Yugoslavia - Battleground of the South Slavs 1

The New Federalist April 7, 1989 Pages 6-7

American Almanac

Yugoslavia: Battleground Of the South Slavs

Part I

by Allen and Rachel Douglas

Dr. Frederick Guggenbuhl

A street scene the southern Yugoslavia coast city of Dubrovnik.

Introduction

by Rachel Douglas

A subscriber to New Federalist I was talking to a few weeks ago summed up the crisis in Yugoslavia succinctly. You see, he said, they've got eight different peoples over there, and with the food shortages this year, they're at each other's throats. And one of them wants to bring in the Red Army to straighten things out.

The biggest vortex in Yugoslavia's stormy political life, at the moment, is indeed Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's campaign to assert hegemony over the primarily Albanian-ethnic province of Kosovo. This drive was rekindled during November 1988, just after Russian Defense Minister Gen. Dmitri Yazov toured the country, the guest of the Serb-dominated military.

Many times in history, the Russians have acted with the Serbs in the Bal-kans. As the map shows, Serbia, together with Macedonia and Montenegro, was historically Orthodox, like Russia. Although the language spoken in the two largest of Yugoslavia's republics, Serbo-Croatian, is one tongue, the Serbs write it with the Cyrillic script used also for Russian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian. The Croats write it in Western script.

Croatia and Slovenia became predominantly Catholic, and were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For a longer period, the southern regions of what is now Yugoslavia were subjugated by the Ottoman Empire, having been seized in the fourteenth century, more than 60 years before the Turks took Constantinople in 1453. One of the reasons that the semi-autonomy of Kosovo within Serbia so infuriates Milosevic's followers, is that though the province is inhabited by an Albanian majority with a minority of Serbs and Montenegrins, it contains the site of a Serbian national shrine—Kosovo Polje, the battlefield where the Serbs were defeated by the Turks in 1389.

During the nineteenth century, when the most expansionist Russian imper-ialist faction was on the rise, they carried the banner of "Pan-Slavism" into the Balkans. If Russia were the protector of its Orthodox brothers living under the Ottomans, this justified Russian military expansion into the area.

The Balkans were not only coveted by the Russians, but had already acquired the dubious status of backyard to Venice, the powerful city-state at the top of the Adriatic Sea on the Italian side. Because of that involvement, late-nineteenth century Balkan history sheds light on the road to the Bolshe-

vik Revolution itself. For interests in the West, including powerful ones grouped around Venice, desired a revolution in Russia, and it was the Venetians who gave it a crucial impetus. They acted through the Venetian Giuseppe Volpi, later Conte (Count) di Misurata and Mussolini's minister of finance. They acted in the Balkans.

The tangled history of the Balkans figures again and again in The Roots of the Trust, the study of the Bolsheviks and their patrons in the West under-taken by Allen Douglas and myself, of the Executive Intelligence Review staff. In this and upcoming issues of the New Federalist, we offer excerpts from that report, concerning the Balkans at critical times in its history. The first section briefly describes the political and cultural input from Serbia and Bulgaria, to the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century creation of Russia as an empire, aspiring to be the Third Rome. The second part recounts how the most aggressive Russian expansionists, the Pan-Slavs, sought to dominate the Balkans in the late nineteenth century; their maneuvers set the stage for World War I. Lastly, in future issues of New Federalist, we turn to the very eve of World War I, when financial and political circles, centered in Venice, orchestrated the collapse of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires.

Readers interested in the background to the explosive crisis in Yugoslavia now, as dangerous for the world as the one in that region was on the eve of World War I, will find elements of its pre-history here. Since these are excerpts from the longer report, a glossary is provided of key terms that are not fully explained in this part of the text.

Before the Birth of 'Moscow the Third Rome'

The notion that Moscow's destiny is to be the capital of a third and final "Roman Empire," Rome and Constantinople having fallen, has been a force in Russian politics since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But this myth did not spring up like mushrooms in the Russian forest, near the then-puny town of Moscow. It was injected into Russia from outside, by a political and cultural faction headquartered in Venice, the political heir of the Byzantine Empire and the repository of the most evil traditions of gnosticism.

"Gnosticism" refers to various systems of belief in the power of secret knowledge, directly accessible to the initiated. Common for gnostic cults are such principles as these:

• The material world is evil, and in it, good works count for nothing and anything is permitted—pillage, rape, murder—because it is not reality.

• The paramount importance of the "feminine principle" in the universe, according to which man is made not in God's image as creator, but as passive object;

• The battle between "good" and "evil" is unending, and there is no unifying principle in the world, but only a chaotic, apocalyptic battle between conflicting "cosmic armies";

• Judaism and Christianity, with their emphasis on the individual, are religions of the stupid masses, while gnosticism is the property of elite masters, priests, and initiates.

Profoundly at war with Christianity, gnosticism was declared heretical in the early years of the Christian Church, but different strains of gnostic belief infiltrated the Christian movement all during its first millennium. Especially in what became the Orthodox East, gnostic patterns such as the absolute authority of the priesthood and the denial of the individual person's capacity to further the work of God's Creation by living "in imitation of Christ," were incorporated into the practice of Christian churches.

Some of the most extreme gnostics, masquerading as Christian sects, were to be found in the Balkans. From the tenth through the fifteenth centuries, Bulgaria was the center of a gnostic sect called the Bogomils, meaning "Beloved of God." The gnostic dualism of the Bogomils, a radical division between matter and spirit based in part on the beliefs of Manichean sects flourishing in Asia Minor in that period, included a fanatical rejection of "matter"—eating meat, drinking wine, and sex for the purpose of procreation were proscribed. The Bogomils encouraged sodomy as an alternative to such "sin"; the word "bugger" and its cognates came into European lan-guages when the Bulgarian Bogomils arrived in France.

Bogomilism made a lasting impression on Orthodox Christianity and on Islam in the Balkans. Widespread in Orthodoxy in Bulgaria was hesychasm, which the Bulgarians pioneered in the Slavic world. Called from the Greek for "quiet," hesychasm is an extremely irrationalist school of Orthodox monastic practice, featuring withdrawal from the world, constant prayer coordinated with one's breathing, hyperventilation, and navel-gazing.

Although the Hesychasts would not admit to being gnostics, their thought and practice are precisely gnostic, in that they follow the first of the gnostics' two paths to Pure Light, which are withdrawal from the material world and violation of the material world. The Hesychasts adopted the tradition of the ascetic Desert Fathers of the early church, who had modeled many practices on those of the Essenes, a gnostic cult.

While the Bogomil cult was hegemonic in the Balkans, there emerged and peaked in the fourteenth century, kingdoms in Bulgaria and Serbia. Already their leaders, prompted by monks of Mt. Athos, brandished the claim to be a "Third Rome."

By the fifteenth century, the Balkan kingdoms had collapsed, but Venice and Mt. Athos were soon to relaunch the "Third Rome" project in earnest, with the build-up of Russia. They were prompted to do this by the Council of Florence, which concluded in 1439, a great victory for the Christian human-ists of the West and a setback to gnosticism. The Venetians, most of all, set the goal of building up Russia as a counterweight and eventual marcher lord, against the legacy of the Council of Florence. They drew on the experience and personnel of the Serb and Bulgarian Kingdoms.

Hence, long before the Balkans became a route by which Russia would strike out against Europe, the area served as a staging ground for the creation of Russia itself as an empire. To appreciate what a momentous project this was, we will first look at the Council of Florence, then describe briefly the ingredients for the creation of Russia, including the Balkan Kingdoms.

The area called the Balkans, from the Turkish word for "hilly, wooded place," today. Its history was determined by its strategic place-ment, amidst Venice, the Ottoman Empire whose capital was Istanbul, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Russia.

The six republics, with Serbia's two semi-autonomous provin-ces, Kosovo and Vojvodina, of the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia.

The Council of Florence

On July 6, 1439, after 18 months of the most powerful philosophical dialogue in human history, the proclamation Laetentur Coeli—Let the Heavens Rejoice—was signed under the recently completed Brunelleschi Dome in Florence, Italy. Fruit of the work of collaborators of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, the document proclaimed the reunification, after a centuries-long split, of the Eastern and Western churches. The signatories agreed "that the Holy Spirit has its essence and its being at the same time from the Father and the Son, and proceeds from each as from one cause and single source," thus adopting the Western version of the Creed, including the word Filioque—"and from the Son."

The Filioque was the foundation of Christian humanism, since only if Christ, being both man and God, were not only consubstantial but also coequal with God the Father as cause, could the individual man, acting in imitation of Christ, truly continue and participate in God's work of creation.

Within months of the Florentine proclamation, the 30 to 40 men controlling the awesome political and financial machinery of Venice, which since approximately the tenth century had been the de facto capital of the Byzan-tine Empire, in great fear and rage at the resolutions of Florence, took strategic decisions of the most dramatic and far-reaching import, reflected in the years ahead in the following events:

1) The 1448 declaration of autocephaly by the Russian Orthodox Church. This was part of the Venetians' attempt to rip up the decrees of the Council of Florence in as much of the "Orthodox East" as possible.

2) The creation of the Patriarchate of Venice in 1451, the only such institu-tion in Catholic Christendom. The religious maneuverings of Venice would be aimed to destroy the fruits of the Council of Florence.

3) The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, after Venice failed to honor its solemn pledge of aid to the city if it came under attack.

4) The build-up of a new empire, centered around Moscow the "Third Rome." It would be used against the West, and against the newly expanded Turkish empire. The deal was clinched in 1472, with the marriage of Sophie Paleologue, niece of the last emperor of Byzantium and ward of the Venetian Pope, Paul II, to Ivan III, Grand Duke of Moscow. "Soon after the mar-riage," writes the Russian historian Dmitri Likhachov, "the Signoria of

Venice, always precise and careful in its decisions, wrote to Ivan III that Byzantium, 'for reason of cessation of the imperial line on the male side, should belong to your highness as a result of your favorable marriage.' "

This section of The Roots of the Trust deals with the circumstances in "the Orthodox East," particularly Russia, during the preceding century, which made Russia ripe for such a Venetian project. Of great importance was the influx of monks devoted to hesychasm, which practice of withdrawal from the world was profoundly at odds with the creative outlook on which the Council of Florence would insist. These monks came to Russia from Mt. Athos in Greece and from Serbia and Bulgaria.

Venice vs. 'The Alliance Of the Empires'

The Russian delegation to the 1439 Council of Florence signed its agree-ment for the union of Christian churches of the East and of the West, at the instruction of the great Isidore of Kiev, then Metropolitan of Moscow, but this outburst of sanity did not last long. "On the return trip," as Giuseppe Olsr wrote in a 1949 article on Moscow the Third Rome, "Semyon and Tomas [members of the Russian delegation] already in Venice abandoned the pretense of following Isidore."

To appreciate the events in Russia after the Council of Florence, it is necessary to go back to view certain features of the preceding centuries' struggle, as they intersect Russia's history.

In opposition to Venice, and to the monastic parties of Byzantium, there was a constant tendency for the Holy Roman Empire and the humanist currents sometimes ruling in Byzantium to ally—what the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick Barbarossa expressed to Michael Paleologue as "the alliance of the Empires." Barbarossa himself was ultimately forced to kneel before the Pope and Venice in 1177. Forced to kiss the foot of the Venetian-allied Pope Alexander, Barbarossa did so, muttering "Not to thee, but to St. Peter," whereupon Alexander put his other foot on the neck of Barbarossa, proclaiming, "Both to me and St. Peter."

It appears that the Venetian-directed sack of Constantinople in 1204, by Latin troops on their way to the crusades, was not merely the taking of a "target of opportunity" by the immoral, greedy Venetians, but something greater—the destruction of one pole of the "alliance of Empires," which served to dramatically weaken the Hohenstaufen emperors back in the West. The sack of Constantinople was followed by the invasion of Russia by

Genghis Khan. In this invasion, and most crucially in the Mongol sack of the Western-tied city of Kiev in 1240, the Venetians acted as the advance guard and intelligence arm of the Mongols.

Though Michael Paleologue kicked the Venetians out of Constantinople in his recapture of the city in 1261, by 1266 the last Hohenstaufen was dead. The Council of Lyons of 1274, where the Eastern Church under Michael unified with the Western one and accepted the Filioque, never took hold, because Michael was isolated from the West and faced with a strong monastic party at home. Michael's own sister declared, "Better my brother's Empire should perish than the unity of the Orthodox faith." She was referring to the existence of two parties of Orthodoxy by then—one which accepted the Filioque and was allied to the West, the other irrevocably committed to the Eastern Orthodox brand of gnosticism.

Throughout the fourteenth century, the Christian humanists of Byzantium had not only to face the monastic thrust from within, but also to contend with the Mt. Athos-created "empires of the South Slavs," the Bulgarian and Serbian Kingdoms which proclaimed themselves to be the heirs of Rome.

The Russian-Venetian Connection

There was a colony of Venetian merchants in Moscow already by the mid-fourteenth century, during which Venetian-Russian ties were drawing closer. "Because of the developing Genoese alliance with the Mongols," historian James Billington observed in The Icon and the Axe (New York, 1966; Vintage Books edition, 1970), "Russia increasingly cultivated the Venetian side in this [Venetian-Genoese] dispute."

But this alliance took off in a major way with the Russian victory over the Mongols at Kulikovo field in 1380. This battle was a function of two strategic factors: 1) the global battle to the death between the Venetians and the Genoese. The Genoese were present on the battlefield to try and aid their Mongol allies against the Russian-Venetian alliance. The Genoese were decisively defeated by the Venetians at Chioggia outside the Venetian lagoon in 1381, following which the Genoese gravitated toward the role of Venetian junior partner; and, 2) the Venetian need to build up a strategic counterweight against the advancing Turk, who had crushed the South Slav would-be Third Romes of Serbia and Bulgaria by the end of the third quarter of the century.

The build-up of Russia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which saw vast colonization programs launched from Mt. Athos and a steady influx from the collapsed Balkan kingdoms, was shaped by the Venice-Mt. Athos-Russia triangle, in which Venice was the chief funder of the monasteries of Mt. Athos. The power of this triangle guaranteed that hesychasm, victorious in Byzantium in 1351, would be the dominant cultural input into the growing Russian state at the time.

The Kingdoms of Serbia and Bulgaria

One reason for this was the flood of Serbian-Bulgarian monks into Russia, for the Balkan Kingdoms had been, in effect, pilot projects for what Russia was to become. The essentials of those now-collapsed kingdoms are succinctly described by Billington:

The Serbian kingdom, during its golden age under Stephen Dushan, 1331-55, represented in many ways a dress rehearsal for the pattern of rule that was to emerge in Muscovy. Sudden military expansion was accompanied by a rapid inflation of princely pretensions. With speed and audacity Dushan assumed the titles of Tsar, Autocrat, and Emperor of the Romans; styled himself a successor to Constantine and Justinian; and sum-moned a council to set up a separate Serbian patriarchate. He sought, in brief, to supplant the old Byzantine Empire with a new Slavic-Greek empire. To sustain his claim he leaned heavily on the support of Mt. Athos and other monasteries that he had enriched and patronized.

There had been a similar development in neighboring Bulgaria:

The Bulgarian kingdom developed during its much longer period of independence from Byzantium a prophetic tradition which was to be taken over directly by Muscovy. Seeking to glorify the Bulgarian capital of Trnovo, the [Mt. Athos] chroniclers referred to it as the New Rome, which had supplanted both the Rome of Classical Antiquity and the declining "second Rome of Constantinople." When the infidel Turks swept into the Balkans, crushing the Serbs at Kossovo in 1389 and overrunning the flaming Bulgarian capital four years later, the messianic hopes of Orthodox Slavdom had only one

direction in which to turn: to the unvanquished prince and expanding church of Muscovy.

In 1390 a Bulgarian monk from Trnovo, Cyprian, became Metropolitan of Moscow, and in the course of the fifteenth century men and ideas moved north to Moscow and helped infect it with a new sense of historical calling. The Balkan monks had tended to sympathize politically with the anti-Latin zealots in Byzantium and theologically with the anti-Scholastic Hesychasts. They brought with them a fondness for the close alliance between monks and princes which had prevailed in the Southern Slav kingdoms and a deep hatred of Roman Catholi-cism, which in their view had surrounded the Orthodox Slavs with hostile principalities in the Balkans and had seduced the Church of Constantinople into humiliating reunion [with the West in 1274].

This was the outlook, imported into Russia by the monks from the defunct Serb and Bulgarian Kingdoms. The Hesychasts from the Balkans were supplemented by the dramatic Mt. Athos-organized colonization of the north of Russia, led by the Hesychast Sergius Radonezh, the St. Sergius who had not only led, but had organized the Grand Prince of Moscow into the Battle at Kulikovo Field, and who is today the patron saint of Russia.

The Nineteenth Century: The Pan-Slav Insurgency

In the late nineteenth century, the Russian Slavophiles and Pan-Slavs main-tained that their chief interest in the Balkans was to free their Orthodox Christian "brother Slavs" from the tyranny of the ungodly Turk. While this was a transparent excuse for Third Rome-driven expansionism, there was another element to their Balkan intrigues—the struggle for control of Russia itself.

The Pan-Slavs were drawn primarily from the ranks of the old landed aristocracy (boyar families), which yearned to break the grip of the Petrine State of the Romanovs. Their movement had received fresh impetus in the early nineteenth century, at the time Russian was ensconced as the "Gen-darme of Europe" under the 1815 Holy Alliance, when a new wave of hesychasm was propagated into Russia—once again, from Venice. The massive resurgence of monasteries had big political and cultural

Tsar Alexander II, had no desire to Former Russian Ambassador toseize Constantinople or the Balkans, Constantinople and later chiefwas assassinated by police-linked of the Okhrana (secret police),terrorists in 1881. Pan-Slav expansionist Count

N.P. Ignatyev organized theRusso- Turkish Wars of the1870s, behind the Tsar's back.

repercussions, as the monasteries of the hesychasts became brain-centers for the Slavophile, and later Pan-Slav, movements.

General Mikhail Chernyayev, the "hero of Tashkent" and the man who took command of the Serbian Army in 1876, laid out the Pan-Slav scheme for Balkan adventures to rebound onto the Russian scene:

The Petersburg government cannot stand on Slav ground and remain what it is today. It would have to renounce its Germanic traditions and become popular and for that the first step would be to gather up its things and transfer to Moscow— Long before the Serbo-Turkish War, I had reached the conclusion that we could not get away from our present trivialities without an external push and that this would have to come from the Slav

lands. (Quoted in David MacKenzie's Panslavism in Practice: Cherniaev in Serbia, 1976.)

Count Ignatyev

The chief architect of the 1875-78 Balkan Wars, Count N.P. Ignatyev, was the man who would also preside over the creation of a vastly expanded police apparatus, the Okhrana, in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Another of the wars' sponsors, Count Illarion Ivanovich Vorontsov-Dashkov, in 1881 would found the powerful "private Okhrana," known as the Holy Brotherhood (Svyashchennaya Druzhina).

In 1864, the Pan-Slav faction secured a major advance in its aims, with the appointment of Ignatyev as Russian ambassador to Constantinople. From a wealthy boyar family, Ignatyev had graduated from the General Staff Academy in 1851, fought in the Crimean War and was afterwards named military attaché in London. In 1858, he got his first major diplomatic mission with a trip to the Central Asian khanates of Khiva and Bukhara, to claim much of Turkestan for Russia, and capture Tashkent. For this, he was named a major general in the Tsar's suite, a big honor for a 26-year-old officer.

The following year, 1859, Ignatyev went to China to negotiate the cession to Russia of Chinese territory, in northeastern China, on the Pacific. When the Chinese would not capitulate, Ignatyev returned in 1860 with a Franco-British Expeditionary Force and attacked the Chinese until they gave in and signed the Treaty of Peking, which granted Russia most of the territories it wanted, permitting it to build a port in Vladivostok and become a major Pacific power.

After heading the Asiatic Bureau of the Foreign Ministry from 1861-64, which was responsible for the Balkans as well as Central Asia, Ignatyev became Russian minister in Constantinople in 1864 and ambassador in 1867. This post was apparently secured for him by anti-Filioque activist and Third Section agent Olga Novikova, whose brother-in-law was a Russian officer in Constantinople.

Ignatyev dedicated his next ten years in Constantinople to reviving, in expanded form, the "Greek Project" of the Venetian-directed Orlov brothers in the eighteenth century, who set their sights on seizing Constantinople for Russia. His first agents were the sons of the powerful old Greek families of Constantinople and the Greek islands. As Ignatyev later stated in his

Memoirs, he was already convinced, as of his directorship of the Asiatic Section of the Foreign Ministry, that Russia must have three aims in the Balkans: 1) a revision of the 1856 Treaty of Paris, which meant returning to Russia a ceded portion of Bessarabia, and the abolition of the Black Sea neutralization and naval limitation clauses, 2) the command of Constanti-nople and the Straits, and 3) common actions by the Slavs under Russian direction in the Balkans—Pan-Slavism.

Ignatyev's first action toward these ends was the 1866 uprising he directed in the ancient Venetian colony of Crete, under Turkish control since it was ceded to Turkey in return for establishing the dragoman system at the Porte. He followed this with extensive operations in Bulgaria, including his person-al sponsorship of a Bulgarian Orthodox Church Exarchate, independent of Constantinople, to prepare for Bulgarian independence from the Porte.

Like much other "liberation" activity in the Balkans, and like the Zionist and much of the Bolshevik movement, the Bulgarian independence movement was headquartered in Odessa. One of its leaders there, Naiden Gerov, was also a member of the Moscow Slavonic Benevolent Committee.

But all of this was preparatory to launching actual insurrections in Serbia, Montenegro, and the Balkans as a whole, which Ignatyev felt must take place soon, or, with the progress of Western civilization into the Balkans, never. He explained this urgency: ". . .delays in the explosion of a popular rising will not be favorable to the Christians. . . . In the future, the fighting conditions will not be more favourable for our Balkan brethren, who are losing the habit of using arms and becoming less warlike. Their social development, the spread of education, the growth of material interests weakens their spirit of military enterprise, inclining them at the same time to approach and study the West. The bonds based on community of religion and origin and on remembrance of former help received from Russia are vanishing with the passing of the old generation which has felt Moslem persecution. . . . Ideas of progress, oblivion to paternal traditions, a general inclination for equality are penetrating the masses and changing the old type of men. A true and healthy development can only be attained by the forma-tion, under Russian direction, of independent and co-religionist states. . . . Orthodox nations." (From "The Memoirs of Count N. Ignatyev," by A.M. Onov, Slavonic Review, Dec. 1931.)

Ignatyev's power in the Porte was unchallenged. He had decisive influence over both the Sultan and the Grand Vizier, Mahmoud Nedim, to the point

that the latter was nicknamed "Mahmoudoff." His own nickname was Menteur Pasha, or "Father of Lies." By the summer of 1875, the Father of Lies had prepared the ground for the "explosion of a popular rising."

Ignatyev's Balkan Uprisings

Ignatyev's two main agents in the Balkans were the brothers, Alexander and Vladimir Ionin. Alexander, who for seven years had been the Russian envoy to the Prince of Montenegro, trained some Hercegovinian peasants in Montenegro, and sent them over the border into their homeland to slaughter some Turks in June 1875, in protest against high Turkish taxes. His brother Vladimir, meanwhile, who was on the payroll of the Moscow Slavonic Benevolent Committee, worked in Romania to prepare Bulgarian exiles there for the coming risings. When word of the fighting got back to Russia, the Slavonic Committees in the capital and in Moscow went into high gear, printing pamphlets, holding demonstrations, and sending money and men to fight for their "Slav brothers."

A Russian eyewitness reported:

The soul of every enterprise, the center of all the intrigues, was the Russian Consul-General, Ionin, at Ragusa. . . . In January 1876, the first officers actually serving in the Russian Army arrived at Cettinje and Ragusa, either to take part in the engage-ments or to watch the progress of the insurrection. . . . The arrival of these gentlemen, the activity of the Slav commit-tees . . . together with considerable help in money, provisions, arms and ammunition, at once effected the desired change in the general state of feeling. . . . Until that time the insurgents had been only peasants, malcontents, miserably armed Heiduks, patriotic brigands; they now became a corps of volunteers, well-armed and with some discipline, to whom the Monteneg-rins sent between 2,000 and 3,000 of their best warriors. . . . The Prince of Montenegro, supported by the Russian Govern-ment, supplied with money and provisions by the committees which he well knew how to make the most of, threw aside the mask assumed till then, and took part, more or less openly with his oppressed brethren. (Quoted in Virginia Cowles, The Rus-sian Dagger.)

The British sent the third secretary of their Vienna Embassy, Edward Mon-son, to get a first-hand reading on what was happening. Monson reported that Colonel Ionin and his chief assistant, Colonel Montevered, kept an open house for the rebel leaders at all times of night and day. His dispatch of June 14 stated:

It is not surprising that the large force of Turkish troops, badly officered, insufficiently clothed, half-starved during the winter and spring, and destitute as they are of a proper transport service, had been unable to suppress an insurrection which, in regard to its origin and to the number of bona fide insurgent combatants, may fairly be termed "fictitious." My own convic-tion is that had it not been for the money spent by Russia and by the Dalmatian Pan-Slav Committees upon certain influential chiefs, the insurrection would have long since collapsed. The mass of the population of the revolted districts would probably from the outset have been contented if they could have obtained a hearing for the Agrarian grievances under which they have undoubtedly labored. . . . As it is a large proportion of them have not resorted to arms. . . . In fact the purely agrarian population of the insurgent districts, comprising that portion whose grievances are well-founded, are almost entirely refugees.

Refugees indeed! These were the "refugees" trained by Ionin in Monte-negro. The Turkish government offered an armistice and amnesty, and agreed to negotiate on the basis of a note drawn up by Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, which mandated significant "reforms" in Turkey. But Ignatyev and the Pan-Slavs had no interest in negotiations or reforms, because the issue was not only the Balkans, but control over Russia itself.

The Pan-Slavs were agitating for the Russian government to fight Turkey over the Balkans. In May 1876, General Cherny-ayev took command of the Serbian army and the volunteers from the Pan-Slav apparatus in Russia. In June, Serbia declared war on Turkey.

The guns at Plevna, during the Russo-Turkish War in the Balkans.

Over the Tsar's Head

Tsar Alexander II opposed Ignatyev's Balkan adventures, emphasizing that he did "not want the sick man [Turkey, the "sick man of Europe"] and I wouldn't know what to do with him if I had him." The Tsar and his chief ministers, such as Finance Minister Reutern, understood that the whole operation was in fact aimed against the Petrine state. In arguing against the war, Reutern stated what was obvious to everyone, that a war would bank-rupt Russia and throw away almost 20 years of reform and social progress: "Even if we were victorious, we would be greatly impoverished, and in-creased taxes and other hardships would play into the hands of the revolu-tionaries."

The foreign minister, Gorchakov, was also opposed to the Balkan adven-tures. He remarked about one of the chief "society" patronesses of the Pan-Slav cause, Countess Antonina Bludova, a lady-in-waiting to the empress and a founder of a "philanthropic" Slavophile society in Petersburg in 1856: "That one will not rest easy until she is well-seated upon the crescent over Santa Sophia [the famous mosque in Constantinople, formerly an Orthodox Church]."

Tsar Alexander II began to realize by early 1876, what kind of a conspiracy was afoot in high-placed circles. The Pan-Slavs were setting up a huge agitation to force the Russian government to follow their lead, into war with Turkey over the Balkans. On June 18, 1876, Serbia declared war on Turkey, promptly followed by Montenegro. In May 1876, in defiance of the Tsar's orders, General Chernyayev arrived to take command of the Serbian army and the "volunteers" being funneled into the Balkans from the Pan-Slav apparatus in Russia. This is the same Chernyayev who had said, that an "external push" were necessary to transform Russia's government.

Chernyayev was not alone as he defied the Tsar's wishes. The following group of leading boyars and their retainers were fully backing him:

Count Illarion Ivanovich Vorontsov-Dashkov, Chief of Staff of the Guards Corps. Well before the latest outbreak, Vorontsov-Dashkov had become Chernyayev's financial and political patron. David MacKenzie described their relationship in The Lion of Tashkent: "Already in debt, Cherniaev borrowed from Vorontsov-Dashkov to finance his ventures. Extremely wealthy, the count shared Cherniaev's conservative views and became his financial advisor and benefactor." As chief of staff of the Guards Corps, Vorontsov-Dashkov "openly encouraged his men to volunteer," according to Cowles.

Prince V.A. Dolgoruky, governor-general of Moscow. This was the former Third Section head, who had known about the assassination planned by the "Hell" group against Alexander II, and done nothing to stop it, for which he was fired. Dolgoruky gave visas to all and sundry to go to the Balkans, without which visas it was impossible to travel. One of these was to Chernyayev, expressly forbidden by the Tsar to go.

Col. AL. Potapov, head of the Third Section. Potapov was assigned by the Tsar to keep an eye on Chernyayev so as to prevent him from linking up with the insurgents. Potapov failed.

Count P.A. Shuvalov, former Third Section head. Shuvalov was also fired for allowing at least one too many assassination attempts on the Tsar. He tried to line up a job for Chernyayev in the interior ministry, which the Tsar personally intervened to stop.

Prince Meshchersky, editor of Grazhdanin newspaper, sponsor of the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. Meshchersky wrote numerous articles, as did Dosto-evsky, agitating for war in the Balkans. When Chernyayev's gross incompe-

tence, including repeated commands to his forces to charge against fixed positions, resulted in mass slaughter of the insurgents—Russians, Monte-negrins, Serbs, and all—Meshchersky vigorously defended him. Meshcher-sky was later to be a chief sponsor of the Okhrana's Sergei Zubatov, organ-izer of the infamous "police unions" that fueled the revolutionary movement.

Revolutionaries in Tow

Along with the Pan-Slav volunteers in the Balkans, went their traditional allies, the revolutionaries. In Cowles's account: "Even revolutionaries were beginning to infiltrate the ranks in order to work for the overthrow of the Turkish and Austrian monarchies, and to get a free passage to the scene of action. Although the right-wing Panslavists saw what was happening they shut their eyes to it, as they needed professional agitators to stir up rebellions abroad. . . . Russian army officers [were] rubbing shoulders with Russian revolutionaries posing as hospital workers."

The Pan-Slav upsurge against the Petrine state was not exactly a secret. The figure responsible for getting Ignatyev his Constantinople appointment, Olga Novikova, was forced to reply to charges that she and her colleagues had brought about the Balkan wars, in her words, "to crush in Russia the present form of Government." She further acknowledged that "Some writers charge Mr. Aksakoff with being, as President of the Moscow [Slavonic] committee, the head-center of revolutionary Russia." Despite her protestations, she herself attested, in her 1880 book Russia and England, to the war to the death between the "two Russias": "There are two Russias. There is official Russia, and national Russia. There is, in a word, the Russia of St. Petersburg and the Russia of Moscow. St. Petersburg is not Russia! It is not vitalized with the fierce warm current of Russia's life blood."

Novikova and her friends of "national Russia" would soon take power, after the assassination of Alexander II. But even before, as Reutern had predicted, the hands of the revolutionaries were greatly strengthened. There were additions to their ranks from those "volunteers" employed by the Pan-Slavs in the Balkans, and a great increase in their technical abilities from skills learned in the war. Instead of the dagger and bullet, bombs and mines became the stock in trade of the nihilists.

Politically, the atmosphere in the wake of the Treaty of Berlin of 1878 was highly favorable to them as well, as the Pan-Slavs set up howls of outrage when the map agreed on earlier that year in the Treaty of San Stefano, fea-

turing the "big Bulgaria," favorable to further Russian Balkan adventures, was redrawn to the detriment of the Pan-Slavs. The Tsar was charged with having sold out, in the Treaty of Berlin, the territory won on the battlefield.

After the Balkan Wars

As Finance Minister Reutern had predicted, the 1875-78 Balkan War shifted Russian politics in favor of "the revolutionaries." More precisely, in favor of those who had been the revolutionaries' sponsors in the Balkan wars— the Pan-Slavs. The assassination of Alexander II on March 1, 1881, represented the final phase of a coup, a process which had been initiated with the plan-ning of the wars by Ignatyev.

The last of these wars, the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War, ended with the collapse of the Turkish forces in January 1878. The Turks then sued for peace. With Russian troops six miles from Constantinople, the Turks signed the Treaty of San Stefano on March 3, 1878. Various aspects of this treaty, in particular the "big Bulgaria" created according to the schemes of Ignatyev, upset some of the European powers, especially Britain; therefore the Rus-sian ambassador to Britain, former Third Section chief Peter Andreyevich Shuvalov, had to negotiate with Britain's Lord Salisbury (Cecil), the outline of what was signed at the Treaty of Berlin on July 13, 1878.

With this treaty, the foundations of World War I were securely laid. As Round Table historian Carrol Quigley put it in his Tragedy and Hope, "European history from 1878 to 1914 is just a commentary on the Treaty of Berlin."

Inside Russia, the returning Pan-Slavs and their allies in "society," also known as "public opinion," began a bitter campaign against the "sell-out by the Tsar" at the Treaty of Berlin, which relinquished all of Russia's hard-earned gains in the Balkans. Ivan Aksakov gave a speech blasting "this shameful treaty to the duty and historic mission of Russia," for which he was banished from Moscow.

The revolutionaries, now pouring back from the Balkans by the hundreds, began an intensive assassination campaign against leading figures of "official Russia." This new, systematic use of terror and assassinations was largely organized out of the South of the Russian Empire, in particular Odessa and also Kiev, with, once again, prominent aristocratic sponsorship.

Glossary

Boyar. A member of the old nobility of Russia, many of whose families, and land-holdings, were older than the Romanov Dynasty that ruled Russia 1613-1917.

Dragoman. In the Ottoman Empire, the dragoman system put all diplomatic duties, the "interpreting" from Istanbul to the rest of the world, in the hands of non-Turks. These included Jews who had fled from Spain, Greeks of the Phanar (lighthouse) District in Constantinople-Istanbul (known as Phanari-ots), and Hellenized Italians, especially Venetians. From 1669-1821, the Phanariots held the post of Grand Dragoman of the Porte, the equivalent of Ottoman Foreign Minister. The first two Grand Dragomans were Greeks from the Venetian-held island of Chios. Many Phanariot families, and others directly from Venice, participated in building up Russia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, where they fulfilled a dragoman function for the backward Muscovites.

Petrine state. Russia after the reforms of Peter the Great (ruled 1689-1725), who, among other things, curtailed the power of the boyars and introduced a system of ranks dependent on service.

Round Table. A political group in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain, whose financial mainspring was the gold and diamonds fortune of Cecil Rhodes and whose most prominent leader was Lord Alfred Milner. The Round Table gave rise, in Britain, to the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and, in the U.S., to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Slavophile. Nineteenth-century Russian romantic philosophical and cultural current, which glorified what the Slavophiles asserted to be the intrinsic qualities of Slav culture, such as "harmonious social relations" as opposed to Western individualism. It fueled the more blatantly aggressive Pan-Slav movement in the late nineteenth century.

Third Section, or Third Department, of His Majesty's Chancellery. The Russian imperial political police, created by Tsar Nicholas I in 1826. Its successor organization, in 1881, was the Okhrana.

The Trust. A deception and penetration project of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka and the OGPU, from 1921 to 1927. In the Trust, Soviet agents masqueraded as anti-Soviet underground fighters, to deceive Western

intelligence staffs about what was afoot in Bolshevik Russia. More broadly, "The Trust" refers to the international banking, political, and cultural net-works, active in the East and in the West, which financed and otherwise encouraged both Russian revolutions of 1917, and are still active in osten-sible power-sharing with Moscow today.