|
Index of Lectures on The Balkans in
the Age of Nationalism by Steven W Sowards
Lecture 24:
The failure of Balkan Communism and the causes of
the Revolutions of 1989
[This lecture was written in August 1995. It is clear after the passage of more
than two years that some sections would be written differently today. However, in the
interests of fininshing the project of posting the entire series of lectures on the Web, I
have elected to keep the original text with only minor editing: interested readers should
pursue newer information and interpretations in their libraries.]
The Revolutions of 1989 that ended Soviet-style Communism in the East European
socialist states from the Baltic to the Balkans, were both dramatic and largely
unexpected. It will be many years before a full documentary record is available, or the
evidence required for a complete, reliable picture of what happened. However, one can
discuss the causes of 1989, and explore some interpretations. This lecture discusses four
explanations. Many of the key events in those explanations are interrelated, and it makes
some sense to treat them as four stages in a lengthy process.
Briefly, these four explanations are:
- Collapse due to economic failure: The Revolutions of 1989, and the general unrest which
preceded them during the 1980s, have been interpreted as outgrowths of the economic
failure of Communism. During the 1970s, the Eastern European Communist states pursued
high-risk development strategies that relied on foreign loans to pay for construction of
modernized economies. When oil prices rose in 1973 and 1979 and slowed the world economy,
the Bloc states could no longer make payments on their debts, and this led to a loss of
credit and internal economic problems from which they never recovered.
- Collapse due to the arms race: The end of Soviet Communism has also been explained as a
result of an economic crisis, in which American military pressure and the costs of the
arms race were the most important causes. Under Presidents Carter, Reagan and Bush, the
United States forced the Soviets to spend so much money on high-tech weapons that the
Communist economy was bankrupted, after too many resources were diverted from productive
investments and consumer needs.
- Collapse due to "perestroika" in the Soviet Union: Another explanation points
to the Soviet Union, and emphasizes the "perestroika" politics of Mikhail
Gorbachev, without which revolutionary change in Eastern Europe would have remained
impossible. Gorbachev did two things: he sanctioned an unprecedented degree of change in
the Communist world, and he made it clear that the Brezhnev Doctrine of 1968 was no longer
in force. Once it was clear that the Soviet Union would no longer intervene in the affairs
of its neighbors, Eastern Europeans were able to address their own local needs in their
own way.
- Collapse due to the rise of alternatives to Communism: An approach that looks for
explanations within Eastern Europe, rather than from the outside, argues that economic
failure and the loss of Russian Communist pressure still do not explain the specific
events and outcomes of the East European and Balkan Revolutions of 1989. The entrenched
Communist leadership might have retained power on their own, except for the growth of
alternatives, to which the various nations could turn to redefine their societies. Because
this view uncovers very different developments in the various states, and therefore also
explain why the revolutions had such very different outcomes in various parts of the
Bloc. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, for example, alternatives included the so-called
"civil society" movement, and provided local leaders like Poland's Lech Walesa
and Czechoslovakia's Vaclav Havel, who stood up to authoritarian rule in the late '70s and
early '80s to demand political pluralism and individual freedom. At the same time, states
like the former Yugoslav republics followed a contrasting path, in which the most
successful alternatives involved nationalist figures who reintroduced familiar Balkan
themes.
The interaction of these explanations,and of critical events outside Eastern Europe, is
apparent in following the development of Eastern European Communism in the two decades
preceding 1989.
Step One: Economic failure
Eastern European Communism reached its political and economic high point in the late
1960s and early 1970s. The Soviet Union had become a scientific and military superpower
comparable to the United States. Thanks to limited economic reforms like the New Economic
Mechanism in Hungary, and acceptance of a semi-private "second economy," the
Communist states achieved striking economic growth. This economic success made it hard to
dismiss socialism as a valid alternative to capitalism, especially for developing nations.
Between 1965 and 1970, gross national product (GNP) per capita in the six Comecon
states (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria) grew annually
by between 2.7 and 4.0 percent, compared to 2.5 percent for the United States. From
1970-75, GNP per capita rose in the same six states by 2.7 to 5.7 percent (an average of
4.2 percent), compared to a mere 1.2 percent in the U.S. and 1.3 percent in West Germany.
In Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia, GNP per capita doubled between 1960 and 1975, and new
production began to include a higher proportion of consumer goods. GNP per capita was
still only half of the American level, but the Communist states seemed to be catching up
while offering universal health care, access to education, and full employment.
These growth figures were in some ways misleading. The Bloc countries began with such
low levels of economic productivity that small increases translated into large percentage
rates. Non-Communist Greece had rates of growth for1967-70 and 1970-75 that were even
higher than those for the Comecon states (6.6 percent for Greece, 4.9 percent for the
Bloc), and for the same reason.
Three traps were ahead for the East European economies.
First, growth on the cheap was about to end. Opportunities to build on previously
untapped natural resources were exhausted: no more simple new hydroelectric dams, or mines
exploiting high quality surface ores. The pool of underemployed rural labor -- an asset
when new factories opened -- also had now been committed. The Soviet Union had subsidized
growth by offering economic aid, petroleum and natural gas supplies, and expertise at low
costs; world events would soon force Moscow to curtail these resources or demand market
value. East Bloc labor had worked hard for minimal rewards, and by doing so, those workers
were subsidizing socialism: when workers began to demand more consumer goods and improved
housing, overall costs rose within the system. After 1970 these old advantages
vanished.
Second, economic reform introduced new expectations. When the Bloc regimes accepted
limited levels of Western profit incentives (through reforms like the New Economic
Mechanism), they fostered popular demands for better conditions. The Solidarity union
movement in Poland was the unintended result of such a reform. When the Polish state
stopped subsidizing low food prices in 1970, consumers experienced reduced access to
goods: the resulting dissatisfaction caused the Gdansk shipyard strike, which in turn
began a process that created an independent trade union movement ten years later.
Third, contact with Western economic forces exposed the Communist economies to the
risks, as well as the benefits, of free enterprise and modern economic structures. Access
to Western loans is an example. The Communist states lacked hard currency to invest in
modern industries that could compete with the West in advanced technologies and consumer
goods. To pay for imported Western machines and services, the East European states
borrowed from Western banks. By 1980 Hungary owed $9 billion to Western lenders; Romania
owed $10 billion. The new East Bloc industries planned to sell the output of the new
industries on the world market, and so raise the cash to repay the loans. Two things
undercut this plan.
First, too much loan money was spent unproductively, subsidizing short-term consumer
needs, lost to corruption, or wasted on bad investments like the $2 billion Smederovo
steel works in Serbia, a factory that never turned a profit.
Second, the Comecon states became economic hostages to Western business cycles.
They were among the victims of the 1973 world oil crisis when the OPEC states drove
up the cost of energy from a 1973 index level of 80, to 138 in 1975. The Iranian
revolution of 1979 caused another increase in energy costs, to an index level of 238 in
1980 and 276 in 1982. Even after the crises ended, typical index levels remained remained
around 125 or 130.
As a result, the debt-laden Bloc states could no longer stretch their financial
resources far enough to buy energy to produce new goods, repay old loans, and meet
domestic consumer demand at the same time.. Without hard currency for debt repayment,
vital Western investments would dry up: to pay back the loans, the Bloc states back on
consumer goods, and this created lines at stores, general misery, and a loss of confidence
in local economies and currencies (in the 1980s, cartons of Kent cigarettes had replaced
currency as the preferred medium of exchange in Romania). Per capita GNP stopped rising in
the 1980s; in Poland GNP figures actually began to go down.
Step Two: Cold War pressures
At the same time that the oil crises were straining Comecon finances by raising the
price of energy, increased East-West tensions added burdensome military expenses.
When the period of "detente" ended in the late 1970s, the USSR and the US
resumed a high-tech, high-cost strategic arms race. The Carter administration began work
on neutron bombs and missile systems like the mobile MX and the cruise missile, which were
deployed under Reagan in the 1980s. The USSR's 1979 intervention in Afghanistan to
preserve a communist regime led to a lengthy, costly war. In 1970, the military share of
the Soviet GNP was estimated to be about 13 percent of total GNP. By 1988 this had grown
to 16 percent. These military costs went up when the USSR could least afford it.
While the East European and Balkan socialist states were not directly affected by these
costs, they soon faced reduced Soviet aid as an indirect result. The USSR began to demand
market prices for its products, especially oil and gas. Thus the arms race compounded the
effects of other economic problems in the Balkans. Economic hard times were not new in the
Bloc, but in the 1980s they combined with new political phenomena to set the stage for
1989.
Step Three: Perestroika
The revolutionary events of 1989 differed widely from place to place. This suggests
that the decisions of East European and Balkan leaders determined the nature of specific
events during the transition from socialism. Aging leaders remained in control of the
Communist states, except in Yugoslavia, where Tito's death in 1981 ushered in an awkward
system of short-term presidents drawn in rotation from all the consitutent republics.
While states like Hungary allowed experimentation in their economies in the '80s,
tolerance for change did not extend to political pluralism: the rationale for innovation
remained pragmatic economic development.
The simultaneous rise of Mikhail Gorbachev to power in the Soviet Union signaled not
only economic pragmatism, but a willingness to experiment in politics too. A fundamental
factor universally at work in Balkan events was the transformation of Soviet Russian
policy, and in that sense, a major impetus for change in the 1980s originated outside the
Balkans. "Perestroika" (new thinking) in Russia began with economic reforms and
a role for criticism under the concept of "glasnost" (openness). At the 1988
Party Congress speakers made real critiques of state policy. Combined with moves toward
secret ballots and real elections, tolerance of such dissent implied a shift away from
monolith Communist power in the state, and toward multi-party pluralism.
More important for the Balkan states, Gorbachev abandoned the Brezhnev Doctrine, the
USSR's commitment to use force to block any shift away from Russian-style Communism.
Soviet occupation forces left Afghanistan, and then Hungary. Speaking at the United
Natoins in December 1988, Gorbachev renounced the use of force in foreign policy. Clearly
Russia was no longer going to block political experimentation in Eastern Europe.
Step Four: Alternatives to socialism
During the 1980s, oil prices and foreign debts discredited socialist economics and gave
Eastern Europeans a pocketbook reason to seek radical change, while Gorbachev's new
policies removed potential Russian intervention as an obstacle. However, to understand the
actual events that took place before and after the 1989 revolutions, we must look at
domestic developments inside the Bloc states.
Just as trends in these states during the Cold War exhibited a strong degree of local
variety, so did events at the end of the Cold War. There had been no uniform or
"monolithic" Communism: neither was there any uniform shift to post-Communist
societies and political systems. In some states, so-called "civil society"
movements led toward Western-style pluralism; in others, authoritarian regimes (often
tapping traditional nationalism) came to power. In some states, the revolution was
bloodless, in others (like Romania) it led to civil strife, and in Yugoslavia, to extended
open war. The presence (or absence) of specific alternative movements, ideologies and
institutions correlates with the specific paths taken by the various Balkan states as the
Communist era ended. In other words, local influences and decisions were important.
The varieties of Balkan experience
By looking back twenty (or more) years before the events of 1989, we can discern trends
that illuminate what happened when change came. It is helpful also to look widely at
events across all of Eastern Europe, because the steps that led to the 1989 revolutions
show strong interconnections across the region.
We can see the roots of diversification in the Balkan and East European socialist
experience as far back as the Tito-Stalin split, in Romania's pursuit of a "national
road to Communism," and in the 1968 Prague Spring movement for "Communism with a
human face" and its aftermath. While the 1968 Czech movement was suppressed, it
produced echoes in other places that had profound consequences in years to come.
In Croatia, for example, 1968 demonstrations by pro-Czech student sympathizers led to
the creation of new student groups that functioned outside the control of the Party. Under
their leadership, interest in Croatian history and culture revived. This reawakened ethnic
pride soon combined with economic resentment with an ethnic twist, as Croats watched money
flow from Yugoslavia's rich north to the poor south.
The result was a growing Croatian separatist movement, based on a revived cultural
organization of the nineteenth century, Matica Hrvatska (Matica means "queen
bee"). In 1971, students sang banned patriotic songs in defiance of the authorities,
while Matica Hrvatska proposed a new Croatian constitution under which Croatia would have
the right to secede from Yugoslavia, and "Croatian" would become the sole state
language. At the same time, Catholics criticised the Serbian Orthodox Church and there was
an effort to end the right of Serbs in Croatia to education in Cyrillic. In the ensuing
crackdown, numerous leaders were arrested. One of them was Franjo Tudjman, the
future President of Croatia. In 1971 he was 49 years old, a former partisan and
Communist general with academic interests, who had resigned his state posts in 1967 to
take up the cause of Croatian nationalism.
The period of East-West detente in the middle 1970s injected additional factors. The
1975 Helsinki Agreements between the USSR and the United States included a pledge by the
Soviets to permit the exercise of "human rights." While the concept was vaguely
defined, the agreement nevertheless offered important leverage for reformers.
When an irreverent rock band called the 'Plastic People of the Universe' was arrested
in Czechoslovakia in 1977, 243 Czech writers, intellectuals and reform-minded Communists
organized an informal group called "Charter 77" to protest the arrests. Charter
77 issued a public letter calling on dissidents to live "as if" they were living
in a "civil society," one in which basic human rights such as freedom of
expression were allowed. Their most important leader was the playwright Vaclav Havel,
later the first President of the post-Communist Czech Republic. Under Stalin (or Romania's
Ceausescu), these kinds of dissenters would probably have been shot, but increased Bloc
reliance on Western good will meant that they were simply harassed, while their message of
disobedience persisted, laying the framework for an alternative system.
In Poland, the impetus for an alternative society came from other directions. The 1978
election of the Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II fostered Polish
activism that included a rediscovered awareness of Polish Catholicism (in which
nationalism was not far from the surface). In 1980, another economic downturn led to more
strikes in Polish shipyards, and the emergence of Lech Walesa and Solidarnosc
(Solidarity), the Bloc's first independent trade union, that is, one without Communist
Party control. Solidarity offered an alternative model for labor in a "workers'
state," despite being suppressed in 1981 by the martial law regime of Prime Minister
(and former General) Wojciech Jaruzelski. Ironically, even Jaruzelski can be viewed as a
figure opposed to external Soviet Russian influence. The prevention of an armed
Russian intervention was one of the key factors behind the imposition of martial law, as
much as opposition to reform ciurrents from within the Polish socialist state.
ALTERNATIVES IN HUNGARY
Events in Prague and Gdansk foreshadowed the course of the eventual revolutions and
issues defining the post-Communist societies in Czechoslovakia and Poland. So did events
in the Balkans. In retrospect, it is possible to find hints in the 1980s which point to
emerging forces, forces that took center stage after Soviet control was removed.
In Hungary, the "alternative" to Communism largely sprang from inside the
Party itself: for that reason the "Revolution" of 1989 was more of an
"Evolution." Hungarian Communism in the 1980s tolerated strong elements of
economic reform, and a good deal of decision making took place at the lower levels of the
economy, even if prohibitions on political democracy remained in place. The private
"second economy" was legalized in 1982. Such conditions encouraged opponents of
the system.
Until the middle 1980s the Hungarian opposition remained small and was principally a
matter for intellectuals. After 1985, however, other groups capitalized on new rights to
freedom of expression won by this vanguard, and for the first time since the 1940s created
mass movements outside the Party. Environmentalists opposed Czechoslovak projects for new
dams on the Danube; demonstrators promoting aid to the persecuted Hungarian minority under
Romanian rule in Transylvania. Neither group could be accused of anti-Communist views;
both tapped into nationalist feelings as well.
In 1988, the senile Janos Kadar was removed from power by younger elements in the
Party. By then, both pro-reform Communists and the new movements were comfortable with a
relationship in which certain organizations functioned outside Party control. After
Gorbachev withdrew the threat of Soviet intervention as a prop for traditionalists in the
Party, the reform faction was able to gain control. Party reformers were willing to accept
political as well as economic and organizational pluralism. In the spring of 1989, the
Hungarian reformers declared the March anniversary of the 1848 revolution as a holiday,
scheduled free elections for 1990. Unwilling any longer to enforce a closed
frontier, they opened the border to permit Hungarians to freely visit Austria for the
first time in a generation. The results were spectacular.
THE EVENTS OF 1989
Hungary's decision to open its borders set off a chain reaction that involved all the
East European socialist states. In August 1989, a stream of East Germans began to appear
at the West German embassy in Budapest, seeking asylum and permission to move to West
Germany. When the growing throng overflowed the embassy grounds, the Hungarians simply
opened the border, and thousands of East Germans streamed into Austria. A similar cycle of
events began at the West German embassy in Prague. The excitement was catching.
Czechoslovakia and East Germany (whose Communist regimes remained traditional and
authoritarian) now experienced massive street demonstrations, which went unchecked after
police refused government orders to fire on the crowds.
By November 1989, a new East German reform cabinet entertained secret discussions of
relaxation in the emigration rules: as a result, a rumor swept East Berlin that the Berlin
Wall was being opened. Crowds filled the streets, and demoralized border guards simply let
them cross into West Berlin. After that, East Germany unravelled in a few days. In
Czechoslovakia, a week of mass demonstrations ended the Communist monopoly on power when
Czech party reformers refused to use force. Vaclav Havel began the year in jail; by
December he was the new President of Czechoslovakia.
Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany experienced rapid, non-violent revolutions, in
which an orientation to the West and the preexistence of progressive
"alternative" structures played key roles. Events in the Balkan states
stand in stark contrast. The "revolutions" there were slower to begin,
slower to unfold, and slower to lead to dramatic changes: in fact, to the extent that
former Communists retained an uninterrupted grip on state power, one might question
whether "revolutions" even took place. Furthermore, events in the Balkans
involved substantially greater levels of violence, iuncluding the resurrection of
inter-ethnic strife, so that it was unclear whether the collapse of Communism looked
forward to new 21st century visions, or backward to the traditions of the 19th.
BULGARIA
Bulgaria experienced a rather quiet "revolution" in 1989. It is perhaps
easier to say that the Party , like it's leader Todor Zhivkov, simply grew old and
exhausted. As they had in Hungary, the limited levels of opposition to the Party in the
1980s revolved around issues that were relatively harmless from a political
perspective. One center of dissent was an environmental movement, which focussed on air
pollution from badly run factories in neighboring Romania. Another was made up of
Bulgarian intellectuals opposed to anti-Turkish measures. Neither movement involved
fundamental criticism of the Bulgarian regime.
In 1984, for reasons that are still obscure, the state decided to Bulgaricize the
country's 10 percent Turkish minority, which lived quietly and productively in traditional
rural districts. For the first time, Islamic religious observances were harassed, and
Moslem families were forced to change their names to "Bulgarian" sounding names.
Perhaps a hundred people were killed in small-scale riots. Dissent remained private until
1989 when Turkish leaders organized protests. The state responded by expelling 300,000
Turks from the country, a move that disrupted the economy and attracted criticism from
Bulgarian intellectuals.
However, the more important forces for change came from within the party. Reformers
publicized corruption among Todor Zhivkov's entourage, in part to put pressure on the
Party to embrace needed economic reforms. Zhivkov resigned in November 1989 at the age of
78, and in December the Party gave up its monopoly on power. Like their Hungarian
counterparts, reformers in the Bulgarian party overcame fears about pluralism, and in fact
the renamed Bulgarian Socialist Party won the free 1990 elections. In other words,
the result of the 1989 "revolution" was to return reform-minded ex-Communists to
power, which casts some doubt on the use of the word "revolution" in this case.
ROMANIA
In Romania too, Party insiders were important figures in offering
"alternatives" to the existing, traditional Communist regime. Unlike Hungary and
Bulgaria, however, their influence was far less progressive, largely because Ceausescu's
brand of Stalinism had suppressed imaginative thinking for so long ,along with real
dissent . Romania tolerated no movements like Charter 77 or Solidarity: the leaders of
even minor strikes routinely disappeared.
Ceausescu's brother Nicu has called the events of December 1989 in Romania "a coup
d'etat that took place against the background of a popular revolt." If levels
of violence are any gauge, the revolution tapped deep wellsprings of discontent. The
entire population had suffered under miserable conditions all through the 1980s, denied
basic consumer goods while the foreign debt was repaid.
At the same time, ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania were singled out for second-class
treatment. It was no coincidence that when the crisis broke in December 1989 it began with
state efforts to arrest a Magyar priest in Transylvania. In that episode, several people
were killed by the Securitate secret police, but inaccurate rumors of the massacre of
thousands led to a nation-wide wave of unrest. Ceausescu's efforts to overawe his critics
backfired, when he was booed at a mass rally in Bucharest. Fighting then broke out between
street crowds and the Securitate, in which some 5,000 people were killed and parts of the
city destroyed.
However, the absence of organized, well-known or credible alternative forces in the
society left this popular revolution without leaders or a clear ideological direction.
Instead, rivals of Ceausescu within the Party itself appear to have used these genuine
demonstrations as a cover, under which they carried out long-standing plans for a coup.
Army and Party leaders jealous or afraid of the Ceausescu clan took advantage of the
disorder to arrest, execute, and belatedly try Ceausescu and his wife. Analysts have
pointed to the rapid appearance of the National Salvation Front (NSF or FSN) as a sign of
conspiracy: a previously unknown political organization, it rapidly took over the
government.
Subsequent to 1989, the NSF proved to be a political tool of longtime Communist
leaders, including Securitate figures, and not an expression of real dissent or
opposition. While some alternative political groups and media have appeared, the NSF has
dominated power as a new political monopoly. Ion Iliescu, a former Communist, secured 85%
of the vote for president in 1990. When student demonstrators challenged NSF policies, the
state brought 10,000 miners armed with clubs to Bucharest from the provinces, then used
them to break up opposition gatherings and smash rival offices. Romanian politics in the
period after 1989 showed few signs of real pluralism or reforms that might break up old
corrupt centers of power.
YUGOSLAVIA
Events in Yugoslavia displayed the resurgence of nationalism at their most extreme.
Lecture 25 deals with events there. Suffice it to say for now that the alternative
centers of social and political organization there were based strongly in traditional
nationalism, and this accounted for the ethnic warfare that lasted four years. The
aftershocks of the Prague spring fell on fertile ground laced with mistrust when it came
to Serbs and Croats.
ALBANIA
If we analyze the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 through the presence or absence
of local alternatives to Communism, Albania presents an extreme case. Because Albania had
the fewest alternatives to the Party structure, Albania experienced the least apparent
changes in 1989. Instead, change began with the death of Enver Hoxha in 1985, the World
War II guerilla leader who led the Party and the State all through the Cold War.
By the time Hoxha died at age 77, Albanian Communism was exhausted. Forty years of
Stalinist domestic policies (periodic purges, repression of dissent and criticism, central
economic planning and collectivization) had produced Europe's lowest standard of living,
combined with a sterile culture offering no alternative ideas. Even Albania's celebrated
independence in foreign affairs reached a dead end, when Hoxha broke with Communist
Chinese modernizers after Mao's death in 1976. The country was self-sufficient but
isolated.
Hoxha's successor was Ramiz Alia, a Communist since age 18, who rose rapidly in the
Party-state apparatus. Despite his loyalty to Hoxha, Alia recognized in 1985 that the
country needed international aid and economic reforms. From 1985-89 he introduced wage
incentives, plant autonomy, consumer goods, and toleration of criticism by the nation's
writers, while the Party retained a monopoly on political power.
Alia expereienced no serious challenge during the Revolutions of 1989. The Party
accelerated economic reform, but made no move toward political pluralism until December
1990, more than a year after events elsewhere. In apparently free elections in 1991, the
Communist Party took 56 percent of the vote, and Alia was elected President. In other
words, there were so few alternatives in Albania that the party and its leading
personalities still dominated the landscape. If there is to be "revolution" in
Albania, it's crucial aspects are a matter of economic modernization, not politics.
CONCLUSION
We can make two summary observations, comparing Balkan events with those to the north,
and even to those in Hungary.
First, only in the Balkans did former Communists retain a grip on political power in
the period immediately after the revolution. Elements rooted in Solidarity and the
Catholic Church routed the Polish Communists. Charter 77 created an alternative in
Czechoslovakia. East Germany looked to Bonn, and former Party leaders were tried for
treason. But in the Balkan states, ex-Communists remain major players in national
politics, even if many chose to redefine themselves as nationalists.
Second, extensive violence during the 1989 revolutions was confined to Balkan states:
Romania and Yugoslavia. The northern revolutions involved peaceful demonstrators,
establishing pluralist regimes. In the Balkans, tolerance and pluralism remained in short
supply. This led to violence responses to dissent, and to ethnic conflict. Both seem more
like echoes of the Balkan past, than signs of progress into a brighter future.
This lecture is a portion of a larger Web site, Twenty-Five Lectures on Modern
Balkan History (The Balkans in the Age of Nationalism); click here to return to the Table of Contents page.
This page created on 27 November 1996; last modified 3 November 1998.
URL=http://www.lib.msu.edu/sowards/balkan/lect24.htm
Copyright 1996 by Steven W. Sowards |
Document compiled by Dr S D Stein