THE RIGHT-WING PEOPLE DATABASE

This database is one of the results accomplished as part of the project. Although it is the leaders and the most prominent members, ideologues and organizers of political parties that take the center stage of most research, including our own, no picture of a political party is complete without considering its wider base, the grassroots of political activism. Especially in the case of Yugoslavia, including the Serbian right-wing political organizations, our knowledge about this important aspect of their history is conspicuously scant. There is a number of reasons for such an unsatisfactory situation, most notably the rather meagre sources given the fact that very little of the archives concerning the work of political parties (with the exception of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia) have survived the turmoil of the Second World War. For that reason, a researcher can glean little relevant information from a variety of historical sources and even then find it difficult to produce a rounded account that can provide more answers than pose questions.

It does not help either that little is known about the people who played not insignificant role in the work of the Serbian right-wing political parties, for example as members of the Main Committees or other relevant party organs, members of parliament and leaders at the local level. Since the project team members were bound in the course of their research, to varying degrees, to come across many such people, this database came into existence as their attempt to capitalize on their research and assemble as wide array of neglected individuals as possible. Consequently, this is no place to delve into the most eminent party figures and there are no entries for Milan Stojadinović, Dimitrije Ljotić and Svetislav Hodjera. The focus here is on those much less visible figures, but still undoubtedly important for the functioning of the political parties in question and right-wing politics in Serbia and Yugoslavia. Some of them even reached ministerial positions in the cabinets formed in the second half of the 1930s, but nevertheless the great majority of them remain absent from historiography. In fact, most of them remain almost completely unknown and there is scant information available on them and their political careers.

This database aims to contribute, at least to a limited extent, to shedding some light on many such individuals, hundreds of them whose names are assembled here for the first time. The project team members could not realistically be expected, and indeed did not, create something of an equivalent of a dictionary of national biography comprising Serbian right-wingers. An undertaking of that scope far exceeds the time and resources that they had at their disposal within a two-year project. Instead, this database should, above all, serve as a valuable tool for further research, especially inquiry into the grassroots of right-wing political activism. It might usefully serve as a starting point for individual or collaborative investigation of not just the people listed here, but also their engagement in and contribution to their respective parties (some were members of more than one party), and the wider networks that were central to party membership.

Finally, it should be noted that the Serbian right-wing parties referred to here, as well as their members and sympathizers, do not necessarily imply ethnic origins of the people concerned. The Serbian rightists were committed to integral Yugoslavism; unlike the Serbian faction of the ruling Yugoslav Radical Union (JRZ), the most radical rightists from ZBOR and the Yugoslav People’s Party (Borbaši), comprized of predominantly Serbian members, remained convinced Yugoslavs even after the failure of the Yugoslav nation-building in 1939. The people here were thus simply members of the parties concerned regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or regional affiliation.

This database will remain operative after the end of the project and open to creating further entries and/or to adding to the existing ones, to which contributions from other scholars or the general public that can be varified are more than welcome.