Just under two years ago, I wrote a short commentary for the Belgrade weekly Vreme in which I outlined the condition of Serbian national politics in Montenegro:
In Montenegro, it is exceptionally difficult to be a national Serb of genuinely anti-colonial and sovereign-minded convictions. For one must contend not only with the followers of Krsto Zrnov Popović — servant of the Italian occupier — and their clownish ‘Duklja-style’ revisionism of the partisan struggle, which they portray as an expression of chauvinistic anti-Serb sentiment, but also with the followers of Pavle Đurišić, servant of both Italian and German occupation. Indeed, not only do these latter ‘protect’ you from the former, they go a step further and proclaim themselves to be the exclusive and only authentic Serbs. And this purportedly ‘authentic Serbian identity’ serves primarily as a bargaining chip in the hands of the current director of the final phase of the farcical degradation of Serbian nationalism
— Aleksandar Vučić.
Since then, nothing has changed. The only thing worth adding is that Dukljanism itself is an ideology that originally stemmed from the Zelenaši’s Serbo-Montenegrin racial supremacism directed against non-Montenegrin Serbs — an ideology that would later, under the influence of Croatian rightism (pravaštvo) on Montenegrin students studying in Zagreb and certain politicians between the two world wars and during the communist era, acquire its overtly anti-Serb character.
This implies that in Montenegro we are not dealing with just one, but rather two originally Serbian, self-destructive, auto-colonial closed ideological systems. Besides their Serbian origin, what they have in common is a shared hostility toward historical truth.
One of them — the Ravnogora current — has captured and subordinated the Christian and traditional Serbian identity to its petty political scheming. The other — Dukljanism — has hijacked the country’s leftist, libertarian, and anti-colonial legacy.
And so the question arises: what would a truly Montenegrin-Serbian political vision look like — one that could reconcile the country’s historical identity with all the positive elements of the WWII partisan struggle?
Nowhere, perhaps, has the historical fate of the Serbian people in the 20th century been expressed as starkly and cruelly as in Montenegro. It is a fate marked by two great, paradoxical tragedies: the royalist Ravnogora anti-communism, which — together with the minor Zelenaši factions — descended into suicide through collaboration with occupying forces; and the partisan epic, which, after its military triumph, was smothered decades later in its own bureaucratic decadence. “Everything that decays, decays disgracefully,” wrote Milovan Đilas in his Montenegro. One could say that in today’s Montenegrin society, both of these legacies continue to rot beneath the illusion of eternal glory, unaware that their demise is long since a settled fact.
One group comforts itself with the notion that the treacherous betrayal and bloodletting of political opponents and Muslims were not, in the end, all that terrible. The other clings to the belief that they never truly betrayed the ideals of the partisan struggle — that they never became precisely what they once condemned in their enemies: traitors and collaborators with the occupier. And that their own brutality, including the purging of dissenters even within their own ranks, was somehow justified — a regrettable but necessary means to build a better world. A world that, in the end, was never built.
And yet, Serbs in Montenegro not only have the right, but the duty, to honor the ideals of their partisan heritage, just as they must honor the earlier tradition of freedom-loving resistance. Not through cheap political sloganeering and Titoist iconography, but by embracing the core values that the partisan struggle once embodied: resistance to occupation, the defense of national dignity, the fight for justice, social equality, and decolonization.
Nevertheless, this respect must not exclude awareness of the profound moral and political errors of the so-called “Leftist Deviations” — a period when the Party, gripped by distrust toward the population’s loyalty or fear of bourgeois influence, killed not only suspected collaborators, but also its own sympathizers. These actions pushed many people into the arms of the Ravnogora movement — not because the latter had a vision or were right in their shameful dealings with the Italians and Germans, but because, amid the pogroms against Orthodox Christians and clergy in the USSR, and the brutal purges of 1941 and 1942 at home, to conservative and traditional people the alternative seemed like the desecration of everything they had known.
And yet, a far more pressing question for Montenegrin society is this: must ideas be held hostage by the past? Does the collaboration and betrayal of those who, at least traditionally, upheld Christian values during the 1940s — followed by the betrayal and collaboration of those emerging from the left in the 1990s — mean that values should be judged according to the corrupt individuals who misused them, rather than by their intrinsic content?
When, in Montenegro or anywhere within the Serbian ethnic space, the partisan tradition is dismissed as merely “commie” or “atheistic” — which it certainly was not — we lose our connection to one of the noblest chapters of popular resistance. Just as the crude anti-church posture of modern Dukljans and self-styled “leftists” forgets the fact that the People’s Liberation Struggle (NOB) was a broad popular front, in which numerous Orthodox believers and priests took part — many of whom were executed by the occupiers and various collaborators for precisely that reason. Likewise, when Christian faith is reduced to mere ritual or an ethnic marker, stripped of social justice and compassion for all human beings, it loses its very essence.
That is why the time has come to reunite those two vital sources — the liberationist ideas of the left and Christian ethics. Not as relics, but as the driving force of a new, native, popular movement. In this sense, we should not reach for the indefensible figures and policies of the tragic twentieth century, but instead learn from those who, within that same century, clearly discerned the essential truths.
Russian theologian and political thinker Sergey A. Bulgakov, writing in the early 20th century, observed that “capitalism is spiritual anarchy — the estrangement of man from man, and from God as well.” Yet he also warned that in striving to build a Christian socialism, the Orthodox Church risked becoming a political party, modeled after the Roman Catholic practice of infiltrating and controlling political movements, whose sole purpose was to maintain the existing order.
And still, his words remain strikingly relevant today:
“Even more indisputable is the second limitation of the basic dogma of pagan political economy — the notion of perpetual wealth growth. Wealth must not be acquired through violence, through the torment of others, through banditry and plunder. Unfortunately — as we shall further see — such a path has been the most frequent and consistent throughout history, and even today so-called civilized humanity has not abandoned it. This applies not only to internal capitalist enslavement, tied to the modern organization of production, but also to what is known as colonial policy, which is nothing other than a form of international banditry and theft. Civilized states compete to seize by force the territories of militarily weaker peoples, in order to plunder them (or, to put it more politely, to ‘exploit their colonies’)…” The thunder of events that now unfold — the general strikes, even the deaf have heard them — signals that we are living in a new capitalist world, where the relationship between labor and capital represents a complex and painful issue of social conscience. In confronting it, it is a sin to be content with Pharisaic nodding; one must, above all, understand it scientifically. The political changes ahead, and the powerful current of the liberation movement, must shatter even the most hardened prejudice — that there is only one, once-and-for-all given form of political life, and that all who challenge its essence are sinners and renegades.”
This lesson is especially important because Montenegrin society has endured two great delusions: the first — that honor lies in preserving the established order at any cost, even through collaboration with the occupier; and the second — that power is the sole meaning of revolutionary social change, rather than its mere instrument.
Serbian politics in Montenegro must no longer be a hostage to defeat, to myths, or to the false dilemma posed by these two historical caricatures. It is time for something new to be built upon the ruins of failed ideologies — not by simply rejecting the past, but by re-examining it in depth.
The Serbian idea in Montenegro must once again become a vision of emancipation, justice, and dignity for all its citizens, regardless of their ethnic or religious background — not a mere reaction to other people’s narratives. Only then can something arise from the ashes of these two discredited legacies — both the pseudo-spiritualist and the pseudo-revolutionary — something that truly belongs to our time, and not to the eras that disfigured us.
