Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943 by Marko Attila Hoare (review)

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738 SEER, 86, 4, OCTOBER 20o8 period, takes as a case study the diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, a Ukrainian peas antwho moved to Moscow in 1930.The diary charts Podlubnyi's assimilation into urban lifeand his attempts towiden his cultural horizons. The book is largely a collection of papers inwhich young scholars have published theirfirstresearch. Despite itsaspirations to conceptual unity based on theories of everyday life, it is essentially a miscellany of detailed studies of various aspects of early Soviet experience. In this context the essay by Sheila Fitzpatrick emerges as an example ofmature scholarship inwhich detail and generality stand in a mutually complementary relation. Department ofCentral andEast European Studies J. D. White UniversityofGlasgow Hoare, Marko Attila. Genocide and Resistance inHitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and theChetniks,ig4i-ig4j. A British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monograph. The British Academy and Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2006. xiv + 386 pp. Maps. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?55.00. The Second World War in former Yugoslavia was a series of overlapping conflicts. The Axis powers imposed multiple occupation regimes, several collaborationist movements emerged across the partitioned country, and two resistance movements surfaced to contest the occupiers, their collaborators and each other. What ensued was a succession of often remarkably brutal wars. Much of the worst violence was experienced in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH). Incorporated inApril 1941 into a fascistCroatian state,BiH was forced to endure the vicious rule of theUstasa regime and the occupation policies of theGerman and Italian forces,while also serving as a central battlefront between Yugoslavia's two resistance movements. It is hardly surprising that BiH suffered greater human losses than any other Yugoslav republic, account ing for nearly a third of the one million Yugoslavs killed between 1941 and !945 English-language studies of the Second World War in formerYugoslavia and BiH are still relatively scant.Marko Attila Hoare's compelling, remark ably detailed, well researched and finelywritten book is therefore a welcome addition to the scholarly literature on wartime BiH, partitioned Yugoslavia, and the politics of occupation, resistance and identity. It is based on a thorough reading of the archival material, published primary sources and the secondary literature. The book is a study of the first two-and-a-half years of the Partisan movement in BiH, during which time itwas principally a Serb movement. InJuly 1941 the uprising that erupted inBiH was largely a tradi tional Serb peasant rebellion, but leadership of the rebellion was contested by two ideologically antithetical movements: the Communist Partisans and the Serb royalist Chetniks. Hoare describes the policies and ebb and flow of the twomovements in great detail, examining dynamics at the local level and placing themwithin the context of broader wartime developments. Through out the book, Hoare is careful to weave the history of revolution from above with the story from below. Within this framework, Hoare provides us with reviews 739 extensive material on socio-economic and political trends in BiH in the decades preceding thewar, and delves into important aspects of social history without which an understanding of Partisan success is impossible. By mid-1942 BiH was a complex and chaotic patchwork of competing fiefdoms.The increasinglymarginalized Croatian fascist regime controlled the larger townswhile the countryside was held by different rebel groups, either Partisans, Chetniks or, in some cases, local Muslim militias. Hoare argues convincingly that the Bosnian Partisans, despite their predominandy Serb base, led an uprising under non-sectarian Bosnian lines, building the founda tions of the futureBosnian state.This was no simple undertaking, for in the firstyear of the revolution much of the Serb rank and file shifted between the Partisans and Chetniks, who were committed to a programme ofGreat Serbian statehood that leftlittleroom fornon-Serbs. The tenuous alliance that had existed at firstbetween the twomovements collapsed in spring 1942.The Partisan leadership now saw theChetniks as theirprincipal enemy and placed greater emphasis on educating its followers to renounce Great Serbian nation alism, to adopt the brotherhood and unity of Serbs, Muslims and Croats on an all-Bosnian basis, with the goal of building a patriotic Bosnian conscious ness within a Yugoslav socialist framework. The Partisans upheld themodel of a secular and modern BiH as the common, self...