Serbia: power in exchange for territory

The twentieth anniversary of the death of Josip Broz Tito (he died on May 4, 1980) was not celebrated in Belgrade: Tito was the president of another Yugoslavia - one that, after a decade of wars and ethnic cleansing, broke up into five states.

But it's not only that. The logic of Tito, who built a power pyramid in a multinational country on the principle of “a national republic in exchange for the delegation of power to the center,” contradicts the idea of ​​“Greater Serbia.” It was under this slogan that the President of current Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, began to gather all the Serbs into one state, but led the country to defeats, first in the Bosnian (1992-1995) and then in the Kosovo war.


Autumn 1996: students demonstrate every day, demanding that Milosevic recognize the victory of the opposition in the municipal elections. (Photo: AP )

The slogan of “Greater Serbia,” strictly speaking, belongs not to Milosevic, but to the Serbian Academy of Sciences, which in 1986 issued a memorandum, the meaning of which was that Tito’s SFRY was built on “Serbian bones”; out of ten Serbs, four live outside the “ motherland,” and the root of the evil lies in the unfair national-territorial division. Milosevic, who had recently moved from the presidency of the country's largest bank to the chairman of the Belgrade party committee, was the first to recognize in the nostalgia of intellectuals for past greatness an idea capable of capturing the masses.

The political premiere of the “Great Serbian idea” took place in 1987 in the same place where its decline is now taking place - in Kosovo. Albanians already made up 90 percent of the region's population, tension grew, and Milosevic, who had just been elected general secretary of the Communist Party, promised the Serbian minority that “no one would offend them again.” Two years later, a patriotic wave carried him to the presidency of Serbia. In 1991, the Tito federation collapsed, and in 1992, the writer Dobrica Cosic, the ideological inspirer of the Belgrade academics, became the president of the new Yugoslavia (Serbia plus Montenegro). “Nationalism is the highest stage of communism,” the Polish publicist Adam Michnik formulated in those years. No one, however, imagined that this stage would last so long in Yugoslavia.

The Milosevic regime (now the president of Yugoslavia) really doesn’t take anything. During the 11 years of his presidency, he survived the protracted war in Bosnia and the Peace of Dayton, which divided the Bosnian and Yugoslav Serbs, the economic blockade and NATO bombing, the flow of Serbian refugees that swept the new Yugoslavia, and the mass emigration of young people who did not want to fight for “Greater Serbia.” It’s a paradox, but at 58 years old, Milosevic is the “oldest” political leader in Europe and, moreover, the only representative of the communist elite to remain in power. This is no longer the “highest stage of communism” (now, by the way, he is a socialist), not a fight for “Greater Serbia” (due to disagreements with Milosevic, the “academic patriot” Cosic was long ago removed from the post of President of the Federal Yugoslavia and, at the age of 79, entered opposition student organization "Otpor"). A familiar Serbian journalist defined this man’s political credo as follows: “If in order to stay in power one had to become a Freemason or join NATO, he would immediately become the Grand Master of the country’s first lodge or treat Solana to his favorite Cohibas cigars.”

Hostage to this man, who promised to glorify Serbia, but as a result he bled it dry, is not only a country where everyone is infected with nationalism, including the opposition. Peace in the Balkans also depends on it. But the most unpleasant thing is that his regime was and remains an extremely seductive model for those countries of post-communist Europe, where taking power into your own hands means subjugating the entire political space, where nostalgia for state greatness reigns, and oppositionists are presented as accomplices of foreign powers. Milosevic believes that in the east of the continent he may still have stronger allies than the Lukashenko regime: that is why he is endlessly testing the strength of Moscow’s solidarity with the Western camp. What if there are followers?