently heeded – calls for Croats to ignore the army’s conscription eforts.
Radić had arrived at a very diferent understanding of the war years than those
who supported the ideas of ‘liberation and unication’: for him, the First World
War had been a clash of oppressive empires fought by unwitting conscripts,
the lesson was that no Croat soldier would ever ght again in a ‘foreign army’.
‘Foreign’ had meant the Austro-Hungarian army, but after 1918 it came to mean
the army of Yugoslavia.
War veterans had considerably more respect for Aleksandar Karadjordjević,
Yugoslav king (after the death of his father Petar) from 1921 onwards. Aleskan-
dar’s relationships with veterans and with the army on the one hand and with
the parliamentary system on the other are crucial to understanding the course
of politics in Yugoslavia in the 1920s. The crown and Aleksandar emerged al-
most unequivocally as symbols of prestige and power amongst war veterans
in the postwar period. Aleksandar was the ‘unier’ who had led the Serbian
army in the wars of 1912–1918, and he therefore remained the warriors’ cham-
pion in the postwar period. Veterans looked towards Aleksandar as a symbol of
national unity, a talisman of the war years. Aleksandar himself returned the fa-
vour by ofering material and nancial support to veteran associations, and by
frequently appearing at their public parades and events. But at the same time,
Aleksandar seems to have shared with his veterans at least an impatience with
the problems of parliamentary politics: the Yugoslav constitution called for
Aleksandar, as head of state, to assume the role of arbiter between political par-
ties, but he interpreted this role generously – laying an increasingly heavy hand
on the various governing coalitions in Yugoslavia, directing parties towards his
own preferences and asserting himself into the process of coalition building.
See Rudolg Herceg, Svjetski rat i problem nove države (Zagreb: Naklada tiskara Ign. Granitz,
1919).
On Aleksandar’s ‘autocratic tendencies’ see Dejan Djokić, Yugoslavia Elusive Compromise:
A History of Interwar Yugoslavia (London: Hurst and Company, 2007).
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The relationship between the national parliament, the army and war veter-
ans, and Aleskandar himself is complicated and indeed still partially obscured
by a decit of historical sources and scholarly research. We can say with some
condence that Aleksandar was sceptical and impatient of liberal democracy
in Yugoslavia, harbouring misgivings about the supposed democratic norms
that obtained in postwar Europe. If not a congenital dictator, he was certainly
amongst those who thought that ‘Individual liberal democracy was not nec-
essarily the privileged goal of history.’ This was at the heart of many of his
clashes with Yugoslavia’s politicians.
So much for the relationship between the king and his parliament. The re-
lationship between the king and war veterans (and the Yugoslav army) was
more complicated still, and it is perhaps helpful to think of this as a two-way
street. War veterans themselves, as we have seen, were wary of parliamentary
democracy – and in this attitude found common ground with Aleksandar, a
much more obvious symbol of national unity and patriotism. As for the king,
there can be little doubt that much of his condence in dealing with the coun-
try’s civilian politicians derived from the tacit, or often not so tacit, support
he received from the Yugoslav army and militarist and veteran groups in the
country, a postwar convergence that made the likelihood of an authoritarian
solution to the country’s political problems, one supported by war veterans
and the military, a real possibility. The history of military coups in the Balkans,
many of them resulting in the toppling of crowned heads, shows the essential
need to keep the army and its supporters on side.
The diculties of political life in Yugoslavia were ensured at the outset
following the deeply contested passing of the country’s rst constitution, the
so-called ‘Vidovdan Constitution’, in 1921. The centralising principles of the
constitution, at odds with the diversity of political and historical traditions in
the country, ensured ‘hard opposition’ from the very beginning. The bulk of
this so-called hard opposition came from the Croat Republican Peasant Party
and its leader Stjepan Radić who, in rejecting the constitution, was quickly
branded a potential enemy of the state, against whom the country’s strict anti-
state legislation was readily invoked.
provides a case study of this elision of supposed anti-state forces
in the immediate post-Vidovdan period, and also a case study in the extreme
measures that some war veterans were willing to take in order to oppose it. As
we have seen, was formed in the wake of the political assassination of
Milorad Drašković by a communist fringe group in 1921. For , the lesson
David Roberts, Fascist Interactions: Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism and its Era,
1919–1945 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2016), 5.
Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia.
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of the Drašković assassination was that violence needed to be met with vio-
lence in the fraught postwar years. carried into peacetime the symbols
of the war years, depicting their own violent struggles in continuity with the
wars of 1912–1918. But this force could be applied to all potential enemies of the
Yugoslav state, including, of course, Radić. violence only intensied
in the years immediately after the war, as Radić’s electoral popularity amongst
Croats grew, and his party decided to present candidates in Dalmatian towns
and cities in the 1923 elections. This brought him into direct confrontation
with , who used violent means to threaten and intimidate supporters
of the peasant party in territories they looked upon as their own strongholds.
’s answer to this threat was to call for the abandonment of parliamen-
tary democracy in toto – since it allowed unconstitutional and anti-state forces
into national politics. Already, at this early stage, were calling for a
royal dictatorship to resolve the problems of the postwar period.
The involvement of nationalist veteran associations was even more
widespread in the election campaigns and crises of 1923–1925. Some brief
background is required to understand what was at stake in the country during
these years. The national elections of 1923 shifted the electoral landscape in the
country, it was the rst time in the short history of Yugoslavia that the Radical
Party had insucient support to form a government as majority partner. A gov-
ernment was instead formed by Ljubomir Davidović and the Democratic Party.
Davidović sought a reconciliation with Stjepan Radić and the Croat Peasant
Republican Party – beginning talks with peasant party leaders and seeming
to ofer them a way into government. For Davidović this important new de-
parture in national politics was a response to the disunity in the state: it was
time, claimed Davidović, to break down the internal borders in Yugoslav soci-
ety between the war’s ‘victorious’ and ‘defeated’ parties – including Radić in his
government was a means of moving beyond the cultures of victory and defeat
that had wracked the country up until then, it was essentially a means of de-
mobilizing Yugoslav society. In this way, the legacy of the war became central
to the debates about politics and government in 1924.
This attempted new course was undermined by numerous parties: the no-
tion that Radić, who had until that point launched furious verbal attacks on
the key institutions of liberation and unication: the crown and the army,
might now be allowed into government, was unacceptable to many. The as-
sociations mentioned in this article all bristled at the prospect of the culture
of victory becoming diluted by Davidović’s rapprochement. Thus Chetnik
Pobeda, 5 April 1924.
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support for Davidović, erstwhile president of the pre-war association, dimin-
ished precipitously, giving Puniša Račić the opportunity he had long sought to
capture the group’s leadership and steer it towards the ‘Great Serbian’ ideology
of the Radical Party (whose leaders also opposed Davidović’s move).
also stepped up on their rhetorical attacks on Radić and the government it-
self. As for National Defence, this association was divided only in its position
vis-à-vis the king and the army, two institutions that increasingly looked as if
they would step in to settle the political crisis caused by the Davidović-Radić
rapprochement. National Defence was torn, it seems, between a White Hand
faction who favoured active support for the king should he step in and dissolve
the faltering government, and a Black Hand faction that favoured a passive
response both to the crisis itself and to a potential royal solution. Branislav
Gligorijević has noted how certain factions of the ocer corps began at this
time to assist in the arming of militarist and nationalist groups such as the
Chetniks and , with a view to using them in a potential conict, of
undetermined scale, but presumably fought between those who supported the
king and the Great Serbian forces and those who supported Davidović and his
followers.
The Democratic Party leader’s government eventually fell, after little more
than one hundred days, following the withdrawal from government of the
Minister for the Army and the Navy, Stevan Hadžić, a move almost certainly
orchestrated by the king himself. The ‘100-Day’ crisis of Ljubomir Davidović’s
government revealed the limits of liberal politics and Yugoslav political culture
in the South Slav State. War veterans of the Serbian army were as yet unwilling
to allow a change in national politics that would lead to any kind of diminish-
ment of the Serbian ‘culture of victory’. It was not only that Radić remained
beyond the political pale on account of his anti-state rhetoric and stances on
the king and the army – it was also that Davidović threatened to move on from
the traditions of the war years. In the context of war veterans and politics in
Yugoslavia, this battle of wills was pivotal.
The following election campaign foregrounded the history of the war years,
and was fought by the Radicals and by Pribićević’s newly-formed Independent
Democrats as a defence of the values of the war against anti-state enemies
such as Radić and Davidović. But the war was not only a rhetorical presence in
the electoral campaigning: for the rst time, there was a marked presence of
‘electoral terror’ at the ballot box, as associations such as and (espe-
cially) those factions of the Chetniks loyal to Puniša Račić sought to intimidate
See Gligorijević, ‘Uloga vojnih krugova u “rešavanju” političke krize u Jugoslaviji 1924.
godine,’ Vojnoistorijski glasnik, 1, godina (January–April 1972).
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political opponents through the use of violence. The new atmosphere was
noted by various observers, and it would now become a continuing factor
in Yugoslav politics going forwards. It marked the moment when certain as-
sociations and war veterans translated their hostility about the parliamentary
system from words into action. It also marked the realisation of the close ties
between Aleksandar and his war veterans, which had until this stage in the
state’s life been primarily of festive or commemorative importance, but could
now be reckoned upon as a source of real political power in the country. No
longer was there any ambiguity about where the army and the militarist asso-
ciations stood: they would back the king against potential enemies, should the
need arise. Yugoslav parafascism now had a military component.
The coup de grace of these intersections between war veterans, national
politics, and the king himself came in the summer of 1928, and was delivered
by none other than Puniša Račić. Račić had been elected to the national parlia-
ment on the Radical Party list in the elections of 1927, continuing an ongoing
pursuit of politics going back to the beginning of the South Slav state’s life. He
remained belligerently opposed to the Croat Peasant Party and its deputies,
who had carried out something of a volte-face since the mid-1920s, abandon-
ing the republicanism of their earlier years and agreeing, at least in principle,
to work within parliament as a loyal opposition to the government. When,
during a heated parliamentary session in the June 1928, a Croat Peasant Party
deputy accused Račić of using the cover of his Chetnik activities during the
war and immediate postwar years to steal from the civilian population, Račić
demanded an immediate apology. Since this apology was not forthcoming,
Račić, who attended parliamentary sessions armed, drew his pistol and red at
peasant party deputies, killing two instantly and wounding three more, includ-
ing party leader Stjepan Radić, who died some weeks later from his wounds.
This assassination resulted in yet another political crisis, this time the most
severe the state had faced since the end of the war, and one that was ultimately
resolved by the king’s suspension (permanent, as it turned out) of parliament
and the installation of a royal dictatorship in January 1929, a move that was
wholeheartedly supported by war veteran associations of the Serbian army.
War veterans and their associations played an important role in the tortured
political history of Yugoslavia in the 1920s – their involvement in party poli-
tics frequently amounted to bringing a violent fringe to the electoral processes
Nusret Šehić, Četništvo u Bosni i Hercegovini (1918–1941): Politička uloga i oblici djelatnosti
četničkih udruženja (Sarajevo: Akademija nauka i umjetnosti Bosne i Hercegovine, 1971).
See, e.g., Ivan Ribar, Politički spisi, vol.1 (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1948), 161–162.
See, e.g., Ratnički glasnik, January 1929, and Vojnički glasnik, 9 January 1930.
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in the country. Their scepticism about the ability of the liberal system itself
to reconcile diference across the country and, most importantly, to achieve
Yugoslav unity, further undermined the consolidation of the parliamentary
system. The real and rhetorical violence of the war years stalked the politics of
the country throughout the postwar decade, most graphically and literally in
Račić’s act of political assassination in 1928, but this was only the sensational
culmination of a history of embattled and often brutalised political discourse.
The Dictatorship Years
King Aleksandar’s dictatorship had a number of seemingly contradictory
efects on the veteran question and politics in interwar Yugoslavia. In the
short-term the suspension of parliament was greeted across the country with
relief – few people mourned the faltering parliamentary system and its decade
of paralysis and failures. The king recognised the potent symbolism of the war
and the role of war veterans as a pillar of his dictatorship, although he also
seemed to realise that the war was fractious and disputed territory. In keep-
ing with his overarching aim of accelerating the process of ‘Yugoslavizing’ the
country Aleksandar consolidated the previously divided veteran and national-
ist associations. The various Chetnik associations were re-organised into a
single ocially sanctioned group, the ‘Association of Chetniks’; , an as-
sociation whose violence had made it odious even to ideological and political
supporters, was banned outright; National Defence was allowed to continue –
and repaid the king by announcing its support for his dictatorship.
As we have seen, veteran associations and their leaders had from an early
stage looked upon the king as a symbol of the national unity and prestige. Calls
for the king to step in and take control of the state had been voiced throughout
the 1920s, at times in very specic terms, such as ’s demands in the mid-
1920s to scrap the parliamentary system and introduce a royal dictatorship that
could properly deal with the state’s many opponents. The enthusiastic greet-
ings given by these associations to the installation of the dictatorship, at least
at its outset, can be read as genuine expressions of support on the part of the
majority of war veterans.
King Aleksandar’s dictatorship represented the coalescence and the
culmination of illiberal tendencies that had been at large in Yugoslavia in the
See Christian Axboe Nielsen, Making Yugoslavs: Identity in King Aleksandar’s Yugoslavia
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).
Narodna odbrana, 26 January 1930.
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1920s – the merging of Yugoslavia’s various para-fascist forces and the nal de-
parture from the course of liberal democracy in Yugoslavia. The understand-
ably hostile socialist-era historiography typically referred to the king’s political
project as ‘Monarcho-Fascist’, identifying Aleksandar as a Bonapartist gure
who temporarily mobilised cross-class support for a militarist dictatorship. But
this is to overstate the case: the dictatorship was essentially a product of the
uncertainties and the political insecurities of the 1920s, the unwillingness of
many parts of the Yugoslav state and its society to accept liberal democracy as
the immutable facts of political organisation.
War veteran associations took this further: their instincts in the 1920s had
been trenchantly statist, their mobilisation based around deeply-held fears of
anti-state forces undoing the war victory by breaking up the state. This support
was in turn galvanised by the charismatic authority of the king himself, iden-
tied by Serbian veterans as a central gure in the war’s mythology. And this
support was, of course, more than simply rhetorical: the 1920s had seen an ever
closer convergence of interests and support between the king and militarist as-
sociations, as well as the army himself. In this respect the relationship between
Aleksandar and an inuential, all-powerful group of veterans and army o-
cers resembled the relationship between Józef Piłsudski and his legionaries, or
indeed that of Tomáš Masaryk and the largest Czech Legionary associations.
For many veterans, there was also the revolutionary promise of the Yugoslav
programme itself. We have seen how members of , or indeed National
Defence, conceived of South Slav unication as a political, social, and cultural
transformation of society and the individual, one that could be forced through
by violent means if necessary. Aleksandar’s project was (mis-)guided by this to-
talizing conception of Yugoslavia, the desire to break cleanly with the divisions
of the past and push through a new political and cultural identity.
There are here seeds of the fascist project, but ultimately Aleksandar’s au-
thoritarian project owed more to the perceived weaknesses of politics in the
1920s than it did to the surge of radical right politics and movements in the
1930s. The ‘gravitational pull’ of international fascism was not strongly felt in
Yugoslavia in the second decade of the interwar period. The important excep-
tions to this rule are discussed below.
The Ustashe
Aleksandar’s project had a ricochet efect on a small group of Croat national-
ists who had been opposed to South Slav unication from the very beginning –
transforming them into full-blown paramilitary terrorist organisations that
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were intent – and in the event successful – on bringing the king’s rule to an
end. In the years of revolution and counter-revolution, 1917–1923, small groups
of former Habsburg ocers and Habsburg loyalists of mainly Croat descent
had formed émigré and domestic groups whose quixotic goal was to break
apart the Yugoslav state. Politically, they were guided by the leaders of the
Čista stranka prava [Pure Party of Right], a small party that had been close-
ly allied to Habsburg Vienna until the very end of the war, and with limited
support amongst certain social strata, mainly in Zagreb. The followers of the
Pure Party of Right were known colloquially, to opponents and allies, as the
Frankovci [Frankists], after the renegade founder of their party, Osijek lawyer
Josip Frank.
The Frankists had loitered at the edges of Croatian national politics in the
1920s, remaining a negligible force in comparison to the mass movement of
Stjepan Radić’s Croat Peasant Party. The installation of Aleskandar’s dictator-
ship sent the leadership of the Frankist opposition, at this time headed by
Zagreb lawyer Ante Pavelić and journalist and former Austro-Hungarian
ocer Gustav Perčec, into exile (Hungary) to raise support and arms against
Yugoslavia. They formed the ‘Ustasha Croatian Revolutionary Movement’
(the Ustashe) at the beginning of 1930, a paramilitary terrorist organisation
that plotted to instigate a Croatian national uprising against Aleksandar’s re-
gime. A network of like-minded groups, of varying size, but all committed to
territorial revisionism in the region, provided material and morale support.
In exile, and with support from sympathetic factions at home, the Ustashe at
rst conducted small-scale acts of terrorism against Yugoslavia in the hope
of sparking a mass uprising. These included the bombing of passenger trains
passing through Yugoslavia, or attacks on Yugoslav border posts and police sta-
tions, most notably in Lika in 1932. When these tactics failed to yield meaning-
ful results, the Ustashe moved to political assassination, scoring a sensational
success in October 1934 with the assassination of Aleksandar himself, whilst
the king was on a state visit to France.
Fascist Italy cultivated this group as a means of leverage against the
Yugoslavs, and the collusion with this state, as well as the rise to power of
On the Frankists, see Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia, 260–269.
Ante Pavelić (1889–1959) was a Zagreb lawyer who rose through the ranks of the Frankists
in the 1920s, serving rst on the Zagreb municipal council and then in the national parlia-
ment as a deputy (from 1927 onwards).
On the formation of the Ustashe, see Mario Jareb, Ustaško-domobranski pokret: Od
nastanku do travnja 1941. godine (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 2006). And Goran Miljan ‘From
Obscure Beginnings to State “Resurrection”.’
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National Socialism in Germany, would dene the political programme of the
Ustashe. The Ustashe were especially susceptible to the process of ‘fascistiza-
tion’ in the 1930s, culminating in its adoption of fascist politics and structures
when the small group assumed control of the Independent State of Croatia
following the defeat of Yugoslavia in 1941. The ‘domestic’ context of opposition
to Yugoslavia in this way meshed with the larger and emboldened forces of
illiberalism, revisionism, and fascism in 1930s Europe.
The ideological nucleus of the Ustashe derived from the Croat Pure Party
of Right and the context of Habsburg politics in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century. The followers of Josip Frank had asserted that only the
Croats constituted a ‘political nation’ on the territory of Croatia, a state-
forming appellation that was signicantly denied to the Serb minority in the
same territory (in the Habsburg context, they were a ‘non-political people’).
This precept had evolved overtime into an increasingly chauvinistic and
Serbo-phobic platform, informed by the Habsburg defeat of 1918 (blamed on
Serbian nationalists) and the formation of Yugoslavia (identied by Frankists
as a cover for ‘Great Serbia’). In the 1930s, these ideas were compounded with
the racialism of Fascism and Nazism – reaching a crescendo of annihilationist
violence when the Ustashe took power in 1941. Their aim, immediately pur-
sued, was to rid their new state of Serbs, Jews, and Roma by genocidal means.
The Ustashe’s connection to war veterans is an intriguing one. Although
strictly speaking a ‘second-wave’ fascist group that emerged in the 1930s, and
thus less likely to include signicant numbers of war veterans, the Ustashe, as
we have seen also had a connection to postwar wave of counter- revolutionary
violence that swept over Europe in the years after the end of the First World War.
The war – and Habsburg war veterans – were of important to the Frankists and,
subsequently – to the Ustashe. In the rst place, the Frankists cultivated an al-
ternate ‘culture of defeat’ that ran in opposition to the ruling culture of victory
in Yugoslavia. For the Frankists, the war had resulted in the triumph of a most
virulent and chauvinistic form of Serbian nationalism, the kind that had heed-
lessly led Europe into war in 1914. The Frankists had in the 1920s cultivated an
alternate martyrology that emphasised the heroes of Croatian national history,
as well as the ‘war dead’ of 1914–1918, Croat soldiers who had been killed ght-
ing for Austria-Hungary against Serbia. This in turn was sacralised/ ritualized
by regular visits to Mirogoj cemetery in Zagreb, where the Frankists and their
On this context, see Stjepan Matković, Čista stranka prava 1895.-1903 (Zagreb: Hrvatski
institut za povijest i Dom i svijet, 2001).
On Ustaša racial policy, see Nevenko Bartulin The Racial Idea in the Independent State of
Croatia: Origins and Theory (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2013).
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followers invoked the spirits of Croatia’s fallen, and promised to avenge them
in the future.
Croat war veterans, too, played a role in the Frankists’ imagining of Croatia’s
national future. The political group had always attracted a contingent of
Austro-Hungarian ocers of Croat descent, either as members or as follow-
ers, who supported the Frankists’ loyalty to the monarchy and their hostility
of Serbia and Serbian nationalism. At war’s end, the political and institutional
changes wrought by the unication of Yugoslavia left many of these ocers at
odds with the new regime. Although the newly-formed Yugoslav army tried,
and in many cases succeeded, in drawing former Austro-Hungarian ocers
into the fold, many more remained unreconciled and opposed to the new
state and its institutions. The Frankists, with their anti-Yugoslav liturgies and
homilies to Croatian imperial military traditions, ofered disgruntled former
ocers a political outlet. Once the Frankists graduated into the Ustashe, the
paramilitary programme of the new group gave former ocers an opportu-
nity to practice once again the military craft, training soldiers in the Ustashe’s
émigré camps for the upcoming battle against Yugoslavia. Ante Pavelić repaid
this support by placing former ocers at the heart of his group – and using
them in his armed forces in the Independent State of Croatia (especially in the
Domobran home army).
The presence of Austro-Hungarian veterans in the ranks of the Ustashe
provides a suggestive causal link between the violence of the First World War
in the Balkans and that of the Second. The German occupiers were certainly
cognizant of the connection and its potential use in shoring up support for the
Ustasha state (support that dwindled rapidly as the group launched a campaign
of violence from the beginning of its rule in 1941). The German plenipotentiary
in the Nezavisna Država Hrvatska [; Independent State of Yugoslavia] was
none other than Edmund Glaise-Horstenau, erstwhile Habsburg ocer who
had served as director of the military archives in Vienna in the interwar pe-
riod. The Ustashe itself presented certain aspects of the new state as a kind of
Habsburg revival, saluting the military traditions that had been disavowed in
The sacralisation of Ustaša politics is discussed in Stjepan Kljaić ‘Apostles, Saints’ Days,
and Mass Mobilization: The Sacralization of Politics in the Ustasha State,’ in The Utopia
of Terror: Life and Death in Wartime Croatia, ed. Rory Yeomans (Rochester, Woodbridge:
University of Rochester Press, 2015).
Hrvoje Čapo, ‘Broj primljenih časnika bivše austrougarske vojske u vojsku Kraljevine Srba,
Hrvata, i Slovenaca,’ Časopis za suvremenu povijest 3 (2008).
See Fikreta Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska 1941–1945 (Zagreb: Školska
knjiga, 1977), 114–122.
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Yugoslavia. Thus, new and laudatory military histories of Croatia emerged, the
prestige of Frontkampfer such as Freiherr Stjepan Sarkotić, wartime governor
of Habsburg Bosnia, was duly acknowledged.
However, beneath these ocial homilies the truly fascist aspect of the
Ustasha programme appeared to bristle with veterans of the Austro-Hungarian
army. The various military formations of the were often split over matters
of violence against civilians and the conduct of war. Split, that is, between a
younger cohort fully committed to the Ustashe’s fascist revolution and an older
group who saw this new programme of violence as a radical departure from
the Habsburgs’ war of 1914–1918. This was the diference between a conserva-
tive, imperial military ethos, a legacy of Austria-Hungary, and that of a revolu-
tionary fascist movement, the Ustashe. In comparative terms, it is notable that
Pavelić never made a decisive reckoning with these non-revolutionary currents
in his group, in the manner of the Nazis’ ‘Night of Long Knives’, instead, piece-
meal purges and killings – such as that of Gustav Perčec in 1934 or of Slavko
Kvaternik in 1943, are evidence of an ongoing tension between various ideo-
logical currents within the Ustashe. Thus, the Austro-Hungarian connection
was sucient to forge an alliance of right-wing Croat nationalists against the
Yugoslav state in the 1920s and even into the 1930s, but as the political core of
the Ustashe went ever further towards the fascist programme, so the difer-
ences between the old and new guards became ever more pronounced.
Post-dictatorship Years 1934–1941
The nal phase in the political life of Yugoslavia lasted from after the death of
Aleksandar in 1934 until the collapse of the state in 1941. This phase was marked
on the one hand with a renewed sense of despair at the failures of South Slav
state and national integration, which had now proved incapable of taking hold
in both the period of parliamentary democracy and in the dictatorship years.
Aleksdandar’s death in 1934 had brought to an abrupt end a political project
that had been failing for some time and, as we have seen, had further alienated
and radicalized opposition to the state. Aleksandar’s death also opened the
gates to a more critical stance on the part of Serbian veteran and patriotic as-
sociations towards the failures of the state, as well as a heightening sense of
anxiety about the divisions within Serbdom itself, divergent attitudes towards
Slavko Pavičić, Hrvatska ratna i vojna povijest (Zagreb: Nakladničko trgovačko društvo
Mato Lovrak, 1998).
This thesis is elaborated in Nielsen, Making Yugoslavs.
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the Yugoslav project and its relationship to Serbian national integration, and
intergenerational splits between war veterans and a new cohort of Yugoslavs
who had been too young to experience combat and service during 1912–1918.
All of this unfolded in a continent sliding once again into conict.
The Chetnik associations, partially reined in by Aleksandar during the dic-
tatorship years, were already straining at the leash in the months before the
king’s assassination, their leaderships growing impatient, and divided, over fal-
tering attempts to remould society along Yugoslav lines. Pećanac and Birčanin,
who had been closely allied in the 1920s, had also drifted apart, and taking their
veteran constituencies with them as they went their separate ways.
Birčanin had taken the presidency of National Defence in 1932 – and had
steered the association towards a more active role in national life than his pre-
decessor Stepa Stepanović (who died in 1929). National Defence had warmly
supported the dictatorship of Aleksandar, applauding his attempt to re-forge
the state along Yugoslav lines – but his death and the subsequent new direc-
tions taken by the post-1934 governments of the country saw a rift open up
between the leadership of National Defence, and especially Birčanin on the
one hand and the government on the other. Birčanin wanted to keep the as-
sociation anchored in the wartime traditions of the culture of victory and in
the sphere of the Europe created at the end of the First World War. This put
him and National Defence at ever greater odds with the Yugoslav government,
especially during the years of Milan Stojadinović’s premiership (1935–1939).
Not only did Stojadinović begin to emulate the fascist style in his own poli-
tics, he also brooked ever closer economic and political co-operation with Nazi
Germany and Fascist Italy. This latter move was considered by Birčanin as a
betrayal of the values for which he and his comrades had fought in the First
World War, and National Defence in the latter part of the 1930s, along with oth-
er veteran organisations, such as the Association of Reserve Ocers and War-
riors, became an increasingly vocal opponent of the government. Birčanin
himself was placed under surveillance by the regime, and even arrested after
making a public protest against the government following the death of the Pa-
triarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church in 1937. Later, Birčanin, as president
of National Defence, would send a letter of sympathy to Czechoslovakia in the
aftermath of the annexation of the Sudeten lands in 1939. His unwavering
deference to the Franco-British alliances of the past earned him the attentions
Archive of Yugoslavia (Arhiv Jugoslavije, hereafter ), Fond 37 ‘Milan Stojadinović,’
22–260.
, Fond 37, 22–260.
, Fond 37, 22–171.
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of Winston Churchill’s wartime British government, who hoped to cultivate
National Defence and likeminded groups as a bulwark against the increasingly
pro-Axis slant of the Yugoslav government. In 1941, Birčanin re-joined the ght
as a Vojvoda in the ‘Dinara Division’ of Mihailović’s Ravna Gora movement
(also known as the ‘Chetniks’).
For Birćanin, then, the wartime alliances and traditions were to be pre-
served at all costs: the ballast of the new state was to be found in the wartime
victory of 1914–1918, and although he and his followers had irted with authori-
tarianism and even spoke favourably of certain fascist tendencies in the 1920s,
the changing climate of 1930s Europe, and especially the apogee of German
and Italian political and territorial revisionism, led Birčanin to cling ever more
tightly to the ties of the past. In this sense, the legacy of the war inhibited Na-
tional Defence from drifting wholly into the fascist sphere. Although, as we
shall see, certain fringe members of the association were not so reluctant to
change political course.
As has already been shown, the Chetniks were never a monolithic move-
ment, not even under the homogenizing pressures of Aleksandar’s dictator-
ship. Factions coalesced around charismatic leaders, Vojvode, who in turn
shaped the political course of their grouping. Thus, as Birčanin held fast to
the alliances of 1914–1918 as he sought orientation in the changing European
political climate, so Pećanac altered the course of his faction towards the
right. He had become the leading gure of the Chetnik movement after the
fall of Račić and the split with Birčanin at the beginning of the 1930s, the two
former allies turned rivals as the second decade of the interwar period wore
on. Under Pećanac’s presidency, the Chetniks of the 1930s were becoming
an increasingly chauvinistic and right-wing group, critical also of the gov-
ernment, but turning with ever greater ferocity on non-Serbs whom, it was
claimed, were undermining the project of state integration. Thus the Chetnik
association of the late 1930s, as well as continuing to celebrate and com-
memorate the traditions of the wars of liberation and unication, also took
to a kind of roving vigilantism in towns and villages of mixed ethnicity, ‘pro-
tecting’ the Serbian population, but also intimidating non-Serbs, especially
around election time.
This provoked a counter-mobilisation on the part of the Peasant Party, many
of whose members had abandoned Radić’s pacism in the wake of the kill-
ings on the parliamentary oor in 1928. Thus the ‘Peasant Guard’ and the ‘Civic
Guard’ emerged as pro-Peasant Party militia groups whose intention was to
protect members of the party throughout the country. Politically, these militias
stood at the right-wing fringe of the new and enlarged Peasant Party of Vladko
Maček, Radić’s successor as party leader. They also shadowed the structure of
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the Ustashe itself: the militias emulated the organisation of Austro-Hungarian
army units and were indeed stafed by Croat veterans of the imperial army.
When the was formed in 1941, these units were initially linked to the
Ustashe’s armed forces.
Pećanac, for his part, put his Chetnik units at the disposal of Milan Nedić’s
pro-Axis quisling ‘Government of National Salvation’ in 1941, serving as that
regime’s ‘legal Chetniks’ before eventually being dissolved later in the war.
Pećanac had charted an unusual course in the interwar period, from a one-
time candidate of the Democratic Party into a nationalist zealot at the end of
the 1930s. But in Pećanac’s mind violence had always been closely entwined
with politics, from his aliation with , to his violence at election time
in the 1920s, through to his terrorizing of non-Serbs in the second-half of the
1930s. Perhaps the political and ideological components of Pećanac’s pro-
gramme were too desultory and semi-formed to constitute a coherent new vi-
sion of right-wing politics, but nevertheless the admiration for the fascist right
and the emulation of their activities is visible. His support for the Nedić state
in 1941 was in a sense the culmination of this rightwards drift.
Zbor
This last phase of the political life of the Yugoslav kingdom did produce one
avowed fascist party that had roots in the war veteran movement of the 1920s.
This was Zbor, the creation of Serbian politician and public gure Dimitrije
Ljotić, who was himself a veteran of the wars of liberation and unication and
who sought to instil the values of these conicts into a new radical right move-
ment committed to a Serbian-Yugoslav programme. Ljotić had served as a min-
ister (of justice) during the dictatorship of Aleksandar, and had called on the
king to push for an even more radical solution to the kingdom’s political and
national problems (a solution that the king rejected). Ljotić, unlike the ma-
jority of his fellow politically active war veterans and unlike the king himself,
was bewitched by the rising fortunes of Italian Fascism and German National
Socialism, seeing in those movements an example for emulation in Yugoslavia.
Eventually Ljotić would gather into his fold right-wing leaders of various veter-
an and nationalist associations to form a new political party (in 1935) Združena
borbena organizacija rada [Zbor; Yugoslav National Movement] – a fascist or-
ganisation with Ljotić at its head. Zbor merged Ljotić’s supporters form Serbia
with members of Jugoslovenska akcija [Yugoslav Action], a Yugoslav nationalist
group based in Serbia and Croatia, and the Združenje borcev Jugoslavije [;
Association of Yugoslav Combatants], a veterans’ association based in Slovenia
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and comprising mainly former volunteers. Zbor’s ideology was inspired by
Italian Fascism in the strictest sense: corporatist, anti-liberal (in both the eco-
nomic and political sense), anti-communist, and anti-Semitic. Its only local
variations came from the religious philosophies of Nikolai Velimirović, Bishop
of Žiča (an eparchy seated in Kraljevo, Serbia), a gure whom Ljotić believed
ofered a spiritual ‘third-way’ between sterile western materialism and eastern
Bolshevism.
The group did not transform politics in the way Ljotić had hoped, polling
less than one percent of the vote in the elections of 1935 and 1938. Zbor was
a negligible political force until the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia promoted
the movement to a position of relative prominence. Ljotić himself became
an inuential go-between, negotiating with the occupiers and with domestic
Serbian political and military forces, and heading his own militia, the Serbian
Volunteer Corps.
Although Ljotić placed the war and war veterans at the centre of his fascist
party, he was in the event unable to breach existing divisions within the larger
veterans’ groups. The associations from which he recruited were divided about
Ljotić’s fascist revolution, and in most cases only a right-wing fringe broke
away to support him. This fringe included some prominent gures, such as
Stanislav Krakov, who brought with him a small fraction of National Defence’s
membership who felt the existing veteran and nationalist associations were
not going far enough to re-shape Yugoslav society. Yet most war veterans, like
most voters, stayed away from Ljotić’s putative right-wing revolution. Zbor was
out of joint in 1930s Yugoslavia, its leader had drastically miscalculated the lure
of international fascism at home, if not the scepticism towards democratic and
liberal politics.
Conclusion
War veterans shaped the politics of Yugoslavia in the interwar period. Their
associations saw for themselves an important role in the state-building project
On these groups, see Gligorijević, ‘Politički pokreti i grupe s nacionalsocijalističkom ide-
ologijom i njihova fuzija u ljotićevom zboru’, in Istorijski glasnik, 4 (1965).
On Zbor’s ideology, see Jovan Byford ‘Willing Bystanders: Dimitrije Ljotić “Shield Collabo-
ration” and the Destruction of Serbia’s Jews,’ In the Shadow of Hitler: Personalities of the
Right in Central and Eastern Europe ed. Rebecca Haynes and Martyn Rady (London, New
York: I.B. Tauris, 2011).
Gligorijević, ‘Politički pokreti i grupe s nacionalsocijalističkom ideologijom i njihova fuz-
ija u ljotićevom zboru.’
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after 1918, watching over political institutions and their leaders, intervening
against perceived ‘anti-state’ forces, making temporary alliances with certain
political parties and with the king in order to galvanise certain patriotic prin-
ciples and ideas. In some important cases, outlined in this article, associations
and their leaders brought violence directly into the political processes, terror-
izing opponents, even carrying out political assassination. Authoritarian and
right-wing political impulses were undeniably a factor in the veteran ques-
tion after 1918. Political experimentation was brooked. Departures form the
short-lived democratic norm were encouraged and supported. In the context
of international fascism, however, this experimentation had limits. Perhaps
because the war was typically seen by veterans as the culmination of a longer-
term struggle for emancipation rather than a seminal event that harked to a
new kind of politics.
As for fascism itself, in the Yugoslav case the relationship between war
veterans and this political ideology can be summarised with a simple, albeit
asymmetrical, formulation: fascism was not a major part of the war veteran
question in interwar Yugoslavia, but war veterans were central to the identity
and membership of the country’s fascist groups. The two groups typically iden-
tied in the literature as fascist, the Serbian/Yugoslav movement ‘Zbor’ and the
Croat paramilitary-terrorist organisation the ‘Ustashe’, stalked the margins of
national and political life in Yugoslavia in the 1930s, incapable of taking power
on their own meagre political resources. But war veterans were at the heart
of the leadership of both organisations, and the legacy of the war years deci-
sively shaped their political culture and programmes. And both the Ustashe
and Zbor drew from a much deeper well of authoritarian, illiberal, and often
violent political impulses linked to war veterans, their associations, and their
supporters in the interwar period.
