Encyclopedia of Russian History

Of noble birth, Nikolai Yudenich began his glittering military career upon graduating, with first-class marks, from the General Staff Academy in 1887. He served on the General Staff in Poland and Turkestan until 1902, participated in the Russo-Japanese War (earning a gold sword for bravery), worked as deputy chief of staff from 1907, and became chief of staff of Russian forces in the Caucasus in 1913. During World War I, Yudenich distinguished himself as Russia’s most consistently successful general, inflicting numerous defeats upon Turkey, notably at Sarikamish (December 1914) and, in August 1915, repulsing Enver Pasha’s invasion in 1915, and in capturing Erzurum, Tre-bizond, and Erzincan (February-July 1916). He consequently figured prominently in Russian wartime propaganda. With the overthrow of the Romanovs in February 1917, Yudenich regained overall command of the Caucasus Front. However, dismayed by the revolution and reluctant to cooperate with the Provisional Government, he was retired from active service in May. He returned to Petrograd and lived underground for a year after the October Revolution, before fleeing to Finland. Thereafter he headed anti-Bolshevik forces in the Baltic region, as commander-in-chief of the Northwest Army. Like other White leaders, Yudenich failed to establish an effective political regime or to attract sufficient support from the Allies, and suffered strained relations with the non-Russian peoples of his base territory. Nevertheless, he masterminded the Whites’ advance to the outskirts of Petrograd in the autumn of 1919. However, Trotsky pushed his forces back into Estonia, where they were interned before being disbanded in 1920. Yudenich was briefly arrested by the Estonian government, but was allowed to settle into exile in France. He largely shunned ?migr? politics until his death, in Saint-Laurent-du-Var. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; WHITE ARMY; WORLD WAR I

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YUGOSLAVIA, RELATIONS WITH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mawdsley, Evan. (2000). The Russian Civil War. Edinburgh: Birlinn.

JONATHAN D. SMELE

YUGOSLAVIA, RELATIONS WITH

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was proclaimed on December 1, 1918, and was renamed Yugoslavia on October 3, 1929 by Alexander Karad-jordjevic. The creation of the new enlarged South Slav state and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia together ruptured the once-strong bonds between Russia and the South Slav lands, especially Serbia. Marshal Josip Broz Tito defied Stalin and introduced his own brand of communism in Yugoslavia. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS

Russian support for Serbia in the summer of 1914 had helped precipitate World War I, which destroyed the Romanov dynasty and eventually brought the Bolsheviks to power. Like its neighbors, the new Yugoslav state was fiercely anticommunist. In 1920 and 1921 the kingdom joined Romania and Czechoslovakia in a series of bilateral pacts that came to be known as the Little Entente. The alliance was primarily aimed at thwarting Hungarian irreden-tism (one country’s claim to territories ruled or governed by others based on ethnic, cultural, or historic ties), since the former kingdom of Hungary had lost approximately 70 percent of its prewar territory. The Little Entente also served as part of France’s eastern security system designed to contain both Germany and Bolshevik Russia. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, relations between Moscow and Belgrade were but a shadow of that which had preceded World War I. Not only was Yugoslavia a supporter of the postwar settlements that had aggrandized its territory, but it also sought to isolate the Bolshevik revolution; moreover, it had little trade with the new Soviet state, in part because prewar relations between St. Petersburg and Belgrade had been based almost entirely on diplomatic and cultural rather than economic links. In addition, the rise of Nazi Germany left much of Yugoslav trade within the Third Reich’s orbit.

In 1941 Germany occupied Yugoslavia. Two groups, the Chetniks, led by Dra a Mihailovic, and the Partisans, under Josip Broz Tito, a Moscow-trained communist, fought the Germans and at the same time vied for supremacy within Yugoslavia. Although Tito emerged victorious and Stalin’s so-called Percentages Agreement with Winston Churchill gave Moscow 50 percent influence in Yugoslavia, the Red Army had not occupied the country, and thus the Soviet Union was unable to influence developments there as it could in other areas of central and southeastern Europe. Tito’s popularity and mass following stood in contrast to the situation in the other countries of the future “bloc,” where there were at best small native communist parties dominated by the Soviet Union.