Henry Bogdan: From Warsaw To Sofia

Unlike Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or even Poland during the interwar period, the Balkan states were characterized by dictatorial regimes which, by their attitudes and repressive systems, resembled the Ottoman Turkish regime more closely than the western democracies. Each of these states was a unique case.

From Tribalism to Royal Dictatorship: Albania

Between independence in 1920 and annexation by Italy in April, 1939, Albania experienced an active political life and underwent rapid changes. This situation was partly due to the tardy awakening of nationalism among the local elite and to the constraints of traditional tribal structures, reinforced by powerful religious antagonisms between Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox followers. Another constraint was the illiteracy rate, which was at this time over 90 percent. In addition, Albania suffered foreign interventions by Italians, Greeks and Yugoslavs.

In the April, 1921-elections, the vote was split between the northern conservatives under the direction of Shevket Verlazi, who opposed any agrarian reform, and the Populist party representing the southern bourgeoisie and the intellectuals under the leadership of Bishop Fan Norli, a Harvard graduate and the Albanian American's delegate. But the most prominent personality was Ahmed Zogu, a 25-year-old chieftain from a fierce central Albanian tribe. In a country where vendettas and tribal warfare were the rule, the real power lay with whoever possessed the military means to impose his authority. Ahmed Zogu possessed those means, and had often distinguished himself in battle at the head of his warriors. With the support of his tribe, the Mati, he seized power and declared himself head of state on December 22, 1922. In the elections held the following year, Zogu's partisans emerged the victors. His adversaries, however, led by Fan Norli, persevered. In January, 1924, Zogu was wounded in an assassination attempt and a general uprising followed. Zogu fled to Yugoslavia to await the right moment

Population of Albania

Inhabitants:

1923	817,000
1937	1,038,000

Religion:

Muslims	764,000 (68%)
Orthodox Followers	229,000 (20.7%)
Roman Catholics	104,000 (10.4%)

to return. On June 16, 1924, Fan Norli took over the government and began the process of reforming Albania into a democratic state. Meanwhile, the exiled Zogu was actively preparing a comeback. Within six months, supported by his warriors and the remnants of Wrangel's army in refuge in Yugoslavia, Zogu reappeared in Albania and ejected Fan Norli's government from Tirana.

After assuming the office of president of the Albanian Republic on January 21, 1925, Ahmed Zogu became a virtual dictator. In order to establish his authority and augment the country's coffers, he turned to Mussolini's Italy and in December, 1926, and December, 1927, signed agreements which essentially made Albania an Italian protectorate. Though an Italian vassal, Zogu was assured of his power at home. A constituent assembly elected under more than suspect conditions in August, 1928, unanimously granted him the hereditary title of King of Albania. King Zogu behaved like an oriental potentate as he attempted to modernize his overwhelmingly backward country. Despite his inclinations towards independence, the country's financial difficulties forced him to guide his policies by the wishes and interests of Italy. Then, Mussolini, fearing Albania's eventual rapprochement with neighboring Yugoslavia and the western democracies, put a brutal end to Zogu's reign with an invasion at dawn on April 7, 1939. Three days later, the entire country was in the hands of the Italians, and Victor Emmanuel III was declared King of Albania on June 3 by an assembly of Zogu's former adversaries. Albania's flirtation with independence had been brief.

From the "Green" Dictatorship to the Royal Dictatorship: Bulgaria

As head of state after the elections of August, 1919, and March, 1920, which gave his supporters 40 percent of the vote, Alexander Stambolijski tried to establish a "Green," or Agrarian party, dictatorship within the framework of the monarchy. King Boris III had remained discretely in the background from the beginning of his reign, and let Stambolijski govern. The prime minister particularly tried to please the peasants who represented three-quarters of the population. With the agrarian reform of 1922, he limited private property to 30 hectares and abolished peasant debts. But at the same time he demanded total submission of the peasants and obligatory labor, designed to provide inexpensive manpower for the construction of major public projects.

Stambolijski appeared to be making peace with the Communists, with whom he had fought so bitterly when he first took office. At a conference at Genes in l922, a political rapprochement was initiated between Bulgaria and the USSR. Meanwhile, within Bulgaria the police began jailing White Russian refugees who had been there since the end of the Russian Civil War.

Fear of an eventual bolshevization of Bulgaria brought the bourgeois parties together in a bloc against the Agrarians. Nationalists, grouped around the League of Officers and Professor Alexander Tsankov's National Entente, decided to take action against the Stambolijski regime. They denounced the agreement signed with Yugoslavia in April, 1923, which opposed IMRO and the Komitadji groups who were fighting for the liberation of Macedonia, as a betrayal of the Bulgarian homeland. The presence of 300,000 Macedonian refugees opposing any compromise with Belgrade furnished the Nationalists with additional power. Stambolijski countered the mounting opposition by creating the Orange Guards, made up of peasants devoted to his cause. Their intervention during the violence-fought elections in the spring of 1923 secured 216 of the 245 seats for the Agrarians.

The opponents responded to these rigged elections with a coup d'etat. During the night of June 8, 1923, the garrison at Sofia took over key points in the capital and arrested government ministers. King Boris III, who had not taken part in the plot, requested Alexander Tsankov to form a new government. Stambolijski, in his native village under the protection of militant peasants, was finally captured by the military after fierce resistance, and put to death on June 14 under exceptionally barbarous conditions. The Ottoman ways had not yet disappeared in Bulgaria. The Communists, who had supported Stambolijski on occasion, waited until after the coup to act. In August, 1923, the clandestine Central Committee under Georgi Dimitrov and Basil Kolarov advocated, despite opposition from some of the members, an armed uprising to be supported by the Agrarians. The government, however, was warned of the preparations and responded by arresting thousands of militant Communists and Agrarians. A general strike protesting these arrests as well as revolt in certain rural regions in the Balkan mountains September 20^th to 30^th were of only limited success. The cities did not join the movement. The repression that followed was harsh, and there were rumors that several thousand fell victim to the "White Terror." The Communist party was banned, but its leaders had already fled the country.

Tsankov's conservative and nationalist government organized elections in November of 1923, which gave 185 seats to the Democratic Entente of the bourgeois and nationalist parties. The opposition on the left garnered 62 seats from members of the early peasant and worker parties. Even though present in parliament, this opposition was nonetheless under constant police surveillance. The government's paranoia may have been well-founded, as on several occasions isolated elements tried to overthrow the government by force. The most spectacular terrorist act was the explosion set off in the cathedral at Sofia on April 16, 1925, shortly before the king's arrival. A hundred people were killed and over 300 wounded. Using this as an excuse,

the government hardened its position, and fanatical private groups organized their own forms of violent vengeance. All that the terrorist attempts succeeded in accomplishing was alienating the majority of the population, who hoped for peace and tranquility after ten years of war and upheaval.

King Boris III, disturbed by the excesses of the White Terror, turned the government over to a Macedonian, Andre Uapchev in January, 1926. While moderates flocked to the new government, IMRO terrorism did not abate. Ivan Mihajlov and the most determined members of IMRO stepped up their terrorist activities both in Bulgaria and in Macedonian Yugoslavia, in conjunction with Croatian nationalists. The economic crisis of the late 1920s was fatal to Liapchev's government, and the Agrarian opposition and the moderates of the Democratic party carried the elections of June, 1931. The new leaders, Malinov and the Democrat Muchanov, established a more liberal regime.

The rise of Nazism in Germany in the early 1930s inspired nationalist fervor in Bulgaria as well. Tsankov's Popular Social Movement which favored Germany, and the Zveno group, "the Link," led by the republican officer, Colonel Velchev, became the spokesmen of militant nationalism. On May 19, 1934, the Zveno group seized power and relegated the king to a position as a mere figurehead, once again putting Bulgaria under a dictatorship. This new military power embarked upon a completely unexpected foreign policy; while representing themselves as ultra- nationalists on the one hand, they opened negotiations for entente with Yugoslavia and reestablished relations with the Soviet Union on the other. King Boris did not allow them to remain in power for long. He dismissed Colonel Velchev in January, 1935, and soon afterward had him tried for attempting to overthrow the government. From then on, the king governed as an authoritarian through compliant politicians, while foreign policy became more closely aligned with that of Germany, Bulgaria's most important trading partner in the economic crisis. The new leaders, however, attempted to counterbalance German influence by signing agreements with Yugoslavia and the other Balkan countries. In 1938, like the other Balkan states, Bulgaria was governed by a royal dictatorship.

From Corruption to Palace Revolts: Rumania

Rumania between the first and second World Wars was a nation characterized by violent political clashes between various factions and by quarrels within the royal family. The addition of new provinces as well as the adoption of universal suffrage in 1919 caused upheaval in the political life of the country. The Treaty of Versailles in May, 1919, gave Rumania the provinces of Bessarabia, Bukovina, and from Hungary, the Banat and Transylvania. New political parties sprang up in answer to the new voting

population. The Conservative party disappeared, a victim of its former pro-German policies. Its place on the right was filled by two parties, the Liberal party of lonel Bratianu, a staunch defender of the interests of the urban middle class, and by the People's League led by General Avarescu. Avarescu was supported by former soldiers who hoped for a more authoritarian regime.

Beginning in 1920, several fiercely anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalist factions broke away from the People's League to form the National Christian party led by Alexander Cuza, and the National Christian Defense League of Corneliu Codreanu. In the center of the political spectrum sat the Peasant Czarist party of Ion Mihalache and the former Transylvanian National Rumanian party, led by Jules Maniu. These two parties later united as the National Peasant party. On the left, the Socialist party enjoyed a burst in popularity brought on by the economic difficulties caused by the war and by a failing currency. The Socialists, however, also suffered from splintering: in

I May, 1921, a large number of its militant members joined the Third International and formed the Rumanian Communist party.

Until the death of King Ferdinand I in 1927, Rumania was subjected to a series of governments that distinguished themselves by a penchant for rigging elections in their favor and by the violence and pressure they exerted on their opposition. The elections of November, 1919, were the first and the only elections to take place under nearly fair conditions, even though the Hungarian, German, and Macedonian national minorities--making up over 20 percent of the population--could not participate. The elections resulted in a majority for Mihalache's Peasant party and Maniu's Transylvanian party. The Transylvanian Vajda-Voevod, a former deputy to the Hungarian Parliament, formed a mixed cabinet, but the king dismissed it after three months because of growing peasant and worker unrest.

Power passed to the energetic General Avarescu. Avarescu quickly dissolved the chamber of deputies, and organized new elections which, after careful preparation, gave his party 224 of the 369 seats. Despite bad memories he had left in the countryside after his repressive tactics during the peasant uprisings of 1907, Avarescu believed he could resolve the peasant problem through agrarian reform. The reform, which affected the large landowners in Transylvania more than the Boyars in the older provinces, did succeed in appeasing the peasantry. The dictatorial nature of Avarescu's government, however, caused increasing discontent. Avarescu was removed by the king in January, 1922, and was succeeded by Ionel Bratianu's Liberals.

The new government of Bratianu repeated the pattern set by its predecessor, setting up elections that resulted in an overwhelming majority for the Liberals, who took 260 seats with the remaining hundred distributed

among all the other parties. The new parliament adopted another constitution in 1923, which allowed the king to retain sweeping executive powers. Parliament was divided into two chambers exercising legislative power; the senate was elected by a two-step ballot and included hereditary members, while the representatives of the chamber of deputies were elected to four-year terms by universal male suffrage. The same parliament passed a new electoral law which automatically gave half of the seats to the party obtaining 40 percent of the votes, with the rest distributed proportionally among the other parties, including the majority party. This assured the party with 40 percent of the vote of possessing at least three-fifths of the seats. The electoral law went into effect in time for the 1927 elections, and helped the Liberals to a resounding victory--despite the union of the two peasant parties into the National Peasant party, led by Jules Maniu. The elections themselves were nearly worthless. Never before had such pressure been exerted by the authorities; never had opposition candidates been so crudely abused by the police; never had electoral violence attained such a level. These methods shocked Maniu and the other Rumanian politicians of Transylvania, who were accustomed to the honest and efficient Hungarian administration of only a few years before.

Rumanian politics became even more complicated after the death of King Ferdinand on July 20, 1927. Ferdinand had come to power upon the death of his uncle Carol I, founder of the dynasty in 1914. He played a decisive role in Rumania's entry into the war on the side of the Allies, and had sent his wife, Queen Marie, to defend the interests of the country before Clemenceau, with the intention of assuring that Rumanian interests would prevail at the Peace Conference. Throughout his reign, Ferdinand was a major political force through his advisor, Prince Barbu Stirbey, who had close ties to the Liberal party. Stirbey was, in fact, the brother-in-law of Ionel Bratianu. The crown, by process of succession, should have gone to Prince Carol, the son of the deceased king. But the Prince's dissolute private life and his indiscreet relationship with a promiscuous Jewess, the famous Helene Lupescu, led King Ferdinand to pressure Carol into renouncing his rights to the throne in January, 1926. The rights of succession passed to Michael, Carol's young son by his legitimate wife, Queen Helene. Accordingly, at the age of six, Michael became king under a regency composed of his uncle Prince Nicholas, the Orthodox Patriarch Miron Cristea of Transylvania, and the president of the high court of appeals, Gheorge Buzdugan.

The National Peasant party chose to use the regency period to move against the Liberals. Circumstances seemed favorable as Ionel Bratianu had died on November 24, 1927. But Bratianu,s death changed little since his brother succeeded him at the head of the government. Persecution of the opposition intensified. In January, 1928, for example, the Transylvanian

deputy Vajda-Voevod was barred from parliament for 30 seatings for having dared to protest the methods of those in power and for comparing the new Rumanian regime with the former Hungarian regime in Transylvania. The National Peasant deputies boycotted parliament, and in March, 1928, organized large protest demonstrations in the streets of the capital, Bucharest. At the same time, the nationalist far-right increased its activities, most notably the brutal persecution of Jewish minorities. The streets became an arena for clashes between various political groups. The regents reluctantly agreed to withdraw from the Liberal cabinet, and on November 10, 1928, Maniu formed an entirely National-Peasant cabinet, with Transylvania prominently represented by Vajda-Voevod as minister of the interior, and Popovici in charge of the finance ministry. On December 15, 1928, Maniu's supporters emerged victorious from the elections with 78 percent of the votes and 348 seats, compared to the Liberals' ten. Maniu quickly conformed to prevailing political customs and proceeded to use the same tactics employed by his adversaries. Monetary problems brought on by the fall of the lei also confronted him, but by February, 1929, he had managed to stabilize the currency through foreign loans. A serious social crisis then began in the country, provoked by a renewed outbreak of Communist agitation: there were strikes in Bucharest, in Timisoara (formerly Temesvar), and in the coal-mining area of the Lupeni valley. In October, 1929, the old tradition of nepotism reappeared with the death of the regent Buzdugan; Maniu had him replaced with Constantine Sarateanu, brother-in-law of Vajda-Voevod and a relative of Popovici.

Maniu's systematic takeover of the positions of power was motivated by his plan to recall Prince Carol from his exile in Paris eventually, and to have himself declared the sole regent governing the country in the king's name. On June 5, 1930, Carol arrived by airplane in Transylvania and on June 8, parliament declared him King of Rumania as Carol II. His return just as the country was beginning to feel the effects of the world-wide depression was ill-timed. Maniu withdrew in October following a disagreement with the sovereign, and was followed by a succession of cabinets headed by the diplomat Titulescu, the historian lorga, and the Transylvanian, Vajda- Voevod. Each proved as inept as the next in solving the country's problems: peasant unrest because of falling prices in agriculture and the price of land, and discontent among the workers because of growing unemployment. In 1931, several bank failures destroyed the savings of the bourgeoisie, and the middle classes began to join the ranks of the discontented. Moreover, parliament was dissolved three times--in 1931, 1932, and 1934--and electoral fraud continued, contributing to the growing gap between legal and popular representation.

The clearest manifestation of popular discontent was in the rise of

extremist movements. Primarily nationalistic and anti-Semitic, these movements gained power at the expense of the established parties. In the early 1930s, Corneliu Codreanu dominated the nationalist far right. Head of the National Christian Defense League, Codreanu's resume included organizing a wave of anti-Semitic violence in Rumania in 1923. Accused of participating in a political assassination, Codreanu was arrested and tortured in May, 1924, along with several of his supporters. He retaliated by assassinating the police commissioner of Jassy, responsible for his torture, and was again arrested. After acquittal in a jury trial, Codreanu renamed his movement the Legion of the Archangel Gabriel, which after merging with several other nationalist movements became the Iron Guard. An outspokenly ultra-nationalist, violently anti-Semitic, and blatantly fascist movement, the Iron Guard possessed a paramilitary force called the Guardists, who wore a green-shirted uniform and adopted the fascist salute. Their acts of violence prompted Maniu to ban them; a policy followed by succeeding governments. This did not dim the ardor of the militants, however; they joined forces with Transylvanian German "cultural associations" and were further influenced by pan-German propaganda. Upon election in 1934, Premier Duca had many Guardists arrested, and many perished under torture in prisons. The Guardists retaliated by assassinating Duca on December 29, 1934, and King Carol II promptly appointed a Liberal named Georgi Tatarescu as premier. Tatarescu had the conspirators of the assassination arrested and tried along with Codreanu; the assassins were condemned to life in prison, but Codreanu was acquitted for lack of evidence.

By 1935, anti-Semitism and nationalism were rampant in the country. Jews were barred from some professions--for example, in 1937, lawyers, doctors, and pharmacists moved to exclude their Jewish colleagues. Under these pressures, the established parties split into factions, breaking from or joining with the increasingly popular Iron Guard. In 1935, a segment of the National Peasant party under Vajda-Voevod negotiated an alliance with Codreanu, while the remainder under Maniu sought an agreement with Tatarescu's Liberal government. By 1937, however, the alliances had shifted: Maniu and Codreanu joined forces for the elections of 1937 against the Liberals and Vajda-Voevod. These elections resulted in an unworkable assembly, and King Carol II personally took over the reins of government, producing a new constitution in February, 1938. It passed overwhelmingly in a referendum: 4,289,000 voters accepted it next to 5,483 dissenting.

By 1938, King Carol had become a virtual dictator. First he attacked the far right, arresting Codreanu and hundreds of Guardists in May, 1938. A few months later, during the night of November 29, Codreanu and 14 Guardist prisoners were killed during an alleged escape attempt. Carol had not singled out the far right for punishment alone, for simultaneously numerous militant

Socialists and Communists were jailed. King Carol used his newly acquired constitutional powers to abolish all political parties in favor of a one-party system, named the National Renaissance Front. From this point onwards, he was absolute master of the state. This did not put an end to nationalist agitation, however, which was marked by numerous political assassinations as it grew. Here again, Balkan custom persisted.

The Greater Serbian Dictatorship: Yugoslavia

The union of all the southern Slavic peoples into the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes on December 1, 1918, quickly turned into a Serbian annexation of the other minorities living in Yugoslavia. From the very beginning, the Serbs played a dominant and dominating role in the new state: the throne belonged to the Serbian Karageorgevitch dynasty, high government officials were almost without exception Serbian political figures, and the officer corps of the new army was filled with officers of the former Serbian army. Furthermore, each government from 1918 onwards pursued similar policies of centralization, Serbian nationalism, and authoritarianism. This was hardly surprising, as the new regime had immediately refused to instate the federalism promised the Croats and Slovenes in order to separate them from Austria-Hungary during the war. The first Serbian regime fought not only the federalist desires of the new provinces, but also for the Socialist Workers party promoting the Third International. This party became the Yugoslavian Communist party in June, 1920, with a splinter reformist party breaking away in late 1920.

The radical Serbian party of Pashitch, in power since King Peter's accession to the throne in 1903, continued to dominate the political scene. Even after Pashitch's death in 1926, the Radical party continued in strength with the support of two other Serbian parties, the Democratic and Agrarian parties. With the electoral laws in their favor, the three Serbian parties carried the elections held for the constituent assembly in 1920. Their opposition consisted of the Communist party, which obtained some 50 seats, and several political groups representing the new territories. Most notable of these were Mehmed Spaho's Organization of Yugoslavian Muslims, Father Korosec's Popular Slovene party, and Stephan Raditch,s Croatian Peasant party, whose 58 deputies refused to take their seats in protest of broken promises for a federalist state. The Hungarian and German minorities were not permitted to take part in the elections, and later were deliberately excluded from the assemblies.

The pan-Serbian majority adopted the authoritarian and centralizing Vidovdan Constitution on June 28, 1921. The resulting regime was a dictatorship marked by corruption and electoral coercion, scarcely disguised by its parliamentary trappings. In August, 1921, the Communist party was

the first to be abolished, as a result of a series of Communist-inspired strikes during the preceding year. In 1924, it was the Croatian Peasant party's turn, and Raditch was arrested for a brief time. Raditch had dared to demand self-determination for the Croatian people, and even had the audacity to stand up in the middle of parliament and state--to the great indignation of the Serbian deputies and the loud applause of the Croatian and Slovene deputies -- that "the Croats were not slaves under the Habsburg monarchy'" and that the Serbs "were never their liberators." These impassioned but unfortunate words earned him a term in prison for treason.

Parliament became the arena for more and more violent confrontations between the Serbian parties and the parties from other regions of the kingdom. The point of no return was reached on June 20, 1928, when during a full session of parliament a Montenegrin deputy, Punitsa Ratchich, aimed his revolver at the Croatian Peasant's party and pulled the trigger several times, instantly killing two deputies and gravely wounding Raditch, who died a few days later. Such violence did not prevent the Peasant party, led by Raditch's former secretary Vladko Matchek, from continuing the fight for Croatian autonomy. However, the crisis provoked by the events of June 20 resulted in the establishment of a royal dictatorship. King Alexander (1921-34) dissolved parliament on January 6, 1929, and abolished the Vidovdan Constitution of 1921. Individual freedoms and freedoms of the press--what was left of them--were suspended, while all local elected assemblies were replaced by commissions appointed by the Central Powers. Then in 1931, King Alexander promulgated a new constitution even more centralizing than the preceding one. The constitution abolished the historic provincial divisions, and changed the name of the country to Yugoslavia, now divided into nine banovinas (territories). The role of parliament was reduced to that of a rubber stamp as the ministers answered only to the king. The constitution also banned all regionally-based parties. Accordingly, the Croatian, Slovene, and Macedonian parties, as well as those parties representing national minorities, joined the Communist party (banned in 1921) in illegality. Most of the national political leaders were arrested along with thousands of underground militant Communists.

The royal dictatorship succeeded in radicalizing groups opposed to greater Serbian nationalism. Active Croat nationalists formed a secret society, the Ustasha, led from Rome by an exiled lawyer, Ante Pavelitch. Law-abiding Croats from the Peasant party attempted to take measures to save the situation. In late 1932, they asked the king to restore suspended freedoms as well as equality among the three ethnic groups of Yugoslavia. Their reasoning was sound: in the Yugoslavian army of 1932, there was only one Croatian out of 116 generals, and similar proportions existed throughout all branches of higher administration. The king's response was emphatically

negative. Furthermore, he had the principal leaders of the Croat Peasant party arrested. From this point onwards, direct action seemed to be the only effective way of making Croatian voices heard. The pan-Serbian terrorism which had enjoyed the tolerance, if not the complicity, of the government from 1919 to 1929 was almost completely superseded by anti-Serbian terrorism by 1933. And it was, in fact, a Macedonian IMRO terrorist recruited by the Ustasha who assassinated King Alexander along with the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Louis Barthou, in Marseille on October 9, 1934.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the attack in Marseille helped release some tension. King Peter 11, son and successor to Alexander, was still very young, and so Prince Paul, the deceased king's cousin, took over as regent. The new prime minister, the Serbian Milan Stojadinovitch, released Matchek and other Croat Peasant leaders, and attempted to isolate the IMRO and Ustasha extremist movements through diplomatic agreements with Italy and Bulgaria. In order to partially satisfy the Croats and the Slovenes, at least in the area of religion, Stojadinovitch signed a concordat with the Holy See, formally placing Catholicism on an equal footing with Orthodoxy. This concession unleashed the furor of Orthodox Serbians, who demonstrated noisily in Belgrade and ransacked several Catholic churches; religious tolerance was still foreign to the Yugoslavian peoples of this era. Stojadinovitch's successor, Cvetkovitch, followed his example in attempting to settle the Croat problem. In August, 1939, Cvetkovitch concluded an agreement with Matchek's Peasant party, providing for an autonomous Croatian banovina, and bringing Matchek into the Yugoslavian government as vice-premier. These concessions, which came so late and so reluctantly, appeared to many Croats as motivated more by opportunism than by sincerity. The concessions did not succeed in checking the terrorist activity of the Ustasha, whose declared objective was total Croatian independence with the support of the Axis powers if necessary.

Like Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia never managed to achieve either a spiritual or political unity of its various populations. Both countries were artificial creations born of the imaginings of politicians isolated from the common people. Both were soon to suffer the consequences.

Henry Bogdan: From Warsaw To Sofia