The History of Yugoslavia - Part 1
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Did you clap? I did clap. Did we clap so perfectly in time that we didn't hear each other? I think we might have. That's so weird. That's so beautiful. Good, okay. Hi Janina. Hi Emma. Hi Emma.

How you doing? I'm alright, how are you doing? I'm amazed that we have finally got clapping at the beginning so that we can sync our tracks to such perfect synchronicity that it sounds like silence. It's beautiful. That is the real sound of clapping is silence. It's just silence. All claps cancelling out all other claps.

Yeah, everybody clapping in synchronicity. A fun thing about the Romans that nobody knows, but I feel like more people should know, is that they had semi-professional clappers who would clap in rhythms and they were called the bees and the hummers. And in the theatre, they would clap in specific rhythms. So they were like the song leaders, but to lead...

Or was that part of the soundtrack of the theatre? It's unclear whether they led the applause or whether they were just like doing applause. But there's the occasional mention of them and that they were in theatre and they had their own, like each group would have their own specific rhythm that they clapped in. That's incredible. Now I want to know, like, okay, okay.

Each group had its different rhythm. Was that like to create an overarching sort of percussive choral sensation or was it to make it sound like it wasn't planned and rhythmic? No, nobody knows. Great, great.

Oh, that's got to be my new favourite historical mystery. Uh-huh. We just know that there were specific claps, but we don't really know whether they were done as part of the theatre production or if they were just an added bonus. Yeah, it's

Yeah, it's like when you do a play in high school drama and it's meant to be funny and you can only hear your drama teacher's extremely loud fake laugh to try and get the audience to laugh properly. It's really, it's a nice feeling. It's really great. I appreciate that. Yeah, maybe it's like that, Mike, just so that somebody is applauding for the play. You've made it sad now. Thank you. Sorry, I'm sorry. No, we're talking about, we're talking about

Sadder things, but... We're talking about even sadder things. Yeah. Yes, because our history is sexy and we don't just get together to tell each other random stuff. We answer people's questions. And this week we are answering a question from two people, from Mimi Finn and...

Carolina Gomez-Morino. And they have both asked, what is the history of Yugoslavia? It was an empire all along, as we started anyway. A lot of it was the empire all along. Yeah, well, like several of them. Many of them.

at least three empires just throwing their weight around. And a little bit of, God damn. Like, this is a lot. But all of the books that you read, the problem, I think, with a lot of this history is all of the books that you read are written from the point of knowing that Yugoslavia broke up horribly. Yeah. And so a lot of the books, I say a lot of books, all of the books that I read kind of really focus on the things that...

really led to the horribly breaking up and there's very little of like how it stayed together for so long. Yeah. So I think that the thing it seems good to remember is it does cling on very successfully and is repeatedly refounded because there is a desire for Yugoslavia to exist among basically, amongst at least a lot of people in the Balkans. It's not just people who hate each other. Yeah. This is I think the thing that it

It all comes down to, in history in general, in nationhood in general, and how we operate as people en masse in general comes down to is that, like,

We're all complicated. Our identities are all very complicated. We have a whole lot influencing who we are and it's very difficult to reconcile all those things, but we all feel very strongly about them. And the ways in which we feel united from and divided from other people are very powerful, but also kind of arbitrary and trying to put borders around all of those identities and

It seems like it's this simple, clear-cut, done thing because we take it for granted now because the countries we know, I mean, they're not the countries we've always known because obviously Yugoslavia existed until well into our lifetimes. But it feels static and like it's supposed to be the way that it is. But it is all static.

something that someone made up at some point because there was enough desire for it or in spite of the fact that people didn't want it. There's no real rule. There is no real rule. There is a lot of making up as you go along, essentially. And I think the thing that I hadn't really thought about so much before, before reading about Yugoslavia, is how much the need for clear definitions around nations was driven by the increase in global trade and global influence.

Yes, and global wars. Yes, but even without that, to take a place on the world stage is easier to do if you are a more clearly defined country and if you are a bigger, more powerful country. Yes, yes. And a thing that we've talked about before, right, many years ago when we started doing this, is that nation states started to exist so that war...

and treaties would last after the death of the king which it didn't do before Napoleon really yeah it was all over the map before yes but we will start at the very beginning because I suspect that it is very possible that people do not know actually where Yugoslavia was or what it included or what it really where it was even

Yeah, I didn't even realise until reading that the hot doctor on ER was a Yugoslavian refugee from the Croatian War of Independence. Yes.

Yes. They pop up everywhere. Pop up everywhere? Yeah. So Yugoslavia is basically the big bit of land between the Adriatic Sea and the Danube. And the country that was Yugoslavia included what is now eight and two thirds of a country. Wow.

in that Kosovo is a country that is recognized by about three quarters of the UN member states as a independent and like as a country, basically, which is a whole complicated thing in and of itself. But it's recognized by most people as a country, but not entirely, including North Macedonia, who it

unilaterally seceded from. So the other countries which are definitely recognised are Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia. So it is a very large area

It is a big chunk of land, basically from Europe to Turkey is what it takes in above Greece and butting up to Hungary and Ukraine. It's also, just because I love to mention it, very Roman. Never is remembered as a very Roman place, but profoundly Romanized, invaded repeatedly,

colonized heartily and absolutely covered in Roman stuff. So if you like to see Roman things, then they're delightful places to go. But that is the area that we are talking about. In that area, there are a lot of different ethnicities. The Romans were there hanging out and it has a whole history leading up to

the late 19th, early 20th century, when the idea that the people of this area are not all separate ethnicities, separate races, but are in fact a kind of series of peoples that are similar enough to be the same people called the South Slavs. Yeah, they have like similar enough languages and similar enough cultural histories and

They've been around the same-ish areas for long enough. Exactly. And kind of have enough in common that they start, that there is an intellectual and political movement in the 18th century to, to,

to unify basically and to see each other as cousins and brothers not as enemies or even just kind of foreigners from one another and in part this emerges because the Balkans what becomes Yugoslavia is trapped is a kind of meeting point between two empires and on the one side you have the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled by the Habsburgs our friends the Habsburgs and

And the other side is ruled by the Ottoman Empire. So, Croatia and Slovenia side is Austro-Hungarian. And Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro are Ottoman. And

neither side really wants to be part of an empire and they certainly don't want to be the meeting point of an empire because that's never the funnest place to be. It also means there's like a huge amount of religious diversity. There's Catholicism, there's Orthodoxy, there's Islam all around and everyone is pretty chill about it.

about that like there's no mostly for the most part because there is there is a lot there isn't religious segmentation there's religious diversity no yeah when they're in the separate empires they're all pretty chill about the situation because what you have is in the Ottoman side so what is now kind of Serbia and the Serbian regions are strongly orthodox this is actually a split that happens in late antiquity so when there is the great schism

over when we count Easter which is what the kind of original schism is about and all Greek Orthodoxy and Catholic churches separate they ought

Ottoman side basically is Greek Orthodox and then the Austro-Hungarian side, so Croatia and Slovenia are Catholic and strongly Catholic. And then there also is a fairly significant population of Muslims who have converted over the generations because of the Ottoman presence. And they're all over the place, but there's a kind of fair concentration in Bosnia-Herzegovina. So there is this kind of religious diversity

But there is less of a problem about it, but mostly because people are fighting the empires. Particularly, they are fighting the Ottomans. And it is getting rid of the enemies

that drives the development of nationalism, of both Croat nationalism, Slovenian nationalism and Serbian nationalism. And the idea that they exist outside of empire, that they are being oppressed by empire and that they can and should remove themselves from empire, that they have the right to what kind of slightly later becomes

self-determination in the words of Woodrow Wilson, that they have the right to kind of determine themselves as a nation. Yeah. And in order to do this, they have to develop what becomes nationality or that is outside of ethnicity. And it's the exact same thing that happens in Germany at the exact same time. So like when the Brothers Grimm are going around Germany, collecting up all of those stories and collecting

like they're developing this idea of a German nation and a German-ness that can

make Prussians and Bavarians the same people rather than separate peoples, which is what they have been for hundreds of years. It is the same process of creating a joint culture that is ancient and that connects all of them. And it kind of like knowing what we know happens, it

sounds kind of like deranged behavior for the idea that there is some kind of intelligentsia and political class in Serbia and Croatia and Slovenia and Bosnia going like, we're all brothers and our languages are similar enough and we are close enough that we could be kind of like, they have this tripartite ideology is developed that says that

like as the Trinity is three in one. So the Croats, Serbians and Slovenes are three tribes of the same or three parts of the same whole. And it sounds kind of mad, but it is the exact same process that is happening in Italy as in the 19th century as Italy is creating Italian-ness that says that Sicilians and Slovenes

People in Ravenna are the same people and Germany is creating German-ness and Britain is creating British-ness. That says that Scottish people and people in Sussex are of the same blood. And it is, you know, it is a sense of creating nation-ness that transcends the fact that there are slight cultural differences. And it is...

And it's very popular for a long time. And it drives the, I would say, first set, the first set for this set of talking about it.

kind of horrific wars that occur in the Balkans, which are called the Balkan Wars and are 1912 to 1913 and are Greece, Serbia, Macedonia and Bulgaria kind of ganging up together or coming together and driving the Ottoman Empire out of

and freeing themselves from the Ottoman Empire. They are horrific wars. They are characterized by something that will be a theme of war.

Well, it's a theme of the 20th century, really, but it's certainly a theme of Yugoslavian history, and that is ethnic cleansing. I think the theme continues into the 21st century. It does. But I really feel like if you were going to choose a, you know, technology would be one theme for the 20th century and ethnic cleansing would be another. It was really something that people shouldn't have been into as much as they were.

Marie-Jeanine Kalich, whose book I read, called it The Violent Politics of Homogenization. And that is something that really does come to characterize this area of the world, this kind of simultaneous desire to unify and to homogenize. And very often that homogenization involved people

either massacring or just forcibly removing people that don't have the exact same ethnic characteristics as you. In these wars in 1912 and 1913, they tended to focus on Muslims and tended to be about driving out what was considered to be Ottoman influence. But virtually everybody massacred everybody else. There was

In particular, Serbia...

attempted to Serbanize everybody. This is another thing that is going to come up a lot, which is nobody seems to learn that this is stupid, but the desire to be like, okay, nobody is allowed to use any other alphabet but our alphabet. Nobody is allowed to have any surname that isn't a Serbian surname. Nobody is allowed to be a different religion to our religion. Like, nobody...

to just completely homogenize everything from the ground up and from the name up. And this is the kind of, it's not the first time it happens, but this is the first time it happens in the 20th century in the area. And it...

is massively successful for Serbia particularly and they're able to really make a mark on the global stage but at the same time it introduces the idea of homogenizing the land and ridding yourselves of people who do not adhere to some kind of ethnic purity that really takes off later on

In a way that is unpleasant, but it is a really, it's a nasty war and it ends in 1913, but it does not really end the question of war.

either empire in the Balkans or what to do about the Balkans. That question is still ongoing when a man called Gavrilo Príncep, who is a Bosnian Serb, is eating a sandwich after a failed assassination attempt and then turns that into a successful assassination attempt and kills Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the 28th of June 1914. Which we have, of course, talked about before.

We have. A long, long time ago. Yes. Gavrilo is a member of a group called Young Bosnia. There are approximately, I would say, one billion different groups and societies that occur in Yugoslavia during the 20th century. Because when you've got an opinion, you need a society for it. I think that everybody felt like it was good to have a badge. Yeah.

Or maybe a secret handshake. Yeah. And everybody is furious in a way that really feels very kind of like pre-21st century. Like, you don't really get that kind of like revolutionary fury anymore. No, I wish we did. In Europe, anyway. But it was... Young Bosnia was a...

a group of men mostly who wanted freedom from Austrian rule. They wanted out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and they did want the unification of the South Slavs into their own nation and thought that assassinating Franz Ferdinand, who is obviously Austro-Hungarian, would help them out. What it did instead was start World War I. LAUGHTER

Which on the one hand did help them create a unified South Slavic. I mean, they did come out the other side with no Ottoman Empire and no Austro-Hungarian Empire.

They came out on the other side with no Austro-Hungarian Empire at all. Completely gone. No Ottoman Empire at all. Gone. Absolutely obliterated. They do have, it's not quite called Yugoslavia yet, but they do have a unified South Slavic nation that is recognised on the global stage. What they also have is a loss of 53% of the male population. Wow.

1.2 million Serbs alone dead. A genuine attempt to wipe Serbia and all Serbs off of the map in a total war with the Austrians attempting to basically wipe out everybody in the kind of horrific destruction and mass terror that we already talk about in World War I. We're really into those trenches. Really like those trenches. And there were also... I mean, we don't really... We talk about the Western Front at all.

We talk about the eastern front all the time and we ignore it. We completely ignore the eastern front probably because this kind of stuff was happening. A lot of concentration camps. Bulgaria invaded Serbia and took revenge for everything that had happened during the Balkan wars and attempted to Bulgarize everybody by basically doing the exact same things that Serbia had done to them. Lots of massacres and forced labors and concentration camps and the like.

It basically traumatized every single person and in particular made Serbia and Serbs into kind of martyrs for the cause of South Slavic unification or the South Slavs in general. But it was horrendous. If you've ever read Stefan Zweig's

memoir, The World of Yesterday. He, as a reporter, goes to the Eastern Front and is so actively traumatized by it that he actually couldn't handle the basically anything ever again. And he only witnessed it for about two weeks. It was truly a list of unfathomable atrocities in literally every area. And we never talk about it.

We're all just like trenches That always seems like a fine war Anyway it was not a fine war it was a real bad one It was really really bad and it shouldn't have happened And we've talked about that before too

Yes. During that war though, because of the Balkan Wars that ended in 1913 with what's called the Corfu Agreement, a bunch of Slovene and Croat and Serbian intellectuals and politicians were kind of hanging around in London. And they spent pretty much the entirety of the war bothering the British and Americans by consistently bringing up Yugoslavia.

And continually kind of turning up in meetings. There's only about 20 of them. They're led by a guy called Ante Trumbic, who's a Croat. And they turn up constantly and they're just holding meetings and like sending people memos and refuse to let anybody forget about the issue, which is good for them. And what they eventually get is a promise that when the war ends, there will be, they can have their own country

nation essentially and they're given a kind of very general promise in 1917 that there will be a nation of Croats, Slovenes, Bosnias and Serbs that can be led by the Serbian existing Serbian monarchy and

And that's basically all that is agreed, really. And so when the war does end and all of the kind of great powers are gathering around and chopping stuff up and handing bits of land to everybody willy nilly.

As they did, they basically said, OK, they drew a line around the whole area and said, this is the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which is its official name. And it was officially recognized as a state in February 1919. It was declared a state on the 1st of December 1918.

There was a kind of referendum in all of the various regions, which mostly passed. In some places it was a close run thing. In some places it did not really pass. But

But don't worry about it. There was enough of a buy-in to the situation that they went ahead with it. And most people, because this is the bit that you love that I love less, this is a very agricultural peasant based. Look, I cannot tell you that I understood this whole thing with perfect clarity. I just found it very interesting.

Reading about like this different agricultural lifestyle where you have families who were just the sons never left home so they just grow and grow as the sons get married and have children and grandchildren and their daughters go off and get married somewhere else and then you have this crucial point when the family living in your house gets to somewhere between 20 and 40 people and all of a sudden you're like no we have to break this up it's too much. I

I find that very interesting. Too many people. And these little regions where there was no real ownership, there's no real money and people are just muddling on. Like we don't actually need these things. We don't need to make things so complicated. It's just people have what they need from each other. And there's extreme poverty in these places as well. But there are pockets of like trundling along cooperative farming places.

Seems chill-less. There is, and that is going to become a theme of later politics, which is that people really do idealise this time. But it is basically a very, very agricultural place. There is something like...

at least a 50% illiteracy rate. There is very little in the way of education, very little in the way of industrialization. Almost the entire economy is based on exports of food, essentially. Exports of agricultural products. And it is also, yeah, there's not a lot of big roads where people can move around. So people do live in these kind of very small communities. And

But what there are is some fairly big and growing cities. So Belgrade, Sarajevo, Ljubljana in particular are cities that I think at least Belgrade and Sarajevo are ones that we know the names of because

because of the 90s. But they are big ancient cities and they are cities that are famous for culture and art and political thinking and none of which really got mentioned in the books. But they are like, you know, decent cities. Beautiful, medieval, lovely cities. I don't know why I said decent. They're delightful. But yes, so...

1919, officially, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes becomes a country. That must have been deliberately a temporary name, right? They can't have expected that to last. It really does not roll off the tongue. It does not at all roll off the tongue. And it's unclear what they thought was going to, how people were going to refer to it. But that was the official name. It is a constitutionally monarchy country.

and not a constitutional monarchy. It's a monarchy by the king who has a lot of power. He is king, technically, King Peter I of the Serbian Karadjordjevic dynasty. But Peter is in his 70s and he's already lived through the Balkan Wars and the Russian Revolution and World War I and he's quite tired and he doesn't really want to. So he's just like, I declare my son regent immediately. That is fair. And taps out.

of the whole thing. I relate. And so Alexander I is the king of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. And he is a person who both has a genuine desire to bring all three of the founder nations together. He has little to no interest in anybody else. So all of the like... There's like something like...

20 or 25 different ethnic minorities living in what becomes Yugoslavia at the time. There's no kind of great majority in any way. There's no particular religious majority either. There is like 46% are

Serbian, Macedonian and Montenegrin Orthodox and then 40% are Catholic and then about 12% Muslim. And so there's like, but there's a lot of people but he is really like

come on guys, Slovenes, Croats and Serbians, we can do this together. I believe in us. And the way that I'm going to do it is just by kind of shouting it really loudly and doing what I want to do. And he does his best, which is great.

So he has three children and he gives one of them a Serbian name, one of them a Croatian name and one of them a Slovenian name. Oh, that's actually really nice. Peter, Tomislav and Andre. It is. He really tries to kind of invent and force this idea of unity and that they are three tribes of the same people. And it goes a bit wrong later. Yeah.

He really does seem to believe it. He is also, however, a mad authoritarian. Sure. Who has little to no patience for people talking about things. Yeah.

He kind of holds his tongue, although he maintains a huge amount of power in the constitution. But it takes them years to hash out a constitution. They don't get a constitution done until 1921. And the main argument during that time is, is this going to be a centralized government?

country like Britain is at the time or like France where there is one government in the middle and

and that they are in charge of everything and then you just have kind of councils or is this going to be a federalized country like blue sky or mastodon exactly is this going to be somewhere where the member states can have um like germany or like america basically where there will be a certain amount of autonomy

and then there will be a kind of federal government in the center overseeing all of them. And Alexander basically scuppers arguments from the start by sort of declaring unilaterally really early on that he wants everybody, like basically telling the foreign press that they're going to be centralized, which nobody particularly likes. But that is nonetheless what he does. And so that's,

that kind of skews the arguments that everybody is having. But...

there is a very strong desire from some people to have a federal, I keep wanting to say federal republic, it's not a federal republic, they want a federal monarchy basically that is a nation that is federalised and who see centrism as basically is definitely going to end up with one ethnicity or the other taking supremacy and they don't trust each other because they've just been through these wars and they've all ethnically cleansed each other. And

Living somewhere where there have been kind of civil war based violence, it lives in you. And when these are people who have done it to each other and then they are looking at the family members and friends and so very often the actual people who have injured one another like and they are like, you killed my grandmother or you killed...

forced my cousins to leave their house. And it's very personal. Yeah. And they are having this conversation. So one side very much sees centralism as a genuine kind of existential threat. And the other side sees federalism as either kind of westernized nonsense or a Habsburg anachronism that is way too much like the empire that they just left. Sure. And so there's no... It's a tough...

kind of process that eventually is kind of decided because the main federalist party just boycotts the vote. And in boycotting the vote, allow centralism to get through. Which is fine. And that party is the Croatian Radical Peasant Party, led by a guy called Stepjan Radic, who is...

like from 1919 is like the thorn in the side of Alexander I. Yeah.

And he is repeatedly arrested, put into prison. He is fascinating. He is a Croatian nationalist who fundamentally opposes centralism, but very much wants there to be a South Slavic nation, just not this one. He considers this one to be illegitimate. He wants federalized states...

but specifically what he wants is a Croatian peasant state. He is a peasant, agrarian, utopian thinker where he has this ideology that is based on village life and peasant democracy where everybody lives an agrarian life in small communities and kind of does direct democracy with themselves. And he...

is very anti-violent and insistently claims that he wants a Balkan peasant federation and he loves peasants and peasant life. He becomes gradually more radical as time goes on. And by radical, I mean he becomes quite racist. Because he is a Croat and he begins to see Serbs as his kind of

on a level that becomes racialized. And he begins to consider Serbs to be inferior and non-Westernized in a way that he considers to be, you know, just kind of fundamentally inferior, which is not great. But he does have this kind of deeply, kind of quite unique desire to be not like we should progress the country and we can be great, but to be like, no, we don't need to learn to read. Yeah.

We're going to live in little villages and everything's going to be great. It is one of those things where like we haven't figured out yet. And like, obviously the hope is one day that we do. We haven't figured out how to combine the good parts of urbanization and globalization with the good parts of old timey agrarian village based. There is a lot we have lost here.

and the move into a city-based economy and society. Like, we don't have faith in lines of production anymore. We don't know where our things are coming from and that leads to, obviously, damage to the country. We aren't taught basic, like, human interactive things, like how to have a conversation in a marriage without...

about complicated things like money because we used to do those in small communities. Like I think about this a lot in terms of like the church being a place that fills some of these gaps still if you belong to one. Obviously that also has its own harms and costs. But we just haven't in secular modern society, we haven't managed to replace all of that little small life stuff yet. The community stuff. The community stuff.

little pockets of it like the queer community has because they've had to but like yeah I find it interesting it's irrelevant but interesting let's carry on no it's not irrelevant because there is like you know and I think that to a degree that Radish would agree with you that community aspect and that people who you know looking after the

interests of small communities is important yeah but it also drives thinking like i remember um friend of the pod ala riz bridger doing an essay about how the brexit vote was driven by a desire for enid blighton childhoods and it was always a false idea and like that's the danger when you start looking at this idealized picture of a certain type of life and you view everyone else as someone who is keeping you from it that's

then that obviously ends in harm and ends in danger and violence. And there are valuable things in those ideals that we also don't want to dismiss entirely. Yeah. And this is the thing is knowing that they never existed as an ideal. They always existed as a compromise. And there is as much kind of

suffocating about some equal communities as there is liberating about them but yes but that is what Radich wanted and he was enormously successful in driving the Croatian

or not even independence, just nationalist. There are various levels of nationalism. There's nationalists that wants to be completely separate and have their own country. And there is nationalists that wants to be kind of, I don't want to say separate but equal, but kind of like hanging out at the same table, but maybe with their own serving spoons. Yeah.

But he claims to have a desire for a federation at the same table, but owns Boone. And he manages to basically keep the question on the table after the vote, after technically the constitution has passed, after they've got kind of a proportional representation system that not everybody really understands because it seems to be quite complicated. Mm-hmm.

And they made one massive cock up when they were deciding the electoral constituencies. The only lists that they had, the kind of only censuses that they had were pre-war ones. And so they were based on pre-war population figures, which did not take into account the fact that Serbia had lost 53% of its male population. And as a result, their citizens,

Serbs ended up with outsized voting power because each one of them ended up with kind of the vote of about five people. And this kind of made people furious, especially as the king was also Serbian and had just transplanted a Serbian monarchy into the new kingdom. So by the mid 1920s,

of Croat parties were boycotting parliament Serbs were fed up with the situation and had started talking about this idea of greater Serbia which is an idea of basically spreading Serbian power to how it was in the middle ages in medieval period when Serbia was a powerful kingdom and

They had also managed to take over of the 656 ministerial jobs, 452 of them were taken by ethnic Serbs, which didn't make anybody else very happy. And then they started sort of losing their minds a little bit because they did the thing that kind of authoritarians always do where they just start kind of outlawing stuff. Sure. And it

If you make it illegal and say that it is treason, then maybe people will stop doing it. They outlawed communism immediately. And if you know anything about the history of Yugoslavia, you know that didn't work. But communism is very popular. So 1917 is the Russian Revolution. They are practically...

Yugoslavia borders Austria and so there is a lot of movement backwards and forwards to Vienna and there is a lot of movement backwards and forwards with Russia and St. Petersburg and so there is a hefty communist intelligentsia and a strong communist movement which parliament decides to just keep repeatedly banning and put people in prison for. So they are constantly just arresting people and throwing them in prison which means

never works as a way to tamp down on anything it's just a very bad plan they released something called the law of the defense of the the law for the defense of the state which one of the books I read described as the ravings of a frustrated village constable I don't remember

Because it's like communism is illegal and also prostitution is treason. Great. Yeah, it's nice to let people know that you've really lost your mind. And this is 1921. They've literally just passed the constitution and they're already wobbling. Yeah. It basically nothing...

effective happens for the whole of the 1920s because they are the they have the problem that a lot of proportional representation governments have whereby there's a lot of parties and they nobody can get any kind of majority for anything there's enough people that want a bit of everything that nobody has any overall majority for anything at all the thing about proportional representation is that obviously it's a better it's a democratically better system because

because more people have their voices represented in parliament. But you do need to learn how to actually cooperate and compromise. Otherwise it doesn't function. And that is a different way of governing than people are used to. And it takes time to adapt.

It does. And this is them taking time to do it up. However, because they're all deeply traumatized by war, they spend a lot of time kind of taking everything that everybody says very, very badly. And you end up with two people in government. One is Radic and one is called Rasic, which is confusing to read if you're trying to read quickly. Yeah.

Radic is Stepjan Radic, who is the Croatian agrarian utopian guy. He is leading all kinds of

protests constantly he is basically constantly a thorn in everybody's side the other guy is a Montenegrin politician called Rasic they have repeated arguments in parliament which does not culminate in but like the penultimate episode is that Rasic forces Radic to undergo a medical assessment to ensure that he is in his right mind in parliament and

And when that is kind of over, they get into a physical fight that ends with Rasit shooting Radich and four other people. That might have been taking things a bit too far.

Yes. As a result, Stepjan Radic becomes immediately a martyr to Croat nationalism. And a state of emergency is immediately called, which lasts for six months. There is a national emergency while centralists and federalists argue about what to do, where basically the federalists refuse to go to parliament unless necessary.

they can be promised that they can talk about federalizing and the nationalists who are also called the radicals just refuse to discuss it and are like we're not going to talk about it and as a result they just don't do anything for six months sure I mean they probably

They probably all need to take a break and have some therapy. Yes. What happens instead of that is nobody has any therapy because it's 1929. Yeah, it's a real shame. They should have thought about this before doing it in 1929 when everything's about to get so much worse. Yes. Freud is only just inventing therapy and he's doing the weird sex stuff. So...

Don't know how helpful it would have been. But Alexander basically, as the king, just gets fed up. He's put up with this for a decade. He's done his best to just let people get on with things as much as he has. And so he, in October 1929, he declares himself royal dictator.

Sure.

A little bit later, he declares his plans for the future of Yugoslavia because things have not worked out as he imagined them when he agreed to be the king. He imagined that he would be the king and everybody would be like, we love you so much.

We're going to be Yugoslavians now. Or we're going to all be friends. And we're all brothers. And it's great. They had not done that. They had instead had a lot of arguments. And now somebody was dead and loads of people were in prison. And there was lots of protests. So he was like, right, one, we are no longer the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. We are now called Yugoslavia. I do support that. I support that move wholeheartedly.

And that means the Kingdom of South Slavs. So, Yugoslavia, Kingdom of Slavs. And so that we will have a unified identity. We will not be kind of Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Bosnians, Macedonians. We will be Yugoslavians, South Slavs. There will be a new administrative structure. And we are now going to divide the country into nine regions. Each region is named after a river.

And that these new regions will be the administrative and kind of general focus for life for everybody. This is, interestingly, the exact same thing that Cleisthenes did in Athens, which I was talking to my friend Sarah, who was visiting me about literally maybe six hours before I read about this.

Which is that Cleisthenes came in after some crises in Athens and there used to be loads of tribes in Athens that were family based. And he abolished those tribes and introduced something called Deems and said that there were 10 Deems. Everybody's a member of a Deem now. Deem is where you vote. Deem is where you pay your taxes. Deem is who you support in the games. Basically was like, this will...

the tribes. Tribes don't exist anymore. You can't use that as a focus of loyalty. Now you're loyal to your deem. So it kind of breaks up the old...

kind of tribal politics and loyalties and creates new ones and now you will be a member of whatever district instead of being a croat or a orthodox christian or whatever now you can all be members of the danube district nice idea does not work

I do suspect that he read some of these entities. Yeah. The problem is people just will not feel how you tell them to feel. They do not. And they probably will resent being told how to feel so much that they will feel the opposite just to spite you. My God, you're good at this. Yeah.

Because what he does is attempt to massively force everybody to be a Yugoslavian by suspending all civil rights, taking full control of all press, propaganda, film, culture, books, every single kind of expression of art or feeling that you can imagine. Creates fundamentally a whole new curriculum, takes...

bans all ethnic and religious groups arrests anybody that he can who seems to oppose him and shoots everybody that he can as well just seems that they think that he can shoot his way out of people not liking this idea keeps uh exiling people and throwing them into prison and is thus shocked shocked i tell you when everybody fucking hates it who's gonna predict it

Who else could have predicted that beating, shooting and banning people into submission did not create a sense of national unity? LAUGHTER

around a new identity of brotherly love. It did not do that. It did not do that at all. What it did do is exile a man that we're going to come back to called Ante Pavlovic, who is a Croat, ultra-nationalist and fascist who was beaten and imprisoned and eventually fled Yugoslavia and went to Italy and

now led by Mussolini, where he was welcomed with oaths and arms and started his own little fascist party. The only thing that this did do is unify everybody against Alexander. A lot of groups who had previously refused to talk to each other now largely started talking to each other about how much they hated everything he was doing. Yeah, he did get what he wanted. This is a real monkey's paw situation for Alexander. Yeah.

uh-huh at the same time that he is doing this of course in the late 1920s so this goes on well into 1934 and so during this time there is also the great depression yeah which starts in 1928 and hits the world hard in yugoslavia average income fell by two-thirds exports fell by 70 percent

The rural areas and the peasantry were decimated. They lost so much of their income and their money that they started fleeing into the cities of massively overwhelming cities like Belgrade and Sarajevo because there were no jobs there.

either yeah massive packs of people moving across the landscape and across the cities people literally starving to death and suffering immensely which you will know does not help to ease ethno-political or religious tensions it really doesn't it really doesn't when people are starving to death they do tend to look into another people's bowls and see what they have got

However, conveniently, the main thing that keeps this from exploding into anything terrible is that everybody hates Alexander so much. And in 1932, there is an opposition group, which is called the Democratic Peasant Coalition, which is a group led by a Croatian Serb, a Croat, a Muslim and a Slovene called Svetspartan. I'm so sorry for my pronunciations.

Svetlana Pribyachevich, Vlad Komacek, Mahed Sparho and Anton Korosevich, who lead a massive uprising across the country, protests all over the place. They demand the end to this nonsense autocracy. They demand federalization. They are all arrested. Yeah.

There is a massive crackdown on it. Everything is going very, very badly. This situation finally ends on the 9th of October, 1934, when Alexander goes to France to visit the French foreign minister. He's trying to persuade the French to give them some aid. He gets off the boat in Marseille and less than five minutes after getting off the boat is shot.

and assassinated alongside the French foreign minister. This, you can watch on YouTube. No! You can. No!

Yes. That's insane. The actual moment of the shots being fired is not captured, but the minutes, in fact, the seconds afterwards are. And because the oldie worldie was bananas, they showed, like, I will warn you, I'll put this in the show notes and I'll send it to you, but bananas.

Like the cameraman gets up in Alexander's face as he is dying. And then they edit that into the film and just put it on in the cinema. But you can watch the Pathé, British Pathé cinema news piece about it. And it includes direct footage of him being shot. And then the guy who shot him, who is a Bulgarian called Flado Chernizemsky, is cut down by a French swordsman.

which is very French. That's the Frenchest thing. That's that. Well, that's wild. Yeah, but it is genuinely bananas that you can watch it on YouTube. So should you wish to see a king die? I'm very morbid. So obviously I watched it, but I will put that in the show notes with appropriate. Okay.

warnings so he is shot he dies he the guy who shoots him is bulgarian and he is a member of a group called the internal macedonian revolutionary organization they all have names like this none of them come on something that gives you a nice acronym it's not that hard you do eventually get a nice acronym but the only people who have a snappy name are the fascists fascists are known for efficiency

So basically, Vlado, the assassin, he personally is a member of this group who want Macedonian unification with Bulgaria. So they specifically want the Macedonian, North Macedonian area to secede from Yugoslavia and to merge with Bulgaria. There's not very many of them, but they are funded and supported by this Croatian

fascist group do you remember I said the guy was exiled mhm

And he was hanging out with... Yes. He was exiled and he ran away and went to hang out with Mussolini instead. That guy started the Croatian fascist party called Ustasa and they were funding basically anyone who would cause trouble. And they funded this guy, Vlado, who shot Alexander because there was a general belief with Mussolini and also because this is 1934, Hitler...

has come to power in Germany and fascism is very much on the rise. But there was a general belief that if they, that Alexander was holding Yugoslavia together through personal charisma alone, and that if he was gone,

The entire thing would collapse into conflict that could then be picked up by larger fascist nations, basically without any trouble from themselves. So that is why they wholeheartedly supported anybody who wanted to hurt Alexander. They, however, were wrong.

The death of Alexander did not at all kill Yugoslavia. And I think that this is one of the interesting things, which is that there is so much of the history of Yugoslavia is about the tension and the fighting and the political paralysis and the protests and the repression, which is kind of ongoing. And that does happen often.

But it is very city-based. And more than that, there is very obviously, like, just the fact that it continues and that at every crisis point, there is enough people who are like, no, we want to keep doing this. Like, there is not at any point an overwhelming majority of people who want to not be Yugoslavian or want to not be part of a larger nation that's bigger than just their own ethnic group. Yeah.

they do collapse until much much later down the line and for 70 years like yugoslavia almost collapses and at one point does is dismantled and comes back together again because there obviously is this this desire amongst people that just is is not because it is the desire for the status quo it's obviously not much of a story to be like and then some people were like let's keep going

And there is constant tension and constant fracturing, but the fractures don't work to split it for a very long time. Yeah, it is one of those things that any kind of big, large scale social change, whether it's legal or like it all requires just enough people being committed enough.

Yeah, exactly. With Alexander dead and the country still kind of clinging on because he does have a son and his son is called Peter. His son is a child, but his son is still there and that is enough and a kind of desire for this country to exist, to hold it together. We're going to stop there in 1934 with a kind of sense of hope, I suppose, that things can continue. Yeah.

And then we're going to do this, I think it's three episodes. So the next episode, we're going to find out what happens with Alexander and then the lead up to and probably World War II. Because honestly, I don't want to talk about World War II too much because it's horrible. And then episode three, we will do post World War II and Tito and what happens with the two soldiers.

So two socialist republics. And then we will do the breakup, which we also won't talk about in huge amount of detail because, again, we're not here to make everybody really depressed and tell them about the in-depth details of many massacres. But we will do then up until the 1990s. So we'll do this as three episodes. There's a reasonable amount of time to spend talking about

The entire life of a country. Yes, I think that that's very good. The entire life of a complicated country that has just constantly, actually it veers between just an intense amount of things going on, just a lot going on to everybody glaring at each other in a circle and doing absolutely nothing.

There is, there are like some big skips of like half a decade where everybody glares at each other in a circle and then, then fight and then skip back again. But yeah, so that is going to be the next episode. And we'll find out what happened after Alexander and his, whether his intense authoritarianism continues. Find out next time on History of Sexy.

Janina, do you have anything more you'd like to add about the agricultural family situation? No, no. I just like it. Just I spent like four hours reading about the same sort of gently interesting stuff because I'm doing fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. You're like, maybe I could be in a big family of like 20 people and nobody would. No, it's not that I want to. It's just like.

I don't know. I think it's always, it's one of those things that your ideas about how the world worked before it was like it is now are so narrowly defined by the culture you grew up in and what you watched. And it's just like a different version of how stuff could be. It didn't have to be feudalism. It didn't have to be, you know, individual responsibility so much. It was, you know, it's just, you know, there's different stuff going on. And isn't that nice?

It is nice. I'm going to try real hard to be more intelligent for episodes. I think it is nice. And I think that this is why it is important. Like, I feel like when we talk about a lot of history, especially when we're talking about global history or world history, we tend to very much be like, obviously we focus heartily on Western powers and then...

Asian powers and that this part of the world gets very skipped over like it gets skipped over when we talk about the empires that absorbed them because they were on the edges or considered to be on the edges and this part of the world but this part of the world is ancient and interesting yeah I also think it's one of the things that shows like why communism took off in Eastern Europe and not in Western Europe because I think transitioning into modern capitalism made more sense if

for the last several hundred years, you've been operating on a feudalist landowner-centric model. Yeah. Then stepping into a corporation owner model makes sense. But if you've actually been farming in a cooperative style, then that must seem like nonsense. Yeah.

Like, you want me to do what? And I don't get any of the profit? I just work for you and then I don't... What? I just give you everything and then you give me like 5p. And it's not that this situation was that simple. Like, there was more going on, but it's interesting. The world is vast. Yeah. Who knew? The world is vast and fascinating and there are many things in it. Yeah. All right.

Janina we need to tell people things like that you can find us and if you wish to watch the

death video then you can at history of sexy.com or ask a question or we now have patreon thank you very much to everybody who has joined the patreon i'm sending out stickers as quickly as i can and hopefully they are arriving but specifically sorry to the person in america who sticker will eventually arrive and you'll realize that i became confused while doing a lot of gluing of addresses onto things and just stuck yours on the wrong side

And so I inadvertently stuck your address on, I believe you were in Denver, maybe. And I apologize for failing to address an envelope appropriately or competently. But I looked at it and I thought, no, it's just going to have to stay like that. Yeah.

So sorry to you, you're special. But if you would like to have a sticker or get access to our Discord and other things, then you can now join us on Patreon. You can also still join us on Ko-fi. If you don't want to join Patreon, that's fine because I know not everybody wants to hang out with that company and that's fine. And you can, yeah, but it's all on historyofsexy.com and you can hang out with us. Yeah, yeah, that'd be great. I should join the Discord. I'm not actually on there. I should do that. LAUGHTER

Janina's about to join the Discord. Oliver, can you send me an invite to the Discord? I will send you an invite to the Discord. And then until next time, Janina, when there will be more Yugoslavia chat. Yeah. Bye. Bye.