The Sleepwalkers (6 page)

In 1893, following his coup against the regency, Alexandar dispatched Pašić to St Petersburg as Serbian envoy extraordinary. The aim was to placate Pašić's political ambition while at the same time removing him from Belgrade. Pašić worked hard to build a deeper Russian-Serbian relationship, making no secret of his belief that the future national emancipation of Serbia would ultimately depend on Russian assistance.
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But this work was disrupted by the re-entry into Belgrade politics of King Father Milan. Radicals were hounded and purged from the civil service, and Pašić was recalled. In the years of the Milan–Alexandar reign, Pašić was closely watched and kept at arm's length from power. In 1898, he was sentenced to nine months in prison on the pretext that he had insulted Milan in a party publication. Pašić was still in prison in 1899 when the country was shaken by a botched attempt on the King Father's life. Once again, the Radicals were suspected of complicity in the plot, though their link with the young Bosnian who fired the shot was and remains unclear. King Alexandar demanded that Pašić be executed on suspicion of complicity in the assassination attempt, but the Radical leader's life was saved, ironically enough in view of later developments, by the urgent representations of the Austro-Hungarian government. In a ruse characteristic of Alexandar's reign, Pašić was informed that he would be executed along with a dozen of his Radical colleagues unless he signed an admission of moral co-responsibility for the assassination attempt. Unaware that his life had already been saved by Vienna's intervention, Pašić consented; the document was published and he emerged from prison under popular suspicion that he had incriminated his party in order to save his own skin. He was biologically alive, but, for the moment at least, politically dead. During the troubled final years of Alexandar's reign, he withdrew almost entirely from public life.

The change of regime inaugurated a golden age in Pašić's political career. He and his party were now the dominant force in Serbian public life. Power suited this man who struggled so long to obtain it, and he quickly grew into the role of a father of his nation. Pašić was disliked by the Belgrade intellectual elite, but he enjoyed an immense pre-eminence among the peasantry. He spoke with the heavy, rustic dialect of Zaječar, found funny by people in Belgrade. His diction was halting, full of asides and interjections that lent themselves to anecdote. On being told that the famous satirical writer Branislav Nušić had protested against the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 by leading a demonstration through town and then riding his horse into the ministry of foreign affairs, Pašić is said to have responded: ‘Errr . . . you see . . . I knew he was good at writing books, but, hmmm . . ., that he could ride so well, that I did not know . . .'
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Pašić was a poor speaker, but an excellent communicator, especially to the peasants who formed the overwhelming majority of the Serbian electorate. In their eyes, Pašić's unsophisticated speech and slow-burning wit, not to mention his luxuriant, patriarchal beard, were marks of an almost supernatural prudence, foresight and wisdom. Among his friends and supporters, he went by the appellation ‘Baja' – a word that denotes a man of stature who is not only respected, but also loved by his contemporaries.
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A death sentence, long years of exile, the paranoia of a life under constant surveillance – all this left a deep imprint upon Pašić's practice and outlook as a politician. He acquired habits of caution, secrecy and obliqueness. Many years later, a former secretary would recall that he tended not to commit ideas and decisions to paper, or even, indeed, to the spoken word. He was in the habit of regularly burning his papers, both official and private. He developed a tendency to affect passivity in situations of potential conflict, a disinclination to show his hand until the last moment. He was pragmatic to the point where in the eyes of his opponents he seemed totally devoid of principle. All this was interwoven with an intense sensitivity to public opinion, a need to feel attuned to the Serb nation in whose cause he had suffered and worked.
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Pašić was informed of the regicide plot in advance and maintained its secrecy, but refused to be drawn into active involvement. When the details of the planned operation were passed to him on the day before the assault on the palace, his very characteristic reaction was to take his family by train to the Adriatic coast, then under Austrian rule, and wait out the consequences.

Pašić understood that his success would depend upon securing his own and the government's independence, while at the same time establishing a stable and durable relationship with the army and the regicide network within it. It was not simply a question of the one-hundred-odd men who had actually taken part in the plot, but of the many younger officers – their numbers were steadily growing – who saw in the conspirators the incarnation of a Serbian national will. The issue was complicated by the fact that Pašić's most formidable political opponents, the Independent Radicals, a breakaway faction that had split from his own party in 1901, were willing to collaborate with the regicides if it helped them to undermine the Pašić government.

Pašić dealt intelligently with this delicate situation. He made personal overtures to individual conspirators with a view to disrupting the formation of an anti-government coalition. Despite protests from Radical Party colleagues, he backed a generous funding package for the army that made up some of the ground lost since the departure of King Father Milan; he publicly acknowledged the legitimacy of the coup of 1903 (a matter of great symbolic importance to the conspirators) and opposed efforts to bring the regicides to trial. At the same time, however, he worked steadily towards curtailing their presence in public life. When it became known that the conspirators were planning to hold a celebratory dance on the first anniversary of the killings, Pašić (then foreign minister) intervened to have the festivity postponed to 15 June, the anniversary of the new king's election. During 1905, when the political influence of the regicides was a matter frequently raised in press and parliament, Pašić warned the Skupština of the threat posed to the democratic order by ‘non-responsible actors' operating outside the structures of constitutional authority – a line that played well with the Radical rank and file, who detested what they saw as the praetorian spirit of the officer corps. In 1906, he skilfully exploited the issue of the renewal of normal relations with Great Britain in order to secure the pensioning off of a number of senior regicide officers.
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These deft manoeuvres had an ambivalent effect. The most prominent regicides were removed from exposed positions and the influence of their network on national politics was diminished in the short term. On the other hand, Pašić could do little to halt its growth within the army and among sympathetic civilians, the so-called
zaveritelji
– converts after the act to the cause of the conspiracy – who were prone to even more extreme views than the original accomplices.
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Most importantly of all, the removal of the most senior regicides from public life left the indefatigable Apis in a position of uncontested dominance within the network. Apis was always a central figure at anniversary celebrations of the regicide, at which officer conspirators met to drink beer and make merry in the Kolarac restaurant in a small park next to the National Theatre in central Belgrade, and he did more than any other conspirator to recruit a core of ultra-nationalist officers prepared to support the struggle for the union of all Serbs by any available means.

Underpinning the idea of the ‘unification of all Serbs' was a mental image of Serbia that bore little relation to the political map of the Balkans at the turn of the twentieth century. Its most influential political expression was a secret memorandum drawn up by the Serbian interior minister Ilija Garašanin for Prince Alexandar Karadjordjević in 1844. Known after its publication in 1906 as
Načertanije
(from the Old Serbian
náčrt
, ‘draft'), Garašanin's proposal sketched out a ‘Programme for the National and Foreign Policy of Serbia'. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of this document on generations of Serb politicians and patriots; in time it became the Magna Carta of Serb nationalism.
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Garašanin opened his memorandum with the observation that Serbia is ‘small, but must not remain in this condition'.
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The first commandment of Serbian policy, he argued, must be the ‘principle of national unity'; by which he meant the unification of all Serbs within the boundaries of a Serbian state: ‘Where a Serb dwells, that is Serbia.' The historical template for this expansive vision of Serbian statehood was the medieval empire of Stepan Dušan, a vast swathe of territory encompassing most of the present-day Serbian republic, along with the entirety of present-day Albania, most of Macedonia, and all of Central and Northern Greece, but not Bosnia, interestingly enough.

Tsar Dušan's empire had supposedly collapsed after a defeat at the hands of the Turks on Kosovo Field on 28 June 1389. But this setback, Garašanin argued, had not undermined the Serbian state's legitimacy; it had merely interrupted its historical existence. The ‘restoration' of a Greater Serbia unifying all Serbs was thus no innovation, but the expression of an ancient historical right. ‘They cannot accuse [us] of seeking something new, unfounded, of constituting a revolution or an upheaval, but rather everyone must acknowledge that it is politically necessary, that it was founded in very ancient times and has its roots in the former political and national life of the Serbs.'
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Garašanin's argument thus exhibited that dramatic foreshortening of historical time that can sometimes be observed in the discourses of integral nationalism; it rested, moreover, upon the fiction that Tsar Dušan's sprawling, multi-ethnic, composite, medieval polity could be conflated with the modern idea of a culturally and linguistically homogenous nation-state. Serb patriots saw no inconsistency here, since they argued that virtually all the inhabitants of these lands were essentially Serbs. Vuk Karadžić, the architect of the modern Serbo-Croat literary language and author of a famous nationalist tract,
Srbi svi i svuda
(‘Serbs all and everywhere', published in 1836), spoke of a nation of 5 million Serbs speaking the ‘Serbian language' and scattered from Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Banat of Temesvar (eastern Hungary, now in western Romania), the Bačka (a region extending from northern Serbia into southern Hungary), Croatia, Dalmatia and the Adriatic coast from Trieste to northern Albania. Of course there were some in these lands, Karadžić conceded (he was referring in particular to the Croats), ‘who still find it difficult to call themselves Serbs, but it seems likely that they will gradually become used to it'.
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The unification programme committed the Serbian polity, as Garašanin knew, to a long struggle with the two great land empires, the Ottoman and the Austrian, whose dominions encroached on the Greater Serbia of the nationalist imagination. In 1844, the Ottoman Empire still controlled most of the Balkan peninsula. ‘Serbia must constantly strive to break stone after stone out of the façade of the Turkish State and absorb them into itself, so that it can use this good material on the good old foundations of the Serbian Empire to build and establish a great new Serbian state.'
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Austria, too, was destined to be a foe.
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In Hungary, Croatia-Slavonia and Istria-Dalmatia there were Serbs (not to mention many Croats who had not yet embraced Serbdom) supposedly awaiting liberation from Habsburg rule and unification under the umbrella of the Belgrade state.

Until 1918, when many of its objectives were met, Garašanin's memorandum remained the key policy blueprint for Serbia's rulers, while its precepts were broadcast to the population at large through a drip-feed of nationalist propaganda partly coordinated from Belgrade and partly driven by patriot networks within the press.
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The Greater Serbian vision was not just a question of government policy, however, or even of propaganda. It was woven deeply into the culture and identity of the Serbs. The memory of Dušan's empire resonated within the extraordinarily vivid tradition of Serbian popular epic songs. These were long ballads, often sung to the melancholy accompaniment of the one-stringed gusla, in which singers and listeners relived the great archetypal moments of Serbian history. In villages and markets across the Serbian lands, these songs established a remarkably intimate linkage between poetry, history and identity. An early observer of this was the German historian Leopold von Ranke, who noted in his history of Serbia, published in 1829, that ‘the history of the nation, developed by its poetry, has through it been converted into a national property, and is thus preserved in the memory of the people'.
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What was preserved above all within this tradition was the memory of the Serbian struggle against alien rule. A recurring preoccupation was the defeat of the Serbs at the hands of the Turks at Kosovo Field on 28 June 1389. Embroidered over the centuries, this rather indecisive medieval battle burgeoned into a symbolic set-piece between Serbdom and its infidel foe. Around it twined a chronicle peopled not only by shining heroes who had united the Serbs in their time of trouble, but also by treacherous villains who had withheld their support from the common cause, or had betrayed the Serbs to their enemies. The mythical pantheon included the celebrated assassin Miloš Obilić, of whom the songs tell that he infiltrated Turkish headquarters on the day of the battle and cut the Sultan's throat, before being captured and beheaded by Ottoman guards. Assassination, martyrdom, victimhood and the thirst for revenge on behalf of the dead were central themes.
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