Abstract
This volume brings together 15 essays – mostly by younger Balkan historians educated and employed at universities, research institutes, museums, and military academies in their home countries – which explore the meanings and manifestations of resistance during World War II and situate this phenomenon within both national historiographies and broader trends in historiographical research. The book is organized into three sections.
All five essays in the first section, ‘Conditions and Circumstances of the Armed Resistance’, focus on the Yugoslav lands. All are interesting and informative, but thematically, this is the least coherent part of the book. It contains a pair of solid works of diplomatic history (Aleksandar Životić on Soviet preparations for subversive activity before the German attack on Yugoslavia in April 1941 and the evolving relationship between the USSR and the Yugoslav Partisans; Blaž Torkar on the United States’ dependence on British intelligence and peripheral involvement in the wartime Balkans), an intriguing study of collaboration more than resistance (Nebojša Stambolija on the Serbian State Guard, the police and security force set up in German-occupied Serbia, and its ties to the royalist-nationalist Chetnik movement), an exercise in historical demography (Dragan Cvetković on the overrepresentation of the ethnic Serbs from the Independent State of Croatia in the Yugoslav Partisan movement and among Partisan casualties), and a microhistory (Milana Živanović on the ‘White’ Russian émigrés residing in occupied Serbia, a small minority of whom took part in antifascist resistance).
The second section, ‘Resistance Movements’ contains six essays. Gaj Trifković presents a contrasting study of German and Partisan battlefield strategies in the Independent State of Croatia and shows how hardnosed audacity and operational innovativeness gave the Partisans the winning edge. Aleksandar Simonovski connects the armed resistance in Macedonia (today North Macedonia) to the Macedonian nationalist pursuit of statehood – these two factors determined Macedonia's post-war status as one of the six federal republics of socialist Yugoslavia, in lieu of interwar Macedonia's administrative absorption into Serbia. In one of the volume's finest chapters, Damijan Guštin studies media depictions of violence in German-, Italian-, and Hungarian-occupied Slovenia and the evolving Partisan representation of violence as a tool of, not just retribution, but political legitimacy. Trifković, Simonovski, and Guštin explain the Yugoslav Partisans’ success as both a fighting force and a political movement, due to efforts to transform ragged resistance groups into an official army and a legitimate agent of revolutionary politics in a unified state. Stratos N. Dordanas, Marenglen Kasmi, and Boyan Zhekov round out this section with concise overviews of the tensions and complexities of resistance in Greece, Albania, and Bulgaria, respectively.
The four essays in the final section, ‘Unarmed Resistance’ tackle a key question posited by Olivier Wieviorka in one of the volume's two introductions (the other one is by the three editors): what exactly counts as resistance. Wieviorka opts for a narrower definition of resistance as deliberate political action, rather than just thoughts, intentions, or opinions. In this section, Barnabas Balint and Iemima Ploscariu are especially effective in charting intersections of nonviolent action and clearly political (or politicized) defiance of totalitarian persecution. Their case studies are, respectively, the smuggling of Jews across the Hungarian-Romanian border during the 1944 Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry and the persecution of Christian minority groups in Ion Antonescu's Romania. On the other hand, Nataša Milićević's discussion of nonviolent resistance by the middle class in occupied Serbia and Rory Yeomans's examination of nonviolent resistance in Croatian cities (which both predated and paralleled the violent resistance in the countryside) present a fascinating array of behaviours under enormous social and political pressure, but sometimes they paint with too broad a brush without clearly defining ‘resistance’.
While the volume's title and ample contributions promise to give insight into all of Southeastern Europe, a full two-thirds of the essays focus on the Yugoslav lands. This is, at least, a testament to the ongoing relevance of the World War II legacy in the countries of former Yugoslavia and the corresponding attraction for researchers. In light of ongoing manipulation of the historical record for political ends, one would like to see clearer engagement by both editors and contributors with such issues as the reinvention in present-day Serbia of the Chetniks as a straightforward resistance movement, on a par with and morally perhaps even superior to the Partisans, in lieu of the Chetniks’ actual, more damning track record. Životić and Torkar's bird's-eye-view perspectives show that the Allies’ choice of which Yugoslav movement to support – the question of who gets to call themselves the resistance – was driven by pragmatism, necessity, (un)availability of reliable information, and the fortunes of war, as much as ideology. Stambolija's chapter stands out in denying the Chetniks an easy claim to resistance status and instead situates them in the ever-shifting dynamics of collaboration and accommodation. Milićević treats Chetnik sympathies as an unambiguous sign of resistance to German domination, and the volume's editors merely touch on this issue in passing and equivocally. For many of these contributors, working in the politically charged arenas of post-socialist national academia can necessitate treading lightly when discussing such topics, yet the politically safer choice risks transmitting a flawed impression of, not just Balkan histories, but the quality of Balkan scholarship to a global audience. Despite these reservations, the essays contained in this volume offer up invaluable perspectives and case studies for any serious student of the region and the core theme.