ABSTRACT
The history of the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) during the Cold War period was closely tied to the history of Yugoslavia. After the break between Tito and Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia was no longer part of the Soviet block. The search for new allies and for a third way to socialism strongly altered the political framework and affected the whole complex of church-state issues. In the two decades that followed, the traits of the ‘Yugoslav way’ revealed step by step: a more ‘humanist’ and less state-centred formulation of Marxist dogma; a relative openness towards the West; membership of the non-aligned movement which Yugoslavia founded together with India, Indonesia, and Egypt in 1961; and the federalization of the country. In such a setting, the Serbian Orthodox Church possessed some liberties in
internal and external affairs that were not evident in the Warsaw Pact states. However, it had fewer possibilities to become an informal ‘national church’ than the Orthodox churches in the Soviet Union, Romania and Bulgaria. Particularly after the fall of Aleksandar Rankovic´, Minister of the Interior, in 1966, the republics and autonomous provinces of Yugoslavia strengthened enormously. Unlike the federal units of the Soviet Union, they became real holders of power, though still within the limits of the communist system and its ideology of ‘brotherhood and unity’. For the Serbian Orthodox Church this development was a trauma, because it saw itself as both the mother and the muse of the Serbian nation. While the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and especially Romania compensated their Orthodox churches for their isolation from society, preferring them to other religious communities and recognizing Orthodoxy’s ‘historical role’ in state and collective identity, this way was halfclosed for the SOC. Post-Rankovic´ Yugoslavia understood itself as a state of all its constituting nations (Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and to a lesser extent Albanians and Hungarians). This was hardly compatible with the agenda of the Serbian clergy. Priests, monks, and bishops mainly stood on centralist, Serb nationalist positions. Some of this nationalism was inherited from interwar Yugoslavia, which
Serbs considered to be ‘their’ state for which they had given more sacrifices
of Serbs State of Croatia), Yugoslavia would only be possible if the Serbs retained strong political and military tools to protect themselves from what they perceived as ‘genocidal’ intentions of the other nations, mainly Croats and Albanians. The Serbian Patriarchate actively participated in exaggerating the Serbs’ wartime losses, stating for example, in 1951, that 1.2 million of its believers had lost their lives, a figure three times higher than Church estimates during the war itself and more than twice as much as could be established by serious empirical research during the 1980s. From this point of view, the SOC was close to the regime which also greatly overstated Yugoslavia’s wartime losses in order to stress the country’s victim status, increase international refund and sanctify the partisans’ victory against their bloodthirsty enemies. But since the communists never allowed the victims to be ‘nationalized’ but considered them first of all Yugoslavs, the mythologized victim issue offered no real common ground. The communist federation was not only seen as ‘godless’ but also as an anti-Serb construction that mutilated the national body as the enemies of the Second World War had done. This stance caused significant underground aggression during the 1960s and 1970s, and eventually led the Church to open nationalist action on the eve of Yugoslavia’s violent breakup.
