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Description
Amidst the brutality of the Second World War, Soviet officer Nikolai Zagoryanov is captured and sent to a German concentration camp in Yugoslavia. But even in captivity, the struggle does not cease. As the war rages across Europe, he joins the illegal resistance, navigating a world of treachery, shifting allegiances and the unrelenting force of nazi-fascist occupation. The Yugoslav Tragedy follows his journey from the slave camps of the Todt Organization, the bloodied peaks of Crni Vrh and the sacred mountains, valleys, cities and villages throughout the land — from where heroic Yugoslav partisans wage a fierce battle for a bright future.
Yet beyond the battlefields, another struggle unfolds — not only against the nazis and their collaborators but against those within the national liberation movement who conspire to carve out their own interests at the expense of the people. The book exposes the true face of the dangerous manoeuvring of Anglo-American intelligence services, their schemes to co-opt the war and the bitter tragedy that victory over fascism was not a guarantee of the people’s aspirations.
The war was not fought in the mansions of Dedinje, on the luxurious holidays of Vis or in the secret meetings held in the palaces of Naples, but among simple people — peasants, workers, communists, honest patriots. Men whose forefathers fought alongside Russia: in Admiral Senyavin’s fleet on the Adriatic, in General Chernyaev’s detachments all along the South Morava — time and time again against common enemies. It is this same spirit that compelled ordinary partisans to honour the Soviet Supreme Commander as their own by resolving to forever inscribe his name into Musala, Durmitor and Šator, linked by a single diagonal line carved from the Bulgarian Rila through the Dinaric Alps. For centuries, their ancestors had looked to these monuments of natural beauty for a moment of calm while drowning in constant oppression, hunger and terror — and now, for the first time, this name would illuminate those heights, awakening a new force deep in the soul: hope.
As the Soviet Red Army liberates vast territories and rekindles a great ancestral roar from the East, old questions among the people resurface: Will the Yugoslav peoples realize their historic aspiration of unity with their great Slavic mother and genuine liberators, the Russian people? Or will hostile foreign powers and their internal agents divert the people’s revolution down a road of perfidy and duplicity? The novel delves into these questions within the partisan ranks, and the ultimate betrayals committed by those who placed their personal ambitions above the people’s cause — shaping the postwar order and the destiny of the Yugoslav peoples.
Orest Maltsev presents an honest and emotive account of the National Liberation War of the Yugoslav peoples, unmasking the illusions of so-called “neutrality” and exposing the danger of nationalism as a weapon of sabotage. This is a story of bloody struggle — not only against the enemy but especially against false friends, misplaced loyalty and the forces that sought to suffocate the revolution before it could even properly blossom. The Yugoslav Tragedy is a war novel, but it is also a political testament to those who fought and died for the future that could have been, a future that still must be.