Nielsen, Christian Axboe Making Yugoslavs: Identity in King Aleksandar's Yugoslavia (review)

REVIEWS 179 surviving village commune, the obshchina. In his eyes, the strong vitality of the peasant commune showed that Russia did not tend to follow the Western path. Therefore, doubts began to arise in Marx’s mind as to the universal validity of the economic law of motion of modern society that he had fully expressed in the first book of Das Kapital. But, according to Cinnella, another important aspect also has to be considered in order to explain Marx’s increasing attraction to events in Russia: in the second half of the 1870s, his and Engels’ expectations of a forthcoming socialist revolution in Western Europe had weakened. As a consequence, they turned their hopes towards the Russian revolutionary movement, establishing direct contacts with members of underground groups engaged in the struggle against the tsarist autocracy. In particular, Marx and Engels supported the terrorist organization, ‘Narodnaia Volia’. As Cinnella shows, they were sincere admirers of ‘Narodnaia Volia’ and supported its strategy of terror, in the belief that it ‘was the only one able to direct the enormous revolutionary energies latent in tsarist Russia towards a victorious outcome’ (p. 130). Thus Marx’s attitude to Russia changed considerably within a few years. The former ‘gendarme of Europe’ had replaced the West as the propulsive centre of the revolutionary movement. Concerning the fate of the obshchina, Marx claimed that it might be the seed of a new socialist order in Russia. This is reflected in a series of relevant documents carefully analysed by Cinnella: first, Marx’s letter (never sent), written in French at the end of November 1877 to the editorial board of the Russian journal, Otechestvennye Zapiski, in which he warned that Russia should not miss the finest chance that history had ever offered to a nation to avoid all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime; and, above all, Marx’s letter of March 1881 to Vera I. Zasulich, in which he argued that the peasant commune was the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia. According to Cinnella, such documents show that the author of Das Kapital had, in the last years of his life, become an open advocate of the Russian Populist view. London N. D’Elia Nielsen, Christian Axboe. Making Yugoslavs: Identity in King Aleksandar’s Yugoslavia. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2014. xii + 388 pp. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95 (paperback). Christian Axboe Nielsen’s book is about the ‘other’ Yugoslav dictator, not Josip Broz ‘Tito’, but his significant predecessor, King Aleksandar the First, monarchofYugoslaviafrom1921–34andthecountry’sabsoluterulerfrom1929– 34. Although his time as a fully-fledged dictator was brief (by the standards set by dictators at the time and since), Aleksandar’s authoritarianism ran much deeper and longer than its formal dictatorial expression. The monarch was SEER, 94, 1, JANUARY 2016 180 continuously a heavy and autocratic presence in the South Slav kingdom from the time of its birth at the end of the First World War. Aleksandar’s actual dictatorship had at its heart an ideological goal: to make an authentic and integrated South Slav state where none had existed before, to forcibly weld the various parts of his country into a single and solid national whole. In so doing he hoped to fulfil the title bestowed to him at the end of the First World War: the ‘Unifier’ (Ujedintelj) of his peoples. He also hoped to deliver his subjects and his state from a fractious and failed period of parliamentary rule. To this end, the state was to be reduced to the sum of its millions of parts, its subjects: the dictatorship was a matter of transforming individual identity. Aleksandar’s dictatorship demanded that people think, feel and act in conformity with the new supra-national culture, to do otherwise was to incur the suspicion — or the wrath — of the state. Yugoslavia would become united by ‘making Yugoslavs’ out of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and so on. ‘Make’ as in create, but also ‘make’ as in coerce. Yet despite no lack of will and a formidable arsenal at his disposal, when Macedonian and Croatian extremists killed Aleksandar in 1934, his Yugoslavia was more fractured than when he assumed absolute control...

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