Abstract: Between the two world wars, the national question was at the very core of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia’s politics. Thus, among other things, the Yugoslav communists paid special attention to the Montenegrin issue, which remained unresolved after the creation of the Yugoslav state. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the KPJ’s attitude toward the Montenegrin national and state question in the context of the communist attitude towards the historical traditions of the Serbian nation in Montenegro and Montenegrin statehood, as well as the influence of communist ideological conceptions and current political developments on that issue until 1945.
Keywords: Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Montenegro, Montenegrin nation, national question
Summary
Until the end of the First World War and the formation of the new Yugoslav state framework, after unification with the Kingdom of Serbia, the Montenegrin state had an exclusively Serbian national character. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia, as a new political phenomenon, faced one of the most pressing problems of the Yugoslav state, the unresolved national question. The Montenegrin question existed in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but only as a state legal concern and a legitimist dilemma addressing the way of unification with the Kingdom of Serbia in 1918, not as a national question. In its policies, the KPJ also raised the Montenegrin question as a national one, classifying it among other national questions as one of the means of Yugoslav state disintegration. In their approach to the Montenegrin state and national question, the communists selectively used tradition, focusing primarily on Montenegro’s legal status and using ideological criteria to explain the entire problem, effectively implementing the USSR and Comintern’s policy toward Yugoslavia. The communist attitude towards the Montenegrin question was in accordance with the policy towards the so-called “Great Serbian hegemonism“, which in its essence, until the mid-1930s, was anti-Serbian and anti-Yugoslav. The Montenegrin national question received its definitive form in the new revolutionary state in 1945, when one of the leading Montenegrins, Milovan Đilas, defined this question through the concept of a new Montenegrin nation, which had Serbian origins, but also its own identity formed through the historical development of Montenegrin statehood.