Heroes in the clutches of a defeated ideology

The July 13th Uprising was based on values ​​that are almost non-existent in Montenegro today - the spark of freedom of young people who were ready to make the greatest sacrifice for the sake of collective good and unity, becoming part of the brightest chapter in the history of our country.

Baranin told "Vijesti" that Marko Vukosavovic, an economic expert, a researcher of the history of World War II and Montenegro in foreign archives, who lives in New York, where he has published two books in English about the partisan movement in Crmnica and Montenegro - “The Finest Sons and Daughters, Resistance” and “The Finest Sons and Daughters, Glorious Brigade”.

The first book tells the formative period of the anti-fascist movement in Montenegro, from the uprising of July 13, 1941 to the departure of the Montenegrin partisans to Bosnia in June 1942. The second book follows the 4th Montenegrin Proletarian Brigade and covers the period from June 1942 to December 1943 - the formation of the partisan brigades and the journey through Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dalmatia and Montenegro.

Several paths led him to these achievements - the fact that the living memory of World War II is almost extinct, that there are almost no stories about Yugoslav and Montenegrin partisans in America, and the third reason is a response to the false revision of history that we live in today.

He chose the title "The Brightest Sons and Daughters" because of his father. Radomir Rasko Vukosavovic, one of the organizers and participants of the Trianestojul Uprising, commander of the liberated city of Vir, commander of the third company of the famous 4th Montenegrin Proletarian Brigade...

According to Vukosavović, that's exactly what his father called those who liberated Montenegro at that time, and during his research, although he had a different title in mind, he himself realized that it was "the brightest moment in Montenegrin history."

When asked who they were, Vukosavović replied that they were young. The youngest soldier was 11 years old, and the oldest was 70. Almost half of the soldiers were born between 1919 and 1925, which means they were between 17 and 23 years old when they went to war. Seven out of eight people who participated in the uprising did not live to see the end of the war.

"Most of the partisan leaders were students and former students. It was the most intellectual group of Montenegrins, who celebrated three things - their Montenegrin identity and equality, a deep belief that socialism was just a continuation of the idea of ​​the tribal spirit of community that existed there, and the Spanish Civil War as a symbol of humanity, where many Montenegrins participated in the fight against injustice," he said.

In his books, Vukosavović deals with the period from the July 13th Uprising to the departure of Montenegrin partisans to Bosnia and believes that the period is crucial for understanding the anti-fascist movement in Montenegro, so he explains that there are three periods of the partisan movement.

The first is formative, from the collapse of Yugoslavia to the departure of the Partisans for Bosnia, the second is the "heroic period" which begins with the formation of the brigades (April - June 1942 until the end of 1943), and the third begins when the Partisans leave for Serbia.

The formative period, he says, is crucial for the development of the partisan movement and explains that during that period they were not called partisans but “guerrillas.” It was only in November that things changed, they received uniforms, a star and became partisans.

In the beginning, he recounts, they were organized more as tribes than as villages - the Communist Party was a very small organization at that time and most of the young people were part of the labor movement, the social movement for equality.

Vukosavović also says that the beginning is very important because the royal government was incapable of leading the whole of Yugoslavia in the fight against Italy and signed the capitulation while the Montenegrins continued to fight against the Italians.

"Montenegrins did not agree to surrender like most others surrendered to the Germans and the occupiers, but each of them took their rifles and went to their villages, and that is how the organization of the uprising began. My father, for example, took two rifles and was on the border with Albania, at Lake Skadar, when they started to go back and return to the village. Each village was a cell for itself," he said.

That cell must have had between ten and fifteen soldiers. They trained, collected weapons because they had no common places for them. In Montenegro at that time, as Vukosavović reports, people worked in the countryside from early dawn until around noon, and then rested until four o'clock.

The interviewee explains that it was during this period of rest, which was also observed by the Italian soldiers in the garrisons, that the Montenegrin soldiers trained and were organized as tribal units. Each unit had a leader, and his father was the leader of the one in Sotonići.

"They knew they were going to stage an uprising, but they didn't know what day it would be. That was determined later, but they had been training for the uprising since April," he said.

Dual loyalty to the uprising and family

One of the main goals is to explain the fate and way of thinking of as many people as possible, and that is why the book mentions over 300 people and their fates. What was particularly interesting to him for research was the relationship of a young person towards his unit and family, towards the village and tradition.

The young people, he adds, wanted to fight, but they also had a devotion to their family, and at that time the rule was that a father's word could not be broken. Some had their father's support, while others did not, so during the organization of the uprising, what Vukosavović calls a dual loyalty to the uprising and to the family was created.

This, he claims, is most visible after July 13th, when the uprising collapsed after two weeks and there was a great famine, as the Italians surrounded Crmnica, and problems arose among the young - they wanted their families to survive, but also to continue the heroic tradition.

The author says that the younger generations at that time knew about sacrifice, that the individual was ephemeral compared to the community. The question, he continues, is how much they believed in victory at that moment.

"The chances of survival were very small. That was unique here. In Montenegro, the mass movement was enormous, since in old Montenegro it was still believed that sacrificing for society was one of the greatest virtues that could be achieved."

The second book follows the path of the 4th Montenegrin Proletarian Brigade, and Vukosavović says that what is little known is the fact that of the first five brigades that were formed, 60 percent of the soldiers were Montenegrins - two out of six battalions of the 1st Proletarian Brigade, you have three out of five battalions of the 3rd Proletarian Brigade, the entire 4th and the entire 5th Proletarian Brigade.

In his opinion, the IV Proletarian and I (first) brigades were the two most significant brigades that existed in that partisan movement, and he adds the curiosity that Tito always wanted the IV to protect him, as was the case during the Battle of Sutjeska.

For the purposes of his research and writing, Vukosavović collected over three hundred testimonies of people who participated in the July 13th Uprising and World War II, including the testimony of his father.

He also shared an anecdote from the period when his father Raško and the famous Vladimir Rolović were at one of the first heavy battles, at Sutjeska (near Ljubin Grob), where over 70 Montenegrins died in just a few hours.

Since they had not been able to wash themselves for about a month, let alone bathe or shave, they completely changed their personal descriptions, so the two well-known friends did not recognize each other when they met. Rolović asked Vukosavović which brigade he was in, and he replied that he was in the fourth, to which Rolović exclaimed: “Raško, is that you?” and told him to hold out his hand, into which he put about twenty grains of wheat because, among other things, they were starving.

"Reading about them and the sacrifice they made is transformative. We love Montenegro, but that's gone now. That kind of community that existed back then and learning about it changes your mind about everything. We don't have that capacity for sacrifice that they had back then. And they really were the brightest."

Most of the original documents about the war were actually destroyed during the war, as was the case in Crmnica. In the formative period, when the Partisans left for Bosnia, all the testimonies were buried in a field in Gluhi dol, and the problem is that the man who buried them was killed at Sutjeska.

The Military Institute of Yugoslavia put a lot of effort into finding these documents, but without success. The documents of the 4th Montenegrin Proletarian Brigade were completely destroyed at Sutjeska, and only the copied part was preserved.

"There are not many original documents. Numerous people reported to the Military Institute and gave testimonies, so the events were slowly reconstructed. There are four periods of these testimonies. The first is immediately after World War II, and the data was accurate, but without context, because history had not yet been written. The second period - most of the history of the war was written from 1965 to 1975, when full testimonies were given. The third period is when, at that point, already old, partisans and participants give their testimonies," Vukosavović told the editorial office.

Women as the core of the liberation struggle

In his works, Vukosavović also dealt with the lifestyle of the people of Crmnica, as well as all other Montenegrins during World War II. He found numerous pieces of information and trivia in foreign archives, because the German, French, and Italian missions described the lives of our people in detail, which, he believes, is especially valuable because our documents lack those small details that were taken for granted in our country.

In this way, he specifically addressed the role of women in the war and the July 13th Uprising, for which he says that "without them there would be no Montenegrin partisan movement" because they played a key role in that period.

He explains that at that time there was also a mass emancipation of women, who were mostly uneducated at the time and it was impossible to see them without men. The war changed that.

"At that time, since there were no weapons, women still had a traditional role because they were not in military units. However, when the uprising collapsed, most of the men and women were sent to concentration camps where the women were tortured to reveal the location of the soldiers. For example, my father's sister was tortured, but she did not confess to his whereabouts," he told "Vijesti".

Already in November, most of the women were released from the camp on one condition - that they report daily or weekly to the Italian garrisons. Instead, they went to the mountains and joined the men, and since there was a shortage of soldiers, the women took up rifles, machine guns and joined the fight.

Some of them were couriers, nurses. They went through a period of training and were taught to read and write in the units, and Vukosavović assesses that this is "a big thing for women's transition from a traditional to a modern role."

He also emphasized their great role in saving men, treating and caring for them, and added that during the war they became increasingly dominant in their role, but even in ideology, because in the partisan movement they experienced liberation from the constraints of the patriarchy of the time.

Ignorance feeds ideological divisions

This year, as in all previous ones, the Statehood Day raises questions about the attitude towards the July 13th Uprising. Asked why it is important to talk about that period based on historical sources and facts and not ideological views, Vukosavović replies that there were mistakes among the partisans, although they were not as hidden as is thought today, and some meetings were written about back in the 1970s, but he assesses that today's ideological divisions in Montenegro are less justified than those that occurred from 1941 to 1945.

He thinks that today, when people talk about ideological divisions during those years, they are actually referring to the war of the 1990s.

"The problem is that most people today form ideological opinions even though the facts exist and explain what is true, which is that the Partisans were part of anti-fascism. The big, big problem is that the facts are not read but are viewed ideologically," he said.

Vukosavović believes that the revision of history we are witnessing today is happening because the war is not being investigated in Montenegro and we are not dealing with the facts, which opens the door to distorted interpretation.

He emphasizes that ideology is the result of our lack of reading and our unwillingness to devote more time to researching problems. He also mentions that Montenegro has an intelligence problem because he believes that we rely on short, quickly and easily offered information as opposed to thorough information and long-term learning.

"Ideological revision aims to justify something that was not good, that was simply evil. Equalizing movements that essentially cannot be equalized," he stated.

In his words, it is common in political and media everyday life that 50 percent of people sided with the partisans and 50 percent with the occupiers, which, he claims, is not true, and he adds that such information is the easiest to manipulate. The fact is, he notes, that about 80 percent of people in Montenegro were part of the partisan movement in various ways.

He emphasizes that what is happening today is not something new, as it has been happening in the region for over 100 years, and he notes, which he specifically touches on in his books, that propaganda and distortion of facts also occurred during World War II.

As an example, he cites the departure of the partisans to Bosnia, when the whole of Montenegro was told that they had been killed, so no one knew that the 4th Proletarian Brigade was actually fighting in Bosnia - and winning. When some of them returned, the Montenegrin public was shocked.

As a reason for using disinformation as a weapon, he cites the possibility of the absence of the very tribal system that actually preserved identity, and secondly, he again cites the problem of intelligence in Montenegro.

"The moment you don't research your own history and don't investigate the facts, someone from the outside can tell you another one and you simply either believe it or you don't believe it. In my opinion, the problem with propaganda over the last 40 years, since that nationalism returned, is the fundamental problem that we don't research our own history. If we did, we wouldn't be so influenced by all of this," he said. He concludes that the truth must be sought, that young people must be educated because it is the answer to the ideology of ignorance to which we are intensely exposed.

Interest in the world, but not in Montenegro

Vukosavović has not yet decided whether his books will be translated into Montenegrin, because he does not think there is interest in it, although the opposite has been shown in the USA, Croatia, Slovenia...

It is especially difficult for him that in recent years, during his research, he has met many grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the heroes he wrote about, but they not only know nothing about the lives of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, but have also changed the ideology for which their ancestors died.

"These are the brightest sons and daughters we have had and will have. They deeply felt themselves to be Montenegrins and the bearers of Montenegro's past. If we forget or destroy that history or allow another ideology to dominate, there will be no future for Montenegro, and that is one of the reasons why this ideology is so strong - to destroy the memory of the Montenegrin movement and the moment you destroy it, you simply no longer have the roots of that society and that bright past that brings us the future," said Vukosavović.

He owns one of the largest libraries in the world on Montenegrin history in foreign languages, which he plans to one day donate to the National Library of Montenegro in Cetinje.

Where the first gun went off

An uprising began in Virpazar on July 13, 1941, the first of its kind in Montenegro, the largest and most energetic uprising in enslaved Europe during World War II, as numerous historical documents testify. Around 30.000 fighters from across Montenegro participated in this uprising.

It lasted until mid-August, when it was crushed by a strong Italian offensive, and fighting continued long after that.

The uprising was organized shortly after the beginning of the formation of the pro-Italian Montenegrin puppet government, and the rebel formations, using surprise, attacked the Italians, inflicted heavy losses on them, and took control of many areas of Montenegro.

Although the uprising was planned to be much smaller, historical records show that it numbered around 30.000 people. It is written that they defeated and captured the largest occupying garrison in enslaved Europe up to that time, consisting of around 1000 soldiers and officers.

In memory of the fallen fighters of the uprising, a memorial monument was erected in the center of Virpazar in 1963, and it was ceremonially opened on July 13 of that year.