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Received: 2016-09-18	DOI 10.19233/AH.2017.50
Original scientific article
"THE MILADA PAULOVA'S SYNDROME" - THE LIFE'S WORK OF THE CZECH SCHOLAR AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA
Jan HALEK
Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic v. v. i., Gabcikova 2362/10, 18200 Praha 8, Czech Republic e-mail: halek@mua.cas.cz
Boris MOSKOVIC
Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic v. v. i., Gabcikova 2362/10, 18200 Praha 8, Czech Republic e-mail: moskovic@mua.cas.cz
ABSTRACT
The paper deals with the complex circumstances accompanying the writing of the book by a Czech historian Milada Paulova devoted to the history of the Yugoslav Committee during the First World War (Jugoslavenski odbor. Povijest jugoslavenske emigracije za svjetskog rata od 1914.-1918.). The authors also focus on the subsequent reception of the book by the Yugoslavian historiography after 1945. The first section of the paper, based on archival sources and published correspondence, examines the contemporary influences and conditions that affected the writing of the book. It focuses on personal as well as financial, logistic, and other factors that shaped the final form of the abovementioned publication. The second part deals with an analysis of the specific impact and the overall influence of the book on the narrative and interpretative processes in the Yugoslavian historiography between 1945 and 1991. In this respect, the paper emphasises not only an extraordinary number of references to Paulova's book appearing in the prominent and often classical historiographic works, but also examines the reasons for so many of the Yugoslavian researches automatically accepting or, on the contrary, openly refuting some of the theses first formulated and published by the first Czech female docent in her postdoctoral dissertation in 1925.
Keywords: Yugoslav Committee, Milada Paulova, First World War, historiography, Nikola Pasic, Ante Trumbic
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"LA SINDROME DI MILADA PAULOVÁ" - L'OPERA PRINCIPALE DELLA STUDIOSA CECA E LA SUA INFLUENZA SULLA STORIOGRAFIA NELLA JUGOSLAVIA SOCIALISTA
SINTESI
L 'articolo prende in esame le complesse circostanze nelle quali all'inizio degli anni venti delXXsecolo vennepubblicata l'opera della storica cecaMilada Paulová dedicata alla storia del Comitato jugoslavo durante la prima guerra mondiale (Jugoslavenski odbor. Povijest jugoslavenske emigracije za svjetskog rata od 1914.-1918.). Gli autori analizzano allo stesso tempo il modo in cui il libro fu accolto dalla storiografia jugoslava dopo il 1945. Nella prima parte dello studio, in base alle fonti d'archivio e alla corri-spondenza pubblicata, si analizzano le influenze dell'epoca e le condizioni specifiche che accompagnarono la nascita di quest'opera. Nel contesto vengono presi in esame anche i fattori personali, finanziari, logistici e di altro tipo che influenzarono l'aspetto finale della menzionata pubblicazione. La seconda parte dello studio si concentra sull'analisi della portata specifica e dell'impatto complessivo che il libro ebbe sugli approcci narra-tivi e interpretativi nella storiografia jugoslava degli anni 1945-1991. A tale proposito, lo studio sottolinea non solo le numerosissime citazioni dell'opera di Milada Paulová nei lavori di storiografia più importanti ed oggi per molti aspetti classici, ma riflette anche sulle ragioni per cui un certo numero di ricercatori jugoslavi riprendeva automaticamente, o viceversa contestava esplicitamente, alcune tesi che nel 1925 furono per la prima volta sintetizzate professionalmente e successivamente pubblicate dalla prima docente ceca nella sua tesi di abilitazione.
Parole chiave: Comitato jugoslavo, Milada Paulová, prima guerra mondiale, storiografia, Nikola Pašic, Ante Trumbic
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About five days ago in the mail from [...] Yugoslavia I received [...] the newest work of Dragovan Sepic: Supilo diplomat. Zagreb 1961. [...] [In the passage] where the author quotes from my book for the first time, I read: 'Dr Milada Paulová, in her now classic work The Yugoslav Committee (Zagreb 1925) ...'. The book was my postdoctoral dissertation. It has survived for decades, [...] became well known in the world, definitely better than if it had been published in Czech. The new material includes more details but the basic image remains and, I hope, will remain, unchanged. [...]. The postdoctoral dissertation of the first Czech woman docent could not be published in Czech. I have felt the consequences of that all my life and am still experiencing them today. (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2014, 133-134).
These were the words used in 1962 by the Czech historian Milada Paulová to describe the fate of her postdoctoral dissertation Jugoslavenski odbor. Povijest jugoslavenske emigracije za svjetskog rata od 1914.-1918., published in Zagreb in 1925. The book, the conditions in which it was written and its reception by historians in the socialist Yugoslavia is the main focus of this article.1
The work of a historian is affected by a number of factors: their social and family background, religious beliefs, the place and time they live in, their teachers, experience from stays abroad, political affiliation, etc. One should also not forget the existence of various loyalties towards many people and institutions. The French social scientist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu has called the abovementioned factors affecting one's worldview the habitus (Bourdieu, 1998). We have tried to get to know Milada Paulová's habitus and its influence on one of her academic works. Was the historian in charge of the situation? How much freedom did she actually have? What did she focus her attention on and what were the things she remained silent about? To what extent could she afford to present her own interpretation of history to the public? How much was she affected by the First Czechoslovak Republic rhetoric, the political correctness of the time and the influence of different people she met and whose favour she was often existentially or emotionally dependent on? Did she see her books as a description of reality or was she aware of the limitations of her knowledge (Horsky, 2014, 95-101)? Apart from researching those aspects, we also tried to confront Paulová's book and other historiographic works on this subject published in the following years and decades. We were interested mainly in how her work was viewed by historians researching the same subject in the communist Yugoslavia. Is it still true today that "the book remains the starting point for
the researchers of the subject" (Neumann, 2008)?
* * *
Milada Paulová first encountered the history of the Czechoslovak and South Slavic anti-Austrian resistance in the First World War in 1919. The Yugoslav committee of
1 This study is a result of the research funded by the Czech Science Foundation (Grantova agentura CR) as the project GA16-11252S "Maffie - myth and reality. The formation of the image of the domestic anti-Austrian resistance in the collective memory of interwar Czechoslovakia".
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the Czechoslovakian Foreign Office, inspired and supported by Bedfich Stepanek, one of the remarkable members of the domestic anti-Habsburg resistance, who at that time was replacing Edvard Benes as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, decided to send a young historian to the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (SCS) to write down the history of the Czechoslovak-Yugoslav Resistance cooperation. The first candidate to be suggested was Professor Karel Kadlec, an expert in the history of Slavic law. After he was rejected by the committee due to his age, Jaroslav Bidlo, a professor of history of Eastern Europe and the Balkan Peninsula, suggested that his student Milada Paulova be assigned to this task. The committee accepted the candidate. The young historian, who was at the very start of her professional career, was thus supposed to further reinforce the Czechoslovak-Yugoslav relations, which had been successfully developing for dozens of years before the outbreak of the First World War (Klabjan, 2014; Paulova, 1938).
The period and the destination certainly did not make the task appropriate for a twenty-eight-year old female graduate with no scholarly reputation (Bradlerova, Halek, 2014, 150). But the choice was made mainly based on the immediate social situation. The First World War meant there were few male students at universities. Male students and teachers aged 18 to 50 were drafted and many of them ended up in the battlefields. The overall numbers of university students decreased, but the percentage of female students went up (Hoffmannova, 2014, 171; Petran, 1983, 257). Milada Paulova was one of them. Her focus until then was on the Byzantine history and professor Bidlo was negotiating her acceptance at the seminar of one of the best Byzantine expert of the time, a professor at the Paris Sorbonne, Charles Diehl. Thus, her assignment in the SCS Kingdom significantly influenced her life and professional focus.
The young historian got her instructions from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Stepanek invited her to the Prague Castle. After that he met Paulova a few more times to acquaint her with at least the most important facts from the history of the resistance movement. She left for the Balkans in April of 1920. The trip was financed by the ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education. According to her memoirs, Paulova never regretted her decision and considered the assignment in the Southeast Europe to be the biggest adventure of her life (Bradlerova, Halek, 2014, 149-150). She set out on the journey on April 9, 1920. She travelled by the train which transported Czechoslovak legionaries from Vladivostok via Trieste to Czechoslovakia.2 Paulova was accompanied by the newly appointed first Czechoslovak vice-consul in Zagreb, Odon Para, with whom she became friends in the following years. She first wrote to professor Bidlo on April 21 from Zagreb (Bradlerova, Halek, 2014, 194-196), which became her base for the next few months. She travelled throughout the SCS Kingdom and in the following months visited, among others, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Split, Dubrovnik, Ljubljana and Veliki Beckerek. The travels required a lot of mental and physical strength.
2 AKPR, KPR, 35/507, D 8717, E. Simek to P. Samal, 21. 2. 1920. According to the information from Emil Simek from the Prague Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it was the safest means of transport from Czechoslovakia to the SCS Kingdom.
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Paulová's stay in the Balkans from the very beginning was accompanied by a number of problems, from finding the right accommodation to a difficult financial situation, in which she had to repeatedly ask for money to be able to complete her assignment. According to the initial agreement, the young historian was supposed to be helped by Stepánek's friend and close resistance associate, a Dalmatian Rudolf Giunio. But to Paulová's great disappointment, he turned out to be completely unreliable. But she was not alone in all of this. She was helped by a Czech journalist and a national democrat Frantisek Hlavácek and a Croatian politician Veceslav Vilder, who helped her to access the political and intellectual circles of the SCS Kingdom (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2014, 198-202, 224-226, 235-242).
It seems that Paulová had left for the south with quite a vague understanding of her assignment. But in a letter to professor Bidlo of May 23, 1920, she was already able to define her aims clearly. While Stepánek and Giunio wanted first and foremost to gather sources for the history of the Czech and South Slavic resistance cooperation, Paulová had a broader perspective when she wrote that "the Czech cooperation can only be a part of a study that will deal with the Yugoslav union as a whole" (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2014, 198-202). She was nevertheless aware of the fact that her research is to a large extent limited by the political developments in Czechoslovakia and the SCS Kingdom.
The actions of a Zagreb periodical Obnova could mean a certain competition for Paulová's efforts. According to the information available to her, the people connected to Obnova were supported by the Yugoslav government with one million crowns and they received an assignment to publish "a book portraying South Slavs during the war". The project was assigned to Milan Maijanovic, Rudolf Giunio, Ante Mandic and Ljubo Leontic. But their actions were hesitant, to say the least, and were not a real threat to Paulová (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2014, 198-202). Moreover, Obnova, which published its plans, sparked a significant unrest among the Yugoslav politicians. Ante Trumbic, for example, responded from Paris with a telegram, in which he "strictly forbade access to the univ[ersity] library, and said no one can touch the boxes with the Yugoslav Committee materials collected there" The fact that the people assigned by Obnova to collect the appropriate materials were journalists and not historians, also caused distrust (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2014, 198-202). This all helped Paulová, who gradually managed to gather a lot of highly confidential material. At the end of August 1920, she could thus say that she is "practically swamped' with the materials. For lack of written resources, her conversations with direct participants in the resistance became the main source of her information (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2014, 208-211). But she was aware of the fact that any careless disclosure of these could cause serious problems on the ever changing and turbulent Yugoslav political scene (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2014, 230-232). Paulová also saw the problem with using some of the eyewitnesses' accounts because of their uncertain truthfulness. "People unwittingly fantasise, are biased by ideology and you have to keep coming back to the same person and ask more questions." Almost every new conversation undoes the previous one and causes a need to revise (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2014, 208-211). The historian carefully guarded the obtained information and in doing so she had to face the pressure from different people, including Rudolf Giunio and Milan Marjanovic, who
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were supposed to support her. The efforts of the two men to obtain the gathered materials culminated in January 1921, when they wanted to use Paulová's financial problems to their advantage. The historian still refused to be "Giunio's snitch", saying he suffered from a need to punish all opportunistically minded politicians from the First World War and she did not comply with his requests (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2014, 235-242).
Paulová's first stay in the SCS Kingdom, which was much longer than originally expected, finished in September of 1921. She was aware that the materials she had gathered in the South will have to be complemented by information from the main representatives of the Czechoslovak resistance - President Tomás G. Masaryk and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Edvard Benes. The first Yugoslav post-war Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ante Trumbic, only gave Paulová's his consent to use the materials she got from him on the condition that Masaryk will oversee the process. That is why Paulová visited the Prague Castle as early as October 5, 1921. In her meeting with the chancellor Premysl Sámal she summarised her stay in the SCS Kingdom and requested further support of her work. As a condition for successful completion of her work, she asked for confirmation by Masaryk and Benes of some of the information she had. She also requested access to materials received in the separation from Vienna archives and detailed information about the organisation of domestic anti-Austrian resistance, the so called Maffie (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2011, 41-42).
Sámal informed Paulová on the same day that the President was interested in her work and would like to meet with her. But he wanted to know her questions beforehand (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2011, 42). That is why Paulová formulated the questions over the month of October and submitted them to the President. The questions were about ten main subjects, seven of which referred to the events of the First World War. Regarding Masaryk's stay in Rome in the autumn of 1914, the historian was interested, among others, in the idea of a corridor between the future Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states. Paulová also pointed out the inconsistencies in the testimonies of Ljubo Mihajlovic, Ivan Mestrovic and Ivan Lorkovic about the formation of an independent Croatian state with one of the members of the British ruling dynasty on the throne.
Another subject focused on the events in the United States in 1918 and the Yugoslav Committee's efforts to be recognized by Washington. At that time, the conflict between the Yugoslav Committee and the Serbian government was at its peak and became publicly known. Paulová wondered how Masaryk's operations developed in the US against the background of these events and where one can find common points in the Czechoslovak-Yugoslav cooperation. Another subject concerned Masaryk's stay in Russia in 1917. Paulová was in particular interested how "the diplomatic action and cooperation with south Slavs developed' at that time. In the fourth set of questions she asked the President if it is possible, in relation to 1918, to talk about his cooperation with Yugoslavs, namely the Yugoslav Committee, in the efforts to recognise the independent Czechoslovak, Polish and Yugoslav states. The next set of questions pertained to the division of assignments between Masaryk and Benes when preparing the Rome Congress of Oppressed Nationalities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Masaryk's view on the politics of the Yugoslav Committee, namely Trumbic and Pasic. The last three questions concerned the period
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before 1914: are there any facts about Masaryk's involvement in the so-called treason trials that can be now revealed? Was Masaryk's political ideology in any way influenced by his trip to Serbia during the Balkan Wars? The last question referred to the president's possible memories from 1895-1901, when the realism ideas were brought to Croatia by South Slavic students.3
The meeting of the historian and the President took place on December 20, 1921 in the presidential palace in Lány. Paulová, according to her memoirs, intended to discuss only the questions about the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav cooperation during the First World War. The President, in their two-hour conversation, tried to assess his work abroad in this period. We consider Masaryk's claim that he had not "given his answer any thought" at least disputable, as he had requested to know the individual questions a few months in advance. We tend to believe that Masaryk had considered it all thoroughly and tried to use this conversation to present himself and the whole Czechoslovak anti-Austrian resistance abroad in the positive light. Especially given the fact that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Edvard Beneš, had also known the young historian's questions.
The meeting with the President-Liberator made a lasting impression on Paulová. Her opinion of Masaryk's personality was not completely positive. "He is now a sphynx, a man from another world", she noted.4 She did not hide her view even from Chancellor Sá-mal, telling him that she "had known the President only from the books by Dr. Herben and had imagined him as a professor, who is keenly interested in all things scholarly, beautiful and noble. The president is no longer this man." During the conversation, she became convinced that "the President is dealing with a significant problem with his position. The problem is that he is no longer Herben's Masaryk, but a different man" (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2011, 50). Paulová's opinion of the president was undoubtedly influenced by their differing views on the role that the Yugoslav Committee played in the First World War. While Paulová was affected by her friendships with many of its representatives, which started during her stay in the SCS Kingdom, Masaryk's judgement was based on his experience as a politician and a diplomat and was inevitably burdened with a certain dose of pragmatism. And thus, Paulová listened to a number of president's categorical statements: "I was on Serbia's side .... I was always in favour of the state to be formed under the leadership of Serbia, as it really did happen. No federation." It is necessary to mention that even after a few years Masaryk did not change his earlier opinions and repeated them on the pages of the World Revolution (Hájková, Sedivy, 2004, 304-306; Masaryk, 2005, 187-194).
The year 1921 brought the advent of the government of a Serbian radical Nikola Pašic. On June 28th of that year, on St. Vitus' Day, a new Vidovdan Constitution was accepted, confirming the SCS Kingdom as a parliamentary monarchy headed by the Karadordevic dynasty. In national issues, it declared centralism and unitarism and it formally guaranteed
3	AKPR, KPR, protokol T, 61/T 1410/21, Milada Paulova, part I., Appendix of a letter from M. Paulova to P. Samal (Priloha dopisu M. Paulove P. Samalovi) of 28. 10. 1921.
4	MUA, AV CR-A AV CR-MP, 2/25, M. Paulova's memories of the visit with T. G. Masaryk in Lany, 21 December, 1921.
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civil rights and liberties. The ruler got a number of rights at the cost of the parliament. The king, who was untouchable and legally exempt from prosecution, became the commander-in-chief of the army, appointed and recalled the Prime Minister, convened and dissolved the parliament, proposed and evaluated laws, was the state representative and appointed the highest ranking civil officers. The constitution was the answer to most Serbs' wish to have a unified country, centrally ruled from Belgrade. But the document by far did not meet the expectations of the Croats, Slovenes and other nationalities living in the Kingdom (Tejchman, 1998, 400-401).
In the escalating political situation, the warring parties used arguments from the recent history. Milada Paulová was well aware of that. That is why she decided to support Ante Trumbic, one of the leaders of the Yugoslav Committee. With this in mind she planned to write a study on the Yugoslav Committee using the materials she had already collected. In her letter to Sámal, she said she was planning to bring to the argument her "own strange position, a point of view that is not really partial to any of the parties. Technically, it is closer to Pasic, but in fact it defends Trumbic" Paulová did not only want to help Trumbic, but she also wanted to publish a part of the collected source material. She was afraid that during the conflict some of it might be printed by one of the arguing parties and the historian would thus not be the first to publish it (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2011, 51-52). We presume that it was the planned paper that eventually grew to the size of the book which is the subject of our article.
One year later, in June of 1923, the book was almost complete and it was being translated to Croatian in Zagreb. Paulová wanted to obtain missing information in a conversation with Benes, which she asked Sámal for (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2011, 56-57). She indeed met the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who "very kindly clarified all the situations and submitted certain facts" The historian knew that her work is bound to trigger serious resistance from the Serbian Radical Party. But considering the "retribution that all the members of the Yugoslav Committee suffered from their own nation", she felt the need and courage to talk (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2011, 58). The Czechoslovak Minister of Foreign Affairs was of a completely different opinion as he did not want to start, just because of one historic study, a conflict with the Little Entente ally, which was connected to Prague not only by safety issues, but also by economy (Sládek, 2000, 14-65). It is possible that Benes's interview with Paulová led the minister to act against publishing the book in Czechoslovakia, although a while earlier it had looked like it would not be a problem. According to the historian Josef Susta, the ministerial official Petr Zenkl was interested in the book and wanted to publish it at the publishing house Vesmír, which had already released Paulová's work Tajná diplomatická hra o Jihoslovany za svétové války. Úrední listy bar. C. Hotzendorfa, hr. Tiszy, bar. Buriana, hr. Czernina, hr. Clama-Martinice, gen. pluk. Rhemena, gen. pluk. Sokotice aj. in January 1923.
Benes's opinion of the book is documented in his words from March 1924: "I know Dr Paulová and I know that she is working on a book on the Yugoslav independence. Her work is going to sound anti-Serbian. I also am of the impression that she is a bit sanguine about some issues, although I have no doubt about her skills as a historian. But it is necessary to be careful, so that the Serbian government or the King would not see this as an
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attack on them if we were to officially sponsor the book" (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2011, 65). All her life Paulová remained convinced that Benes had taken steps to stop the book from being published.5 But the work on the Croatian version progressed, despite the author's fears.6 A former deputy of the Yugoslav Committee in Petrograd, a lawyer from Opatija and Paulová's friend Ante Mandic tried to alleviate her fears with realistic claims: "If the book gets confiscated, you can be sure that in two months it will be translated to all European languages".7 The manuscript was continually reviewed by a number of people, including, most prominently, Milan Marjanovic, Ante Trumbic, Ante Mandic and Paulová's patrons during her first stay in the SCS Kingdom, Frantisek Hlavácek a Veceslav Vilder. The book was translated "for a significant sum" by a leading Croatian bohemist and the first instructor of Czech at the Faculty of Arts at Zagreb University Stjepan Musulin, under the condition that his name will not be published (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2014, 272-273).
Despite the undisputable efforts by everyone involved, publishing of the book was put off due to the way Paulová made the final corrections. Her "consultants", who got the Czech version to review, were not only allowed to share their views on the book with the historian, but they directly changed the contents. So the manuscript given to the translator and then to the printers was constantly undergoing changes, which were to a certain extent independent of the author, much to the dislike of the Zagreb publisher Prosvjetna nakladna zadruga8 Based on the study of his personal correspondence, we can consider Milan Marjanovic, who used the archives of Yugoslav organizations and periodicals in America, a co-author of the chapters dealing with the development of the Yugoslav movement on the American continent.9 Similarly, Frantisek Hlavácek influenced the final shape of the passage devoted to the Rome Congress of Oppressed Nationalities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.10
King Alexander I Karadordevic apparently also tried to use the book to his ends. In the early 1924 Paulová was contacted by a former Yugoslav consul in Odessa Marko Cemovic and invited to an audience with the king. Cemovic claimed it to be his idea and said he had asked the ruler to offer Paulová his wartime diary to study. The historian accepted the invitation, which included the reimbursement of all the travel and accommodation expenses and on March 21, 1924 she was received in Belgrade by the king for a 90-minute audience, in which she received some of the promised materials. Paulová was naively excited about the meeting. It is hard to share her belief that "His Royal Highness just happened to have the materials at hand" (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2011, 69-71). It is more plausible that the notes were chosen with the intent to affect the final shape of the work in progress.
5	MUA, AV ČR-A AV ČR-MP, 18/675, Manuscript of the book Jugoslavenski odbor. Povijest jugoslavenske emigracije za svjetskog rata od 1914—1918.
6	MUA, AV ČR-A AV ČR-MP, 8/286, M. Marjanovic to M. Paulova, 3. 7. 1923.
7	MUA, AV ČR-A AV ČR-MP, 7/280, A. Mandic to M. Paulova, 16. 6. 1924.
8	MUA, AV ČR-A AV ČR-MP, 5/146 (R. Giunio); 5/176 (F. Hlavaček); 7/280 (A. Mandic); 8/285 (M. Marjanovic); 11/479 (A. Trumbic); 13/581 (Nakladna prosvjetna zadruga, Zagreb).
9	MUA, AV ČR-A AV ČR-MP, 8/285, M. Marjanovic to M. Paulova, 1. 11. 1923, 17. 3. 1924.
10	MUA, AV ČR-A AV ČR-MP, 5/176, F. Hlavaček to M. Paulova, 10.-11. 8. 1924.
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The book was finally published in the early 1925. The author followed the operations of the Yugoslav Committee in Italy, France, Great Britain, Russia, and North and South America from the outbreak of the First World War until the formation of the SCS Kingdom. The book had almost six hundred pages and the events were described in chronological order. The volume had three main parts: 1. The period from the foundation of the Yugoslav Committee to the defeat of Serbia in November of 1915, 2. Operations of the Yugoslav Committee in Russia and America, and 3. The Corfu Declaration and the efforts for the diplomatic recognition of the SCS Kingdom. In her introduction to the book, Paulová tried to justify her use of the interviews with direct participants of the events as primary historical sources. Referring to the classic 1844 work of Leopold Ranke Die serbische Revolution. Aus serbischen Papieren und Mitteilungen, she expressed her conviction that in the testimonies of the eyewitnesses from 1920-1921 one could see "the spirit which drove their actions during the war". At the time the book was being completed, the actors, according to her, "have changed their original opinions and (often subconsciously) understood and interpreted the past differently." This claim then helped her to support her argument that the greatest advantage of her work is the fact that "it captures the atmosphere and mentality present in the Yugoslav emigration circles during the war" (Paulová, 1925, III-VI).
The postdoctoral committee of the Faculty of Arts at the Charles University positively reviewed the book as early as March 13. The committee's members, professors Jaroslav Bidlo, Josef Šusta and Matyáš Murko described "the main contents of the whole book" as the rivalry of the Yugoslav Committee with the Serbian government, namely the Prime Minister Nikola Pašic. From the formal point of view, the style in which the book was written was described as "a very well written work of literature." But for the academic purposes, it was the scientific methodology used by the author that was important. The committee pointed out that the work is "based mainly on oral testimonies and private notes of individual participants and eyewitnesses to the events", while it accepted Paulová's argument that she cannot reveal the names of her informants because of safety reasons. The committee concluded that the "work method of Ms Paulová fully meets the requirements of historical science". The professors regarded the book as objective. The fact that in places there was more personal sympathy than "allowed by strict objectivity", was explained by the statement that no researcher so far had achieved total historical objectivity if they had not limited themselves to just a list of facts and denied themselves any interpretation.
The postdoctoral committee moreover concluded that works similar to Paulová's book are "quite rare" in historical literature, but, referring to the abovementioned work by Ranke, highlighted the fact that in her book the historian "recorded very valuable source materials of the first order".11 Other sources, however, testify to certain disagreements between the professors. They became more apparent after 1932 when Paulová wanted to become a professor extraordinaire. Josef Šusta said at that time that he feared "that the immediacy of the subject and the content itself' could deceive her into using "methods of a journalist and not a scholar" (Brádlerová, Hálek, 2011, 315).
11 AUK, FF, 47/566, Professor Milada Paulová.
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A reviewer at Slovansky prehled (The Slavic Review), Hubert Ripka, rated the book similarly to the members of the postdoctoral committee. He presumed that the book would stir a lot of controversy, disagreement, critical objections and comments. He stated that the fact that Paulova had changed her scholarly focus to the history of the Yugoslav Committee and the willingness of its former members to provide her with the necessary data, had significantly influenced her position in interpreting this period in history. According to Ripka, in her book Paulova took over the view of the Yugoslav Committee held by its president Ante Trumbic (Ripka, 1925, 308-311).
Right after it was published, Rudolf Giunio gave some prominent representatives of the Belgrade political scene a number of copies and also introduced the book to the Chamber of Deputies.12 But it seems that, despite his claim that the book only "gathered all-around praise", its popularity among the readers was well below the expectations. It was partly due to its high price of 200 dinars, but another reason was apparently its certain bias, which made it hardly acceptable to the Serbian citizens of the SCS Kingdom. It is further confirmed by the press - while the Zagreb newspapers carried a lot of advertisements and long excerpts from the book, Serbian magazines ignored it, despite also being sent "review copies".13 A representative of the publisher thus commented on this fact: "It is hard to write about the book, so [the Serbs] rather remain silent."14 In the end, the book was only published in Croatian. Although, after being unsuccessful with the Vesmir publishing house, Paulova tried in 1925 to have the book published at Čin or with the help of Pamatnik odboje (the Museum of War Resistance), she did not manage to get the necessary support. The plans to publish the book in French or in English were also unsuccessful.
Although Milada Paulova's fundamental work about the development of the Yugoslav political emigration during the First World War never had another edition or even a reprint after it was published in 1925, its influence on Yugoslavian historiographic production for the next few decades was significant. Paulova managed not only to describe in detail the circumstances of the founding of the Yugoslav Committee, but also comprehensively capture its diplomatic and propagandist operations from 1914 to 1918. Based on a number of personal testimonies and the source materials that were both valuable and difficult to collect because of the short temporal distance, Paulova managed to shed light on the course of the internal debates and the overall development of opinions of the foremost members of the Yugoslav Committee during their four-year exile. In this respect, the research work of Milada Paulova was a remarkable contribution to the question of Yugoslav union. Thanks to its informative volume and a broad notion of exposition, it remains nowadays an important source of knowledge of some of the levels of the complex political process which led to the formation of the common Yugoslav state.
Paulova did not, however, limit her interpretation to the activities of the main members of the Yugoslav Committee (Ante Trumbic, Frano Supilo, Hinko Hinkovic, Ante Mandic and others), as she incorporated the activities of the South Slav emigration into the context
12	MUA, AV ČR-AAV ČR-MP, 5/146, R. Giunio to M. Paulova, 21. 3. 1925.
13	MUA, AV ČR-A AV ČR-MP, 48/998, Jugoslavenski odbor - press reactions.
14	MUA, AV ČR-A AV ČR-MP,13/581, Nakladna prosvjetna zadruga, Zagreb.
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of the development of the South Slav question in the First World War. She devoted a large part of the monograph to the relationship of the South Slav politicians operating abroad with the Serbian government headed by Nikola Pašic. When describing the contact between those two parties of Yugoslav politics, she opened a number of controversial and sensitive subjects. One of the recurring motives of the monograph is, for example, a question to what extent the idea of a union of all the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs was a truly primary and honest aim of Pašic's cabinet and how the Serbian ruling elite's vision of the common state was different from the group of politicians headed by Ante Trumbic. The relevant interpretations by Paulová can be briefly, but accurately summarised as a basic and often repeated thesis of the book. In the monograph Paulová consistently criticises Pašic's war diplomacy and attempts to prove to the reader that the Serbian Prime Minister preferred the Greater Serbian solution to the South Slavic question. Even the argumentatively lighter fragments in the first half of the book, where Paulová points out that Pašic often found himself at the mercy of events and in the question of South Slavic integration he was the supporter of a gradual change, which originally regarded the merging of the Serbian ethnic space as a necessary condition for a union with other South Slav nations. Trumbic and his associates, on the other hand, are presented by Paulová as authentic representatives of the South Slavic idea stemming from the right to self-identification, who in their actions during the war often clashed with the ambivalent and opportunistic attitude of Pašic's government. Open sympathy towards the leaders of the Yugoslav Committee and occasional sharp criticism of Pašic's policy definitely do not, however, give the book an anti-Serbian feel or support the nationalist argumentation of the Croatian or Slovenian political representation, which grew more and more common in the early 1920s. On the contrary, the Czech historian devotes a lot of attention in her work to the military successes and cruel suffering of the Serbian army and civilians during the war. She also highlights the reputation that the Serbian Kingdom had among the Entente countries. Paulová simultaneously negatively interprets the actions of the Croatian nationalists, who tried until the last moment to campaign against the idea of a union with Serbia. Regardless of this claim, Paulová quite conclusively creates an image of a Greater Serbia-focused statesman Pašic and contrasts him with the Yugoslav-oriented democrats from the Yugoslav Committee, headed by Ante Trumbic.
In the early 1920s, when Paulová was collecting the material for her book, the conflict on the political scene of the newly formed SCS Kingdom was quite obvious. The dispute about the nature of the new state became crucial in the differentiation of opinions on the contemporary political scene. The abovementioned controversial subjects, which Paulová addressed in her book, thus became especially relevant and touchy in the atmosphere of escalating arguments. It was not just because many of the people that Paulová wrote about in her work were still active in the public life and a detailed account of their often-controversial actions in the First World War could endanger the stability of their position and the voters' support. The main criterion for assessing the influence of Milada Paulová's book is the fact that her monograph contributed to the emergence of a discourse that significantly affected the interpretation of events leading to the formation of the common state in the autumn of 1918. This proposition, however, should not be seen in terms of the contemporary responses, which, as has already been explained above, were not as strong
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as expected and did not cause the much-dreaded protest in the Serbian community, but rather in terms of the development of Yugoslavian historiography after 1945. For many scholars, Paulova's book presented one of the main sources in their research of the basic outline of the South Slav issue in the years 1914-1918. Although a lot of the critical theses against Pasic's policy that Paulova uses in her book were deeply rooted in the discourse of the opponents of the Belgrade centre since the interwar era, in historical research these interpretations survived for many years. One of the reasons was the frequent reference of
historians to Milada Paulova's extensive study from the mid-1920s.
* * *
The development of the historical science in the first decade of communist Yugoslavia copied the complex socio-political development of Tito's regime. The question of the Yugoslav movement from the First World War was of marginal interest to the researchers at that time. The attitude towards the main actors of the formation of the common state in 1918 was largely influenced by the negative presentation of the interwar period by the upper echelons of power (Stankovic, Dimic, 1996, 298). The communist elite, especially at the beginning, legitimised itself, among others, by the act of abolishment of the Ka-radordevic monarchy, which was definitively confirmed in the spring of 1946. This was why the research of the circumstances of the formation of the first Yugoslav state did not lie in the best interest of the strongly biased historiographic production.
Yet Yugoslavian historiography managed to - again in line with the changing political system - gradually reach stronger, although still very limited, emancipation of the patterns of scientific research as soon as the late 1950s. The social liberalisation, in many respects almost hasty, significantly influenced the approach to the so far neglected subject of the Yugoslav union of 1918. In the late 1950s, memoirs of a former politician in the Serbo-Croatian coalition, Srdjan Budisavljevic, and a deputy of the Yugoslav Committee in Russia and Paulova's close friend Ante Mandic were published in Zagreb (Mandic, 1956; Budisavljevic, 1958). Both books were written in the spirit of a strong South Slavic romanticism, which on one hand described the formation of the SCS Kingdom as a fulfilment of the wishes of the South Slav nations to be united, but on the other hand criticised Serbian and Croatian bourgeoisie for their disrespect and abuse of this act to strengthen their own position of power (Mandic, 1956, 93). The presentation of the formation of the first Yugoslav state as a positive act, but one "stolen from the masses", was typical for the official historiographic approach to the issue. In Mandic's book, the writing of which was reportedly requested by the highest Croatian official Vladimir Bakaric, the noticeable emphasis is on the schematic distinction between the "Yugoslav-" and "democracy-"oriented committee of Ante Trumbic and the bourgeois and Serbian-oriented politics of Nikola Pasic (Mandic 1956, 36-39). Moreover, in Mandic's memoirs one can notice hints of a certain historical construct that tried to find elements of continuity between the contemporary regime of Tito and the "progressive" political forces of the past.15 The fact that
15 Compare the final passage of the book by Mandic: "Finally in 1918 there was a union. But the political union did not mean a union of the spirit. There was an SCS state, but there was no Yugoslavia. A lot of
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the official circles used the memoirs of a former member of the Yugoslav Committee to present it, in many respects showed which historical actors are going to be included in the pantheon of Yugoslav history. But the publishing of the two books was first and foremost a proof of how the Yugoslavian historiography changed its approach to the Yugoslav union. It was further confirmed in the second historical conference, which took place in 1958 and was devoted to the formation of the "first Yugoslavia" on its 40th anniversary. The following critical discussion about the influence of individual political and social factors in this historical process, quite clearly showed that historical science in Yugoslavia began to steer away from some of the so far strictly applied patterns (Agicic, 2015, 27-28).
The turning point in the research of the Yugoslav question during the First World War came in the early 1960s, when first studies based on archive research appeared on this subject. The pursuit of a deeper approach, based on scientific methods, also corresponded to a partial shift away from the ideological claims. And thus, Yugoslavian historiography finally had the opportunity to seriously research the issues described by Milada Paulová in her monograph in the early 1920s. Over three decades since the book was published, it was clear from the numerous references in scientific literature that it was still considered to be one the main sources not only for the history of the Yugoslav Committee, but also for the knowledge of the processes at the start of the SCS Kingdom. For example, the already mentioned Croatian historian Dragovan Sepic in his works repeatedly described Milada Paulová's book as a classic and so far, the most complete work about the Yugoslav Committee operations (Sepic, 1960, 1; Sepic, 1961, 7, 13-14). The benefits and the relevance of the early scholarly work of the first Czech female docent are further demonstrated by the fact that it has been used as - sometimes the sole - source of selected documents included in the important edition by Bogdan Krizman a Dragoslav Jankovic (Jankovic, Krizman, 1964, 7). But although Sepic often refers to Paulová's monograph, he does not blindly accept her often stereotypical interpretation of the relationship between Trumbic and other exiled politicians on one side and Pasic's cabinet on the other. Some of the conclusions that Paulová reached in the early 1920s are corrected or overturned by Sepic, which contributes to a more comprehensive and more correct interpretation of the Yugoslav question in the years 1914-1918 (Sepic, 1960, 12). Sepic, who, apart from common professional interests, was also Paulová's friend, thanks to his attempts at an unbiased approach to the subject, contributed to a significantly more complex and correct interpretation of the Yugoslav issue between 1914 and 1918. He praised Paulová's book as a unique and indispensable source in the study of the subject, but at the same time, thanks to an extensive heuristic base and new findings of the Yugoslavian historiography he managed to - very subtly and tactfully - revise some of the conclusions reached by Paulová in the early 1920s (Sepic, 1970; Sepic, 1989). The well-balanced approach is not shared by some of the other Croatian researchers, who considered the tension between the Yugoslav Committee and Serbian government a
blood had to be shed and a lot of time had to go by before a way was found to unify the nation [...]. With all the might [...] everything that was divided, oppressed and segregated was liberated and joined: new Tito's Yugoslavia was formed — bigger, stronger and prouder than ever before" (Mandic, 1956, 95).
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harbinger of the later conflicts in dealing with the nationalist issue and above all a proof that the responsibility for the failure of the "first Yugoslavia" rested on the shoulders of the "Greater Serbian circles". In the mid-sixties, such propositions were not devoid of considerable political charge.
The year 1966 showed to what extent the actions and objectives of the former South Slav political emigration may become the subject of differing interpretations by Yugoslavian scholars. That year, on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Yugoslav Committee, an edition of scholarly papers was published on the subject. As an academic doyen, Milada Paulova contributed an article about the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Rome in the spring of 1918. The nearly seventy-five-year-old historian could see, based on the contributions of her Yugoslavian colleagues, that her original presentation of the Yugoslav Committee and Pasic's government as closely cooperating, but from the ideological point of view opposing actors of the Yugoslav political scene during the First World War, still had its followers. But while a leading historian and author of an important work on the history of interwar Yugoslavia Ferdo Culinovic (Culinovic, 1961) agrees with Paulova's original interpretation and views Pasic's plans for the South Slavic union as primarily Greater Serbian, but more or less forced by the war circumstances (Culinovic, 1966, 167-171), the then director of the Institute of the History of the Worker's Movement Franjo Tudjman went even further in his interpretation. According to Tudjman, Ante Trumbic and his associates, are Yugoslav-oriented, democratic-minded members of the "civil" political spectrum, who, with their ideas stemming from the European liberal tradition, find themselves in direct opposition to the Greater Serbian expansionism of Nikola Pasic and "bourgeois" Belgrade circles. In almost each initiative or step taken by the Serbian political elite, Tudjman saw only centralistic and hegemonic tendencies. In an almost one-hundred-page study he only mentioned Serbian army's merits in the fight for a common Yugoslav state once. Tudjman, who in many of his conclusions refers to Milada Paulova's book, similarly to her did not try to conceal his sympathy for the leaders of the Yugoslav Committee (Tudman, 1966). But with his extremely biased and uncompromising approach Tudjman goes far beyond the interpretative framework that Paulova set her monograph in.
The stereotypes in some of the contributions by Croatian historians did not by far originate in the deeply rooted presumptions or automatic acceptance of the conclusions found in the still widely used book by Paulova. Ideological aspects of historiography were also at play here and they uniformly emphasised the "bourgeois" and hence "anti-people" character of nearly all of the pre-war South Slavic political elite, regardless of nationalist or ideological criteria (Nikolic, 2003, 38). As is apparent from the approach of some of the Croatian scholars explained above, this interpretation was not applied uniformly. The leniency, or even open sympathy for the activities of the Yugoslav Committee sharply contrasted with the negative image of Nikola Pasic and the "Serbian bourgeoisie". This stereotype was especially evident in the history textbooks used in elementary and secondary schools in Croatia, which remained unchanged until the late eighties despite new findings in historiography (Koren, 2012, 301-302; Agicic, Najbar Agicic, 2007, 206).
The mainstream Serbian historians for a long time did not address the tendencies of some of their Croatian counterparts motivated by the attempt at a nationally conditioned
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revision of the current interpretation of the Yugoslav issue in the years 1914-1918. The Serbian community, moreover, had been struggling since the late sixties with indifference and even a certain taboo surrounding the Serbian military actions in the First World War (Manojlovič Pintar, 2007, 158-161). This, to a large extent ambiguous, attitude towards one's own national history was also strongly reflected in the Serbian historians' approach to the subject of the emergence of the first Yugoslav state. Serbian researchers more often than Croatian ones resorted to the Marxist methodology which made them perceive both Pašič's government and Trumbic's party primarily as political bourgeoisie. The attitude towards these actors of the South Slavic scene between 1914 and 1918 completely lacked the effort to idealise their motives or goals. Articles by some Serbian historians, on the contrary, criticised the particular interests of the Yugoslav Committee and the Serbian government, which, according to this interpretation, supposedly negatively influenced the circumstances and results of the formation of the SCS Kingdom in December of 1918 (Jankovič, 1963; Božič, Cirkovič, Ekmečič, Dedijer, 1972, 398, 404-405).
Yugoslavian historiography, regardless of its ideological or biased elements, when interpreting the issues related to the formation and character of the first Yugoslav state, in the 1970s had some notable success. Especially the circles of the middle-aged and younger generations (Janko Pleterski, Bogdan Krizman, Andrej Mitrovič, Branko Petranovič, Djordje Stankovič, Ljubo Boban and others) showed interest in deeper research and critical reinterpretation of the issue examined almost 50 years earlier by Milada Paulova. Thus, the Yugoslavian historiography produced prominent works, which significantly improved the knowledge of, for example, unique aspects of dealing with the Yugoslav question by individual South Slav nations. Many of these books are still considered to be the classic works of Yugoslavian historiography (Pleterski, 1971a; Zečevič, 1973, Krizman, 1977). Although their authors still referred to Jugoslavenski odbor and many other works by the first Czech female docent, they were fully aware of the heuristic, methodological and interpretative limitations which bound Paulova's research. But it definitely did not stop the Yugoslavian scholars from fully appreciating the undoubtable benefits of Paulova's expert work (Pleterski, 1971b; Pleterski, 1971c).
In the early 1980s, a group of Serbian historians, for whom some of Paulova's evaluation of Pašič's activities during The First World War was incompatible with the newest findings, decided to openly refute a number of these, mostly schematic, interpretations. Published works of Andrej Mitrovič or Djordje Stankovič shed more light on the controversial points of relations between the Serbian government and the Yugoslav Committee and thus in many respects undermined the established and by many of their colleagues automatically accepted interpretation formed by Paulova. These works by the Belgrade historians were characterised by a common emphasis on thorough archival research as well as new methodological approach. They resulted in refutation of the interpretations which in Pašič's politics during the First World War were seeking mainly evidence of Greater Serbian and expansionist orientation of the ruling Serbian elite, while soberly analysing a real situation and basic limitations of the influence of the Yugoslav Committee on the process of the formation of a common state (Mitrovič, 1984; Stankovič, 1985a). It was not until mid-1980s that the historical role of Nikola Pašič was finally extensively
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researched in a monograph, which, on the basis of relevant documents, confirmed the earlier findings that his government between 1914 and 1918 continued the pro-Yugoslav policy (Stankovic, 1985b).
Although this group of leading Serbian historians remarkably contributed to the refutation or correction of the theses, which were unexpectedly deeply rooted in the Yugoslavian historiography because of Paulová's book, in the 1980s the book was still, in some respects surprisingly often, the subject of scholarly debates. This confirmed not only a truly strong influence of Paulová's work on the research of the Yugoslav issue during the First World War, but also the need of the next generations of Yugoslavian historians to review the conclusions of her work (Zecevic, 1983, 438-440, 442-444; Diskuzija, 1983, 449-450, 455-456, 462-463, 468-469). In the mid-eighties, however, the issue of the process of formation of the "first Yugoslavia" became increasingly relevant, to the extent that it eventually far exceeded the frame of academic controversy. The crisis of the Yugoslavian federation led to a further escalation of the division of opinion throughout both the Yugoslavian historian community and the society. The attitude towards the Yugoslav unification in 1918 and the interwar period of Yugoslavian history was a reflection of the approach to current events. Paulová's thesis proving that the Serbian ruling elite built its vision of the future common state on Greater Serbian and hegemonic foundations as early as the First World War, became relevant again in the face of the Yugoslavian disintegration.16 But this time the work of the Czech historian, despite its pioneer character, was also explicitly criticised. The already mentioned Belgrade historian Djordje Stankovic wrote in the late 1987 an extensive essay reviewing the newly published biography of Ante Trumbic, written by a Croatian historian Ivo Petrinovic. Stankovic described Petrinovic's work, which was biased and neglected relevant Serbian research, as the result of "Milada Paulová S syndrome". According to Stankovic, Petrinovic's attempt to present Trumbic to the readers as the opposition of Pasic's politics and emphasise Trumbic's national orientation, to a large extent originates with the ideological construct which was first formulated in the scholarly community in the early 1920s by the Czech historian. Stankovic proves that a number of Paulová's theses were refuted by the Yugoslavian historiography and there is no point in holding on to a sixty-year-old stereotype about the antagonism and ideological opposition of the Yugoslav Committee and Pasic's government (Stankovic, 1988, 399-405). Stankovic's reaction to Petrinovic's book fully summarises the fundamental differences in the approach of some of the Serbian and Croatian historians to modern Yugoslavian history. It was impossible not to notice that their mutual contacts were becoming dominated by isolationist tendencies, but until early 1990s most of the renowned historians did not stoop to the nationalistically conditioned and constructed argumentation.17
16	A Croatian communist official Stipe Suvar already in 1983 described the issue of the formation of a common state in 1918 as possibly one of the most dangerous subjects in some intellectuals' attempts at revision or reinterpretation of modern Yugoslav history based on selective arguments (Bjelajac, 2007, 58).
17	See e.g. the historians' contributions during the Round Table in December 1988. The discussion was, contrary to the previous meetings, almost solely devoted to the events in Serbia during the formation of the common state, but the researchers present for the most part used balanced argumentation which did not
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On the eve of the disintegration of the Yugoslavian state, the Serbian community openly attempted to reinstate the system of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Although these tendencies were especially clear among the nationalist-minded intellectuals (Vuk Draš-kovic and others), the wave of social interest in this issue also reached the scholarly community. While the expert debates between the leading historians Dušan Bilandžic and Branko Petranovic managed to avoid the sharp and nationalist argumentation (Niko-lic, 2003, 94-96), the often-hysterical debate in the late 1989 about December 1st being possibly celebrated as the Day of the Formation of SCS Kingdom confirmed the depth of the ideological differences among the Yugoslavian public. This fact was also reflected in the historical research, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s found itself once again under the pressure of the current social and political demand. After the dissolution of the Yugoslavian state, Milada Paulová's work became once again, paradoxically, the centre of interest due to its relatively clearly outlined idea of polarisation of the Yugoslav Committee and Nikola Pašic's Serbian politics.18 This time, however, Paulová's book did not only serve the historical science as one of the fundamental sources of information, but as an argumentatively appropriate source for the revision of modern Yugoslav history. A temporary, but valuable progress that Yugoslavian historiography had made in the preceding three decades, was again in many respects interrupted by the opportune
interpretations of the 1914-1918 events in Croatian and Serbian historiography.
* * *
The brief outline of the start of the history of the Yugoslav Committee allows us to answer the questions we posed at the beginning of this study. Milada Paulová became, to a large extent, a victim of the times of her graduation from university. The young, institutionally unanchored historian in the turbulent period shortly after the First World War was asked to deal with a subject for which she lacked any prior preparation. In her subsequent work in the SCS Kingdom and Czechoslovakia she was practically existentially and socially dependent on her associates, who also set the boundaries for her academic work.
The world that she lived in allowed her to freely conduct academic research, but the publishing of its result was understandably met with a number of injunctions. These factors, coupled with the idea of historical science of the time and considering the Czech historians' lack of interest in the modern history research, to a large extent influenced the objectivity of Paulová's work and the conclusions she reached. These points, however, cannot change the fact that the monograph by the young and inexperienced scholar left an impressive and still evident footprint in the research of the Yugoslav unification during the First World War.
question the sense of Yugoslav unification at the end of the First World War (Terzic, 1989).
18 The next wave of updating Milada Paulová's thesis in historical research was partly started by a Croatian historian Ivo Banac, who used the work of the Czech historian in the passages about the Yugoslav Committee in his ground-breaking 1988 book. Banac attempted to highlight some of the taboo aspects of the Yugoslav unification process. Although in many respects it is a fundamental work on this subject, Banac did not manage to avoid a one-sided, however unconventional, view of the Serbian involvement in the First World War (Banac, 1988).
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"SINDROM MILADA PAULOVA" - ŽIVLJENSKI OPUS ČEŠKE ZNANSTVENICE IN NJEGOV VPLIV NA ZGODOVINOPISJE V SOCIALISTIČNI JUGOSLAVIJI
Jan HALEK
Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic v. v. i., Gabčikova 2362/10, 18200 Praha 8, Češka Republika e-mail: halek@mua.cas.cz
Boris MOSKOVIC
Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic v. v. i., Gabčikova 2362/10, 18200 Praha 8, Češka Republika e-mail: moskovic@mua.cas.cz
POVZETEK
Študija se ukvarja z opusom češke zgodovinarke Milade Paulove, ki se je posvetila zgodovini Jugoslovanskega odbora v letih 1914-1918. Jugoslovanska komisija Češkoslovaškega urada za tujce je leta 1919 Paulovi zaupala nalogo opisa zgodovine češkoslovaško - jugoslovanskega uporniškega sodelovanja v času prve svetovne vojne. V ta namen je v aprilu leta 1920 odpotovala v Kraljevino Srbov, Hrvatov in Slovencev. Njeno pot so financirali z virov češkoslovaškega ministrstva za zunanje zadeve ter ministrstva za šole in nacionalno izobraževanje. V času svojega bivanja v Kraljevini SHS, ki je trajalo do septembra 1921, je zbrala vrsto pomembnih materialov. Najbolj pomemben vir njenih informacij so postala osebna pričevanja neposrednih udeležencev upora. Na ta način pridobljene informacije je po povratku v Prago dopolnila na osnovi razgovorov z glavnimi predstavniki češke rezistence. Rezultat dela Milade Paulove je bila knjiga Jugoslovanski upor. Povijest jugoslavenske emigracije za svjetskog rata od 1914.-1918., ki jo je leta 1925 zagovarjala na Filozofski fakulteti Karlove univerze v Pragi kot svoj habilitacijski spis.
Omenjeno delo je močno vplivalo na jugoslovansko produkcijo zgodovinopisja v nekaj naslednjih desetletij. S svojo monografijo se je Paulova izrazito udeležila nastajanja interpretacijske sheme za razlago dogodkov, ki so jeseni 1918 pripeljali do nastanka skupne jugoslovanske države. Za številne raziskovalce po drugi svetovni vojni je njena knjiga predstavljala eden od glavnih virov, iz katerih so črpali relevantne, pogosto pa tudi edinstvene informacije, ki so jih nato s pridom uporabili pri lastnih raziskavah osnovnih kontur jugoslovanskega vprašanja med leti 1914-1918. Publikacija Milade Paulove pa je hkrati za celo vrsto jugoslovanskih raziskovalcev pomenila tudi pomembno vodilo pri ocenjevanju skupnih motivov in korakov Jugoslovanskega odbora po eni strani in srbske vlade vodene Nikolo Pašicem po drugi. Tako so odprte simpatije, kijih je Paulova glede na lastne nazorske preference in okoliščine, v katerih je nastajala omenjena knjiga, gojila do skupine okoli Ante Trumbica, v določeni meri izrazito vplivale na refleksijo tujega upora in srbske politične reprezentance, kot na dveh odločilnih akterjev nastanka "Prve Jugoslavije" v letu 1918.
Ključne besede: Jugoslovanski odbor, Milada Paulova, prva svetovna vojna, zgodovinopisje, Nikola Pašic, Ante Trumbic
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