Vaso Čubrilović

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Vaso Čubrilović
(before World War I)

Vaso Čubrilović ( Serbian - Cyrillic Васо Чубриловић ; born January 14, 1897 in Bosanska Gradiška , Bosnia and Herzegovina , Ottoman Empire ; † June 11, 1990 in Belgrade , Yugoslavia ) was a Yugoslav historian and politician.

Čubrilović was involved in the 1914 assassination attempt on the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand . During Tito's Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia , he was a university professor and minister of agriculture and forestry.

Assassination attempt in Sarajevo

Čubrilović attended high school in Sarajevo. Politically, he was active in the radical movement Mlada Bosna that of Giuseppe Mazzini Risorgimento was thrilled movement and came after their model for a unification of Bosnia with Serbia. Vaso Čubrilović was won over by Danilo Ilić together with his older brother Veljko in 1914 to participate in the assassination attempt on Archduke Franz Ferdinand. After the fact, he was soon arrested and, like the others involved, confessed. Since he was still a minor, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison while his brother Veljko was sentenced to death by hanging. Vaso Čubrilović served part of his sentence in Bohemia. When the Danube Monarchy disintegrated in 1918, he returned to the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes .

After the war, Čubrilović studied history and then worked as a teacher, later as a university lecturer and professor in Belgrade. In the 1930s he advised the government on national problems in the Yugoslav multi-ethnic state. He took an extremely nationalist point of view.

Memorandum on the expulsion of the Albanians

In March 1937, Čubrilović submitted a memorandum to the Yugoslav government entitled Iseljavanje Arnauta (The Resettlement of the Albanians). In it he developed in detail a plan for the complete expulsion of the Albanians from Kosovo . He considered this to be absolutely necessary for the prosperous development of the Yugoslav state, which he always thought of as a Greater Serbian state. First, he analyzed why the government's measures to Serbize Kosovo were unsuccessful. On the one hand he accused the government of a lack of consistency, on the other hand he justified this with the aggressiveness of the Albanian race;

"In our case we have to keep in mind that we are dealing with a coarse, resilient and child-friendly race, which the late Cvijić said was the most expansive in the Balkans."

- Vasa Čubrilović in "Iseljavanje Arnauta"

Čubrilović saw the only solution in the forced eviction, tried to justify it and made practical suggestions for its implementation. He demanded the ruthless use of the entire power of the state apparatus against the Albanians. In view of the political climate at the time, he considered the expected foreign policy consequences to be minor.

History of the impact of the memorandum

Čubrilović's writing remained hidden from the public for decades. It was not intended for publication by the author, but was intended to influence the policy of the Yugoslav government. Because of the German attack on Yugoslavia in 1941, this did not happen either. Iseljavanje Arnauta disappeared in the archive.

The memorandum was rediscovered in the 1960s. It was leaked to the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha , among others , and a few copies also circulated among historians in Yugoslavia. There was no public discussion of the content at that time.

Dušan Bataković , a Serbian historian, reports that the memorandum became known to a broader group of people only in January 1988 when it was published in a series of articles in the Yugoslav newspaper “Borba”. The publication in the Serbian party newspaper came at a time when relations between the Serbs and Albanians in Yugoslavia were already extremely tense.

The core theses from Čubrilović's work were known to the communist leadership of Yugoslavia shortly after the war, because the author presented them to the new rulers in 1944 in another memorandum, The Minority Problem in New Yugoslavia .

After the Second World War

After the war, Vaso Čubrilović served himself to the new communist rulers. He stuck to his nationalistic sentiments, only now he appeared in private and in public as a “radical Yugoslav”, which changed little in his hostility towards the non-Slavic minorities.

In 1945 Čubrilović became dean of the Philosophical Faculty in Belgrade and a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) . From 1945 to 1946 he was Minister of Agriculture and from 1946 to 1950 Minister of Forestry. He summarized his view of the history of Serbia in the book Istorija političke misli u Srbiji XIX , published in 1958 . veka (History of Political Thought in Serbia in the 19th Century). In 1976 he was elected a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR .

Selected Works

  • Bosanski ustanak 1875–1878. (1930) - The Bosnian uprising 1875–1878
  • Srbija od 1858 do 1903. (1935)
  • Politička prošlost Hrvata. (1939) - The political past of the Croatians
  • Prvi srpski ustanak i bosanski Srbi. - The first Serbian uprising and the Bosnian Serbs
  • Istorija političke misli u Srbiji XIX veka. (1958)
  • Terminologija plemenskog društva u Crnoj Gori. (1959)
  • Svetozar Marković o nacionalnom pitanju u Austro-Ugarskoj. (1971) - S. Marković on the national question in Austria-Hungary
  • As editor: Istorija Beograda. 3 vols. (1974)
  • Odabrani istorijski radovi. (1983) - Selected historical works

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Vasa Čubrilović. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed February 27, 2016 (in Russian).
personal data
SURNAME Čubrilović, Vaso
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Чубриловић, Васо (srS)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Serbian historian and politician
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Gradiška , Bosnia
DATE OF DEATH June 11, 1990
Place of death Belgrade , Serbia