WEEK 6, 14 February 2002
WORLD WAR II: "The Chaotic Gap"

* Indicates books on reserve at Green Library.

*John Lampe, Yugoslavia as History (2000), 201-32

*Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country (1991), 79-127

  • ch. 3, "The Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the Popular Front, 1925-41"
  • ch. 4, "National State and Genocide: The Ustasha Movement, 1929-45"

    Paul Shoup, Communism and the Yugoslav National Question (1968), 60-100

  • ch. 2, "Nationalism and the Partisan Movement"

    *Milovan Djilas, Wartime (1977), 91-215

  • "The Civil War within a War"
  • "The New Army"

    STUDY QUESTIONS:

    The Milovan Djilas reading is from a memoir by one of the leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party and wartime Partisan movement (he would become a prominent dissident in the mid-1950s). There's no need to read it for the details. Instead, I hope it gives a more palpable sense of the war than the scholarly texts. Also, try to think about his accounts of and reflections on the various forces (Partisans, Chetniks, Ustasha) in light of the other readings (e.g., Shoup on the Partisans' policies toward "the national question").

    Re: the chapters from Aleksa Djilas (incidentally, Milovan's son): How and why did the Communist Party's views of the national question change during the interwar period? What does Djilas see as the ideological origins of the Ustasha movement? How does he compare it to Nazism?

    The rather brief chapter in Lampe will give you an overview of the war. You may also want to look back at the previous two chapters to refresh your memory of aspects of the prewar period.