Yeomans, Rory. Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–1945 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 569 frontiers and a pair of new isthmuses the better. In any case, many Finnish troops had refused to cross the existing frontier when what was in question was territory that had belonged to Russia for centuries. Presumably, these instances of independent thinking were not reported in the frontline newspapers. The latter, nevertheless, breezed on. To the jokes about Stalin in the early days (‘it was an accident when he fell down the well, but a calamity when he was brought back up’), or references to the dirty kitchen of the Russian troops, were added more pleasant features. The gazette editors discovered pin-ups. In the end, the most intriguing aspect of Pilke’s text lies in the beginning. It is where she tantalizingly reproduces a statement made by Kalle Lehmus at the start of the Continuation War. He then hoped that the Soviet Union would hit Finland hard. Why? University of Turku George Maude Yeomans, Rory. Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–1945. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2013. x + 446 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00 (paperback). Rory Yeomans’s new study of Ustaša cultural politics is an important addition to the growing literature on the Second World War in the former Yugoslavia. The book is divided into six chapters, with an introduction and conclusion, which chronicle the vicissitudes of the Ustaša cultural policies in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) from April 1941 to May 1945. These chapters address the emergence of a pre-war Ustaša student group (chapter 1), the movement’s cult of youth (chapter 2), the attempted creation of the new Ustaša Man and Woman (chapter 3), cultural values (chapter 4), language and literary politics (chapter 5), and martyrdom and moral regeneration (chapter 6). The book is based largely on a reading of Ustaša wartime periodicals and secondary literature. In some respects, Yeomans’s study mirrors Stanko Lasić’s seminal work, published in 1989, on the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža during the Second World War. (Yeomans acknowledges as much in his Preface, p. x.) Lasić’s work was the first serious study to examine the nature of the Ustaša regime’s cultural politics and the contentious topic of intellectual collaboration. Lasić had argued that in April 1941, when the NDH was formed, Ante Pavelić’s Ustaša movement had not yet evolved a coherent ideology of society and culture. This fact prevented it from offering an intellectually compelling programme (apart from independence and ‘national rebirth’), forcing it borrow heavily from its Axis patrons and only fuelling its revolutionary pretentiousness as it sought to assert its authenticity. SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 570 YeomansarguesthattheUstašaregime’sculturalpolicyevolvedthroughthree phases, again reflecting Lasić’s periodization albeit with important differences. The first phase, from April 1941 to the end of that year, was the most radical and corresponded to period of Ustaša euphoria. The Ustaša ‘cultural revolution’, spearheaded by the Ministry of Religion and Education (later the Ministry of National Enlightenment) and the Main Directorate for Propaganda, was supposed to force the creation of a ‘New Man’ and ‘New Order’. Beginning in the winter of 1941–42, however, Ustaša radicalism began to fade as a result of domestic insurgency and Axis military setbacks; the new strategy was a more nuanced cultural policy. The non-Ustaša intelligentsia was now seen as important to the survival of the regime, which began portraying itself as the defender of Culture against the menace of Communism. Yeomans argues that the third and final phase of Ustaša cultural policy was initiated in 1944, as the regime reverted to its original radicalism, relaunched its cultural revolution and again purged political and racial opponents. This differs significantly from Lasić’s interpretation, which posited that in the third and final phase, from 1943 to 1945, the Ustaša regime (despite its continued brutality in practice) basically jettisoned fascist ideology and laboured to rally the nation and its cultural workers to the defence of the Croatian State, even as Pavelić fought a rearguard action to thwart various challenges to...