The emerging Russian-Serbian political and cultural alliance was tested after the murder of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on July 23, 1914 in Sarajevo and Austria-Hungary’s issuance of the July Ultimatum to Serbia. These events are well known to everyone with even a little interest in history. Serbia accepted nine of the ten points in the ultimatum, but Austria-Hungary considered that insufficient and unilaterally declared war on the country. On July 27, before Austria’s formal declaration of war, Nicholas II notified King Peter and Regent Alexander Karageorgevich that Russia would support Serbia in any event. In response to Austria’s formal declaration of war, a mobilization was quickly declared in Russia. As a result, on August 1 Germany declared war on Russia.
During the war, Russia did not physically have the opportunity to support the Serbian army with its troops, but in 1915-1916, Serbia regularly received from Russia arms, ammunition and equipment (through the ports on the Danube and the Aegean Sea). Several Russian ambulance detachments were also sent to the country. Although Serbia initially won a number of significant victories over the Austrian army, after the German army moved into the Balkans and Bulgaria entered into an alliance with Germany and Austria, Serbia was doomed. From December 1915 – January 1916, the superior forces of the Central Powers decimated the Serbian army. Along with the government, the royal family and a large number of innocent people wandered through the desolate mountainous areas on the border of Montenegro and Albania in an attempt to reach the ports of Durres and Vlora in northern Albania. Regent Alexander Karageorgevich hoped that the Entente forces would evacuate the Serb army out of the port cities to the Greek islands, but France, whose fleet was in the Adriatic Sea, was in no hurry to do so.
In this tragic history, Russia decided the fate of the Serbian army. In late January 1916, Nicholas II appealed to the leaders of France and Britain, informing them that if the Serbian army would not be evacuated, Russia would unilaterally make peace with Germany and Austria on any terms. Frightened by this prospect, the British and French governments organized the Serbian army’s movement to the Greek island of Corfu. This allowed the Serbian forces to regroup and later take part in hostilities at the front in Thessaloniki. Most importantly, however, Serbia’s prestige was rescued along with representatives of the ruling dynasty, the officers, the national elite, as well as the attributes of statehood. The Serbs retreated, but they did not give up. The most famous Serbian folk song “Tama daleko,” which to this day remains a symbol of faith for any Serb, is devoted to these events and Russia’s participation.
Beginning in 1917, the amplitude of the pendulum in Russian-Serbian relations, referred to in the beginning of the article, had moved in the opposite direction. Revolution and turmoil had befallen Russia, but after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Serbia, on the contrary, became the core of a new nation – the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Apart from Serbia and the Slavic areas of Austria-Hungary (Slovenia, Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina), Montenegro and Macedonia also became part of the state. The area of the new state under the rule of the Karageorgevich family was five times larger than the size of the Serbian princedoms. Given the unenviable situation in Bulgaria after the defeat of the Central Powers, we can say that the new state – the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes – from 1918 was the regional hegemon in the Balkans. By 1921, the disparate territories included in the Kingdom had already begun to consolidate into an economically coherent whole. The constitution adopted that year had finalized the political profile of the new state: the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was proclaimed to be a parliamentary monarchy, although the parliament was a largely decorative structure. National movements, including the Serbian, were not encouraged, as the basic ideology of the new nation became “Yugoslavism.”
The first refugees from the civil war enveloping Russia began to appear in Serbia in late 1919 after the French evacuation of Odessa. The bulk of the refugees found themselves in the Balkans after General Denikin’s fall, the capture of Novorossiysk by the Bolsheviks (March 1920) and the removal of General Wrangel’s army from the Crimea (November 1920). Refugees from the Crimea and Novorossiya were taken by sea, primarily to Istanbul, Varna and Constanta. After wandering the Balkans, a significant portion of these people ended up settling in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. According to Vladimir Maevsky, an historian of the Russian emigration and a contemporary to those events, “Russians moved to Serbia, unhampered by quotas, visas, restrictions, passports or anything similar. A friendly country let the Russians in, not feeling constrained by the formalities that existed upon entry into other countries in Europe or America. This is something we must continue to remember with gratitude...”
The reason for the Kingdom’s appeal to the Russian refugees, especially Serbia’s appeal, was that it was ready to accept not only the people themselves, but also to allow Russian organizations to be present there. On August 31, 1921, the primates’ council of the Serbian Orthodox Church decided to take under its protection the supreme ecclesiastical administration of the Russian Orthodox Church while preserving the latter’s own jurisdiction. Its residence became the patriarch's palace in Sremski Karlovci, a city where over two hundred years earlier Maxim Suvorov had opened his “Slavic school.” On November 21, Sremski Karlovci was the site of a church council at which the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and its governing bodies were established.
The same city was also home to the main headquarters and the supreme command of General Wrangel’s southern Russian forces, and later – the leadership of the Russian All-Military Union. Wrangel, in commenting on the opportunity to maintain the organizational structure of the Russian army, wrote, “As regiments are deployed into combat, divided into battalions, companies, platoons and links, so did the exiled army from the camps of Gallipoli, Lemnos and Kabakdzha disperse across fraternal Slavic countries ... It crumbled, but it remained the Army – soldiers, knitted together by a single will, animated by a single inspiration, by a single sacrificial readiness. Through difficult trials, the Army resisted...” In this way, Serbia, or, more accurately, Sremski Karlovci, “became a refugee center whose influence extended far beyond the Kingdom.” General Wrangel attempted to influence the financial flows of the Russian
