By rights it should be Serbia, not Ukraine, that is called Malorossiya, or Little Russia. Serbia, like Ukraine, uses the Cyrillic alphabet and adheres to its Orthodox Christian faith, but the Serbs seem to have a lot more in common with the Russians. Not only is the Serbian flag an inversion of the Russian tricolor, but the country’s national emblem is a kind of two-headed eagle.
Historically, Serbia and Russia had common foes — notably the Turks and Austrians, as well as Catholicism in general. Serbs probably have the most positive opinion of Russia anywhere. A poll last year found that 40 percent consider it Serbia’s best friend and 72 percent see Russia’s influence on Serbia as positive.
During the Yugoslav wars, the sympathy of Russian nationalists was squarely on the Serb side. Writer Eduard Limonov used to hang out with Serbian militia outside Sarajevo, taking potshots into the besieged Bosnian city.
Serb nationalists returned the favor by taking part in the Russian annexation of Crimea and volunteering to fight in eastern Ukraine.
Russian nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin — allegedly a Putin advisor — considers Serbs to be Russia’s closest ally in a newly multipolar (anti-Western) world.
Russia’s interest in Serbia stems from its historic self-proclaimed role as a leader of the Slavic and Orthodox Christian nations. Although pan-Slavism is no longer a mainstream ideological movement in modern Russia, it is at the root of Russian nationalist ideology that insists on an exclusive path and special role for Russia. Dugin is a pan-Slavist just below the surface. Deep down all Slavs are brothers — as long as they unconditionally accept Russia as the Big Brother in the family.
This is the problem, however. Anti-Russian sentiment has always been strong among Poles who spent two centuries under the Russian boot. Bulgaria fought against it in two World Wars while Croatia and Slovenia couldn’t care less for Russia. Czechs and Slovaks used to be more sympathetic to Russia when they were part of Austria-Hungary but changed their views during the Soviet era.
In any case, all of those countries are now part of the European Union and NATO, and well out of the pan-Slavic pipe dreams.
Ukraine and Belarus have been part of the Russian orbit for centuries and have economic and cultural ties to Russia. But Putin’s war against Ukraine and his propaganda’s assault on the Ukrainian people have fundamentally altered the equation in Ukraine and in Belarus too, since the ongoing government crackdown, warm feelings toward Russia have been replaced by something else entirely.
This leaves Serbia as the only adherent to the Russian ideal.
The problem is that far from being interested in promoting Russian expansionist ambitions, Serbia always had ambitions of its own — just as Little Russia would be expected to have.
Serbia became an independent state in the first half of the 19th century. However, hundreds of thousands of Serbs still inhabited territories outside Serbia, in a typical Balkan fashion mixing with dozens of other ethnic groups. By the start of the 20th century, a strong nationalist movement emerged whose goal was not only to liberate those Serbs but to unify all Southern Slavs in Greater Serbia. In the nationalists’ view, all Balkan Slavs were one nation—Serbs of course—artificially divided by various invaders.
Their model was Italy, where regions with diverse historical experiences but (mostly) the same language were unified under the aegis of the Piedmontese monarchy.
The secret society formed by nationalist army officers and known as the Black Hand had a motto: Unification or Death. Their publication was called Pijemont, paying homage to their Risorgimento inspiration. The society was no secret from the government in Belgrade which broadly shared its aspirations and didn’t seem to mind its terrorist tactics.
Serbia, along with its Balkan allies, defeated the Ottomans and fought Bulgaria in the two bloody Balkan Wars in 1912-13, as a result of which it enlarged its territory by some 80%. Most of the Slavs living under the Turks were brought into the Kingdom of Serbia. Now only Austria-Hungary remained an obstacle to the unification of Southern Slavs.
Irish historian Sean McMeekin in his Russian Origins of World War I traces the connections between Dragutin Dimitrijevic, the head of the Serb intelligence before the war and one of the founders of Black Hand, and his Russian colleagues. Essentially, both sides were using each other to advance their expansionist goals. Serbs were hoping that St.Petersburg will keep Vienna at bay while they supported anti-Austrian terrorism in Bosnia while Russia had historic designs on the Straits which it was hoping to win by maintaining a state of high tensions in the Balkans.
McMeekin further maintains that the plot to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo was hatched by Dimitrijevic with the knowledge and at least some encouragement from Russia. The target had not been chosen at random. The Archduke was not just the heir of the Austrian throne occupied by the elderly Franz Joseph I. He had the idea of pacifying the restive Slavic populations of the Dual Monarchy by adding a third Slavic component on the model of the 1867 Compromise which reconciled Hungarians to being part of the Empire after the abortive rebellion in 1848.
Naturally, if that policy were successful it would have put paid to Serbian aspirations.
Russian poet Vladislav Khodasevich wrote an ominous symbolist poem “The Monkey” about the start of the war, describing it as a visit by a “skinny and black vagabond Serbian” (a Russian stand-in for a Roma at the time) with a trained monkey.
World War I was a disaster of historic proportions for Russia; a century later, its consequences continue to inflict damage upon the country and its people and may end up wiping it off the map. Serbia suffered four years of Austrian occupation and more than one million casualties, making it the worst victim of the war. Yet in the end, it succeeded in creating a unified South Slavic state.
Except it didn’t work out that way. The Croats in particular had no interest in living under Serb domination. To quell various nationalisms, King Alexander I, an early supporter of the Balck Hand cause, declared a dictatorship and created a more centralized Yugoslavia. However, he only succeeded in further antagonizing the non-Serbs. When the Axis invaded and defeated Yugoslavia, Germans, Croats and Hungarians took it out on Serbs, killing and displacing several hundred thousand Serb civilians.
After the war, Josip Broz Tito adopted a more federalist approach, but it also failed. Many Serbs believed that Tito, a Croat, was clipping their wings. After his death, an attempt by Slobodan Milošević to reassert Serb power resulted in the breakup of Yugoslavia and a series of bloody wars. Serbia has lost even its closest ally, Montenegro, and is fighting a losing battle to keep Kosovo as its autonomous region. It is a small landlocked nation that is among the poorest in Europe. Worse, it is falling behind its more successful neighbors.
Serbia is at a crossroads. It has applied to join the EU, but there are also strong elements within the country who espouse right-wing nationalism and want to throw the country’s lot with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Right-wing nationalism is on the rise everywhere. This is what Russia is betting on — especially as the United States, the champion of democratic values around the world, is sliding down the same slippery slope. It may well turn out the way Putin hopes and history will once again repeat itself — but we know how this story ends. The tragic history of Serbia, a victim of 20th-century nationalism, stands as a cautionary tale.
