The Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the Montenegrin Question until 1945: Tradition, Ideology, and Politics

Abstract

The national question occupied a central place in the policy of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) during the interwar period. Yugoslav communists therefore devoted particular attention to the Montenegrin question as one of the unresolved issues that emerged after the unification and establishment of the Yugoslav state. This paper seeks to analyze the CPY’s attitude toward the Montenegrin national and state question in the context of the communist approach to the existing historical traditions of the Serbian nation in Montenegro and Montenegrin statehood, as well as in the context of the influence of communist ideological concepts and contemporary political developments on this issue up to 1945.

Summary: Until the end of the First World War and the establishment of a new Yugoslav state framework through unification with the Kingdom of Serbia, the Montenegrin state had an exclusively Serbian national character. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia, as a new political force, was confronted, among other issues, with one of the most pressing problems of the Yugoslav state—the unresolved national question. The Montenegrin question also figured in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes/Yugoslavia, but exclusively as a constitutional and state-legal issue, that is, as a legitimist dispute concerning the manner of the 1918 unification with the Kingdom of Serbia, rather than as a national question. The CPY, however, also defined the Montenegrin question as a national question, treating it alongside other national questions as one of the means of dismantling the Yugoslav state. In addressing the Montenegrin state and national question, the communists made selective use of historical tradition, placing primary emphasis on Montenegro’s constitutional and state-legal status, applying ideological criteria to the interpretation of the issue as a whole, and acting in accordance with the policies of the USSR and the Comintern toward Yugoslavia. The communist approach to the Montenegrin question was consistent with the policy directed against so-called “Great-Serbian hegemony,” which was essentially anti-Serbian and anti-Yugoslav until the mid-1930s. The Montenegrin national question acquired its definitive form in CPY policy and in the new revolutionary state in 1945, when one of the leading Montenegrins, Milovan Đilas, defined it in terms of a new Montenegrin nation that inherited Serbian origins while also possessing its own identity, shaped through the development of Montenegrin statehood.