Nationalism, Myth, and the State in Russia and SerbiaAntecedents of the Dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia |
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9 August 2024 - Europe
Last month I finally finished reading Velko Vujačić's Nationalism, Myth, and the State in Russia and Serbia. I got it before my trip to Bosnia earlier this year and quickly realized that I wasn't going to agree with the central argument of the book, that cultural differences between Russians and Serbs were more important than Yeltsin and Milošević in determining whether they went to war with their neighbors to gain territory after the larger communist states of the USSR and Yugoslavia fell apart. The book was unfortunately written before Putin invaded Crimea. He deals with this in a post-script, but still glosses over the attack on Georgia in 2008 and other efforts Russia made to destabilize its neighbors. The dark elements where there in Russia too, but Yeltsin chose not to stoke those fires. Milošević did and once Yeltsin was out Putin did the same. While the book succeeds as an in-depth comparative look at the two cultures, the central thesis is easily falsified by subsequent history.
