In recent years, the interest of researchers in the First World War and its prehistory has noticeably increased, which is explained by two reasons: the publication of new, previously unknown materials about its origin (after the discovery of archival funds 50 years ago in many Western countries), as well as the strengthening of the ideological struggle of Marxist and bourgeois historiography around this problem in connection with the approaching 70th anniversary of its launch. In the U.S.S.R. 1 and abroad 2 a number of works and documents about the war have been published, and at the same time bourgeois historians of the reactionary trend are trying to revive the old, long-refuted versions of its origin.
Among the new foreign publications of sources on the prehistory of the war, the multi-volume publication "Documents on the Foreign Policy of the Kingdom of Serbia", undertaken by the Department of Historical Sciences of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANI) with the participation of the SFRY Foreign Affairs Secretariat, is of fundamental importance .3 The publication consists of seven volumes (15 parts) and covers the period from January 1903 to August 1914, i.e., that stage in the history of international relations in the Balkans, when the latter began to attract increased attention of the great Powers due to the change in the balance of political forces in this region after the reorientation of Serbia's foreign policy with Austria-Hungary.Hungary's invasion of Russia, as well as after a number of other important events in the Balkans and the Middle East: the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the Bosnian crisis of 1908-1909, the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-1912, the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, and the political crisis of 1913-1914 caused by the German military mission to Turkey. Sanders. According to the apt expression of the prominent Italian historian L. Albertini, the Balkans at that time turned into the" powder magazine " of Europe, into one of the centers of international tension .4
Meanwhile, the study of the history of these events before the publication of this publication was not provided with a solid source base, which gave rise to many contradictory concepts and even fictions. For a long time, researchers, analyzing the causes of international conflicts in the Balkans, relied on the Austrian and German publications of the so-called Serbian trophy documents, i.e., a publication that was largely unreliable. To fully appreciate the significance of the new publication, we will refer to the previous editions of Serbian diplomatic documents.-
1 Istoriya pervoy mirovoy voyny 1914 - 1918. V 2 tt. M.1975; Yemets V. A. Ocherki vneshnoi politiki Rossii v period pervoy mirovoy voyny. M. 1977; Narochnitskiy A. L. Velikie derzhavy, vostochny vopros i pervoy mirovoy voyny [The History of the First World War 1914-1918]. In the book: Velike Sila and Srbija before prvi secular rat (hereinafter-Velike sila). Beograd. 1976.
2 Gаlantai J. Die Österreichisch - Ungarische Monarchic und der Weltkrteg. Budapest. 1979. See also the articles by E. Geis, R. Plaschki, W. Gutsche, F. Klein, and others. in the collection "Velike sile".
3 Documents about spolnoj politiki Kraljevin Srbij (hereinafter-Document). Tt. I-VII. Beograd. 1980 - 1981. Compiled by Zh-Anich, V. Dedier, K. Jambazowski and D. Lukacs. Editorial Board: P. Popovich (Chairman), V. Chubrilovich, V. Dedier, B. Pavichevich, R. Samardzhich, V. Stoyanchevich, D. Yankovich, D. Lukach (Secretary) and Manager of the Diplomatic Archive of the SFRY Secretariat of Foreign Affairs Zh - Anich.
4 Аlbertini L. The Origins of the War of 1914. Vol. 1, Lnd. 1952, p. 256.
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cops. The only publication of official documents of the Serbian Foreign Ministry during the First World War was the White Book, published in November 1914 in Nis, where the Serbian government moved from Belgrade under the threat of an Austro-Hungarian invasion. It set itself the task of documenting Serbia's peace-loving policy .5 This was indicated, in particular, by the peaceful response of the Serbian Government to the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum of July 23, 1914 .6 In total, this publication contained 52 documents for the period from June 29 to August 16, 1914 in the old style. Published in a small print run, the publication was undoubtedly of interest, but it became a bibliographic rarity and few researchers used it.
Instead, many researchers used the versions of Serbian documents that were prepared by the occupying authorities of the Central Powers that seized the territory of Serbia and Montenegro at the end of 1915. The Serbian government, having evacuated to the island of Corfu, could not take the archival materials of the Foreign Ministry with it. The only exception was the papers of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Head of the Serbian Government N. Papgic, who managed to take out some of the most important documents. But Pasic's" Secret Dossier", as these documents were called in the literature, remained in his private collection until his death in 1926.
Documents of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Montenegro and archives of the Montenegrin court were mostly lost. Buried in the ground by order of the Montenegrin King Nicholas I before his flight abroad in January 1916, they suffered from dampness .7 Only in 1925, after the reorganization of archival institutions in Yugoslavia, did the restoration of the Montenegrin archives begin, which continues to this day.
The invaders stole from 10 to 90% of the documents of the Serbian Foreign Ministry for the period from 1871 to 1914, taking them to Vienna, where a special commission was created to process them by the Head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs R. Pogacar .8 The archives of the Serbian military department were also looted, which were sent by the occupation authorities to Sarajevo and Terezienpggadt (Tesin), where the information service centers of the Austro-Hungarian army were located at that time. For the purpose of counter-propaganda, the Imperial High Command decided to use Serbian documents to prove Serbia's "subversive activities" against the Habsburg monarchy. The Austrian military intelligence officer of that time, M. Ronge, described in his book how these materials were "stylized": documents captured in Serbia were arbitrarily reduced, banknotes were made in them, and some of the materials were falsified .9
In 1916, the official newspaper "Neue Freie Presse", as well as the Hungarian newspaper "Pester Lloyd" and the organ of the occupation authorities of Serbia, the newspaper "Beogradske novine", published forgeries: "Secret letter of Nicholas II Romanov to the Serbian King Peter I Karageorgievich", " Confidential manuscript of the Russian envoy to Belgrade N. G. Hartvig"and a series of materials entitled" Thirty Years of Russian secret diplomacy in the Balkans " 10 . These were the usual tabloid newspaper leaks that had nothing to do with the real facts, but nevertheless they were included in the official publication of the Austrian Foreign Ministry in 1919 .11 They have long been used uncritically by foreign researchers.
In the 1920s, new biased materials appeared about Austro-Serbian relations on the eve of the war and the Sarajevo assassination, which served as a pretext for the attack of the Habsburg monarchy on Serbia. Professor of the University of Belgrade S. Stanojevic, who was in opposition to the royal government, published in Germany
5 Дипломатска преписка о српско-аустриjскому сукобу. Ниш. 1914.
6 Diplomatic Archive of the Secretariat of the Foreign Ambassador of the SFRY (hereinafter-DASIP). - Politichno odelen*, 1914, f. XXI.
7 Some materials for the years of the First World War were published by the Montenegrin historian D. Vuksan. See: Records (Cetinje). 1937, book 8, pp. 171-180.
8 Document, Book VII, St. I, p. 14.
8 Ronge M. Meister der Spionage. Leipzig. 1935, S. 102 - 107.
10 See newspaper clippings: TsGIA SSSR, f. 1470, op . 2, d. 21, l. 278.
11 Diplomatische Aktenstucke zur Vorgeschichte des Krieges 1914. Bd, I-III. Wien. 1919.
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book 12, in which he tried to prove the complicity of the Serbian and Tsarist governments in the Sarajevo plot. The same version was made by the former Serbian Interior Minister L. Jovanovic, who settled personal scores with Pasic. In his article, Jovanovic gave fictitious data about the active assistance of the head of the Serbian government to the conspirators13 . The English historian R. W. Seaton-Watson, in a special study 14, proved the groundlessness of these claims. However, the version used with. Stanojevic and L. Jovanovic, was uncritically perceived by a number of historians.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, a three-volume publication based on the same "Serbian trophy documents" was published in Germany .15 Its compiler, former Charge d'affaires of Serbia in Berlin M. Bogicevic, who joined the German service in 1915, did not stop at "stylization" and even direct distortion of documents, which was proved by an expert examination conducted in 1929 by the Chief Archivist of the Diplomatic Archive of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Her Government has issued a formal protest to Germany against the publication. A note dated January 30, 1929, signed by K. Kumanudi, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, stated: "This collection is compiled from archival documents stolen from us. His materials are tendentiously dissected, translated with approximate accuracy (from Serbian-Croatian to German), arbitrarily dated and provided with both banknotes and author's additions. The publication is based on absolutely unreliable data. " 16 A copy of the note was sent to the Yugoslav embassies in France and England to inform the public about its contents, and the full text was reprinted in the Belgrade newspaper Politika 17 . However, this publication was never withdrawn from circulation, becoming the main source for bourgeois historians.
In the 1930s, a "revisionist" movement of historians, led by A. Wegerer, appeared in Germany, grouped around a special journal devoted to the problems of responsibility for the war .18 Many of them, as shown by F. I. Notovich, were linked to Nazism19 . In 1941, Hitler used the publication of M. Bogichevich and the work of historians of the Wegerer school to justify the fascist aggression against Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union with arguments of a geopolitical order, such as the"Slavic danger". In the directive on the campaign against Yugoslavia, he repeated a number of provisions of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia of July 23, 1914,20
During the Second World War, the Yugoslav archives were looted by Nazi invaders. This time, in addition to the archives of the Foreign Ministry and the military Department, materials from the Archive of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where foreign policy documents of the Royal Court of Serbia were stored, were taken out of the country. On the instructions of Goebbels and Ribbentrop, and with the financial support of the Third Reich government, the Austrian Nazi historians G. Hubersberger, L. Bittner, and A. Haek prepared an eight-volume edition of Serbian diplomatic documents from 1908 to 1914. However, Yubersberger's group only managed to publish one (the 3rd one) volume from the planned series 21 . The publication published by the Vienna Reichsarchiv contained falsified materials that were supposed to prove that the struggle of the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina for liberation from the oppression of the Habsburgs was provoked from outside, from Serbia.
12 Stanojevitsch S. Die Ermordung des Erzherzogs Franz Ferdinand. Frankfurt a/M. 1923.
13 Lovanovich L. После Видовдана 1914. - Крв словенства. Споменица десетого-дишеньице светског рата 1914 - 1924. Beograd. 1924.
14 Seton Watson R. V. Sarajevo. Zagreb, 1925.
15 Bogitschewitsch M. (Hrsg). Die Auswärtige Politik Serbiens 1903 - 1914. Bd. I- III. Brl. 1928 - 1931.
16 Drzhavni archiv Sotsialistichke republike Srbije, f. MS, N 133.
17 Politika, 7. II. 1929.
18 Berliner Monatshefte fur internationale Aufklarug. Die Kriegsschuldfrage. Hrsg. von der Zentralstelle für Erforschung der Kriegsursachen.
19 Notovich F. I. Fascist historiography about the "culprits" of the World War.
In: Against the fascist Falsifiers of History, M.-L. 1939.
20 Auswärtiges Amt. 1939 - 1941. Brl. 1941, N 7 (Dokumente zum Konflikt mit Jugoslawien und Griechenland).
21 Grosserbische Umtiebe vor und nach dem Ausbruch des ersten Weltkriegs. Wien. 1944.
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The materials not included in this collection were partially given in the book of G. Yubersberger, and after his death-in the works of his wife X. Flanschbacker-Uebersberger.
The writings of the Yubersbergers are distinguished by an extremely disdainful attitude to sources, a biased selection of materials, and often a direct distortion of them. The fact that G. Yubersberger used the secret report of the head of the Serbian secret organization "Unification or Death" ("Black Hand"), Colonel D. Dimitrievich-Apis, to the chairman of the military tribunal in Thessaloniki, which considered the case of this organization in 1917, became notorious .22 This document was discovered by the Nazis in the Archives of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1942, translated into German and sent for review to the leadership of nazi Germany. On behalf of the latter, the Foreign Ministry instructed Hubersberger to write an article about the responsibility of Serbia and Russia for the First World War. While performing this task, he distorted the document, giving it the exact opposite meaning. Dimitrievich-Apie wrote in his report that the Russian military attache in Belgrade, V. A. Artamonov, had nothing to do with the Sarajevo plot of 1914. Ubersberger claims the opposite. His article was published in 1943 in the German Foreign Ministry's Auswärtige Politik and then reprinted in the Berliner Monatshefte .23 The gross forgery of the document was exposed by many researchers: K. B. Vinogradov, L. Albertini (Italy), S. Gavrilovich (USA) 24 and others.
However, reactionary historians continue to use the materials of Yubersberger to this day. On these "sources" the book of the American I. Rimak is built 25 . The falsifying statements of Nazi historians were repeated by S. Possoni (Germany) and F. Würtle (Austria) 26 . The former galvanized long-debunked scientific theories about the involvement of the Russian General Staff in the Sarajevo plot, the latter tried to justify the aggressive policy of the Habsburg monarchy and Kaiser Germany in the Balkans, presenting the case as if the Central Powers were defending themselves from the machinations of Serbia and Russia. His book, published in a huge circulation simultaneously in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and is now being reprinted by the Vienna publishing house " f. Molde and Co. " as "the greatest discovery of the century", however, does not rely on solid sources. It mainly uses materials of questionable properties.
The publication of the Documents on the Foreign Policy of the Kingdom of Serbia-leaves no stone unturned from the concepts of S. Possoni, F. Würtle and other reactionary historians. The new publication contains valuable materials that will contribute to an objective coverage of the history of international relations in the Balkans in the pre-war years. In total, the last two volumes (five one-and-a-half volumes) of this publication , 27 covering the pre-war years (from January 1, 1913 to August 4, 1914), include 2014 documents that, by their origin, consist of two groups. The first category includes previously published documents that were reprinted after their authenticity was established. Thus, only 138 documents (from N 256 to N 394) are included in the sixth volume of M. Bogichevich's collection (for 1913). All other materials of this publication, as the audit revealed, turned out to be unreliable. The same group of sources includes the documents of the Serbian White Paper mentioned above and the collection prepared by Professor V. Chorovic of the University of Belgrade at the time of printing .28 Its publication was banned by the German-oriented Prince Regent Paul of Peras-
22 See Pisarev Yu. A. Behind the scenes of the Salonika trial of the organization "Unification or Death "(1917). - New and recent history, 1979, N 1.
23 Obersberg;er H. Das entscheidende Aktenstück zur Kriegsschuldfrage 1914. - Berliner Monatshefte 1943, Hf. VII.
24 Vinogradov K. B. Bourgeois historiography of the First World War, Moscow, 1962, p. 164; Albertini L. Op. cit., p. 256; Gavrilovic S. New Evidence on the Sarajevo Assasination. - The Journal of Modern History, 1955, vol. 27, N 4, pp. 410 - 414.
25 Remek J. Sarajevo. The Story of a Politikal Murder. N. Y. 1959.
26 Pоssоnу S. Zur Bewältgung der Kriegsschuldfrage. Köln. 1968; Würthle F. Die Spur fiihrt nach Belgrad. Hintergrunde des Dramas von Sarajevo. Wien - Köln - Zürich. 1975.
27 Volume VI editor V. Chubrilovich, volume VII editors M. Bartosh and V. Dedier. (For previous volumes, see: Pisarev Yu. A. New edition of Serbian diplomatic documents on the preparation and emergence of the First World War. - New and Recent History, 1978, N 3).
28 Borovih V. Diplomatiska prepiska Kraljevine Srbije 1902-1914. Beograd. 1935.
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He believes that the publication's materials revealing the true role of the Central Powers in provoking World War II may worsen relations between Yugoslavia and Germany .29 The second group of documents published in the new edition includes sources found in the Yugoslav archives and materials that were returned to the country from Austria after World War II.
For researchers, the most interesting papers are from the" Secret Dossier " of Pasic, as well as documents from the Serbian Embassy in St. Petersburg (Petrograd). The "secret dossier" did not immediately become the property of the state. After Pasic's death, his family did not return these materials to the archives of the Foreign Ministry. A significant part of them was lost. Radje Pasic, the son of the former minister, is a well-known businessman, who sold off his family property and sold many important documents. 30 The Diplomatic archive of the SFRY Foreign Affairs Secretariat only recently managed to recover what was lost. As for the documents of the former Serbian embassy in Petrograd, they, on the contrary, have been preserved almost entirely for the period from 1883 to 1918 and represent the most valuable source for the study of Russian-Serbian relations at that time.
The Soviet government, as is well known, created favorable conditions for the work of the Serbian embassy in Petrograd (since 1918 - in Moscow), allowing it not only to send all the documentation of the mission to Serbia, but also to get acquainted with the archives of the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs of tsarist Russia on the Yugoslav problem. 31 The Serbian government's emissary to Soviet Russia, R. Jovanovic, stated:: "As a representative of the Serbian mission, I received "personal guarantees" from the Soviet authorities: I could travel freely throughout Russia, abroad and back. Head of the Eastern Department of NCID A. Voznesensky told me that I was the only official representative whom revolutionary Russia trusted in everything. " 32 At the initiative of V. I. Lenin, the materials of the secret Treaty of London of 1915 were handed over to the staff of the Serbian Embassy in the RSFSR. Russia, England and France with Italy, according to which Italy was to receive part of the Yugoslav territories on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea. The Serbian Government used this document to protect the national interests of its country33 .
The fate of correspondence between the Serbian missions in London, Paris and Vienna and Belgrade was different. Almost all the papers stored in the archives of these embassies were looted by private individuals, and the Serbian Foreign Ministry itself preserved only those materials that were sent to these countries by the foreign Ministry in Belgrade. Thus, the documents included in this publication do not fully reflect the activities of the Serbian Foreign Ministry. In this regard, the SANI Commission continues to work on identifying new sources.
What is interesting about the publication's materials? What will the researcher find new in it? The sixth volume contains little-known documents on Serbia's relations with neighboring countries, as well as interesting materials on the policy of the great Powers in the Balkans during the Balkan wars and the London Peace Conference of 1912-1913. There are almost no original sources about this conference and the meeting of the ambassadors of the six great Powers who dealt with the Balkan issues. Meetings of diplomats were usually held behind closed doors, and no minutes were kept at these meetings. The only document "for history" was the diary of the French ambassador to England P. Combon. Meanwhile, in the archives of the foreign ministries of the Balkan states, the correspondence of their governments with their delegations to the peace conference was postponed, which is of considerable interest to historians. Many of these documents were included in the publication (part I, N 77, 78, 100, 137, etc.).
29 By order of the authorities, the same author's book Odnosi izmehu Srbije i Austro-Ugarske u XX veke was also banned. Beograd. 1936. 30 Mihajlovic-Sila Z. Istarija Rade Pasica, -Reporter, Beograd, З. Х1.1Э83, N 874.
31 See Pisarev Yu. A. Soviet-Serbian relations in the period of Brest and the South Slavic problem. Voprosy istorii, 1973, No. 8, pp. 30-31.
32 Архив Српске академрце науке и уметности, N 9829.
33 The document is kept in the DASIP, Politichno odelye, f. Srpsko pososstvo u Petrograd.
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Quite a large place in the volume is occupied by materials on the topic "Russia and the Balkans during the peace conference". The documents show that the Russian government defended the interests of Serbia, Montenegro, Albania and other Balkan states at the London meetings of diplomats, while Austria-Hungary was their main opponent. The instructions of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Russia and Austria-Hungary to their representatives at the meeting of the six countries also indicate this. S. D. Sazonov's instructions to A. K. Benckendorf dated December 13, 1912 set forth the following tasks:: 1) seek to consolidate the results of the victories of the Balkan Union; 2) support Serbia's demands for access to the Adriatic Sea; 3) oppose Austria-Hungary's plans to turn Albania into a dependent territory .34 The representative of Austria-Hungary, Count A. Mensdorf, received a different order: 1) to prevent Serbia from entering the Adriatic Sea under any circumstances; 2) to secure the establishment of an Austro-Hungarian protectorate over Albania .35 The publication contains materials that reveal these two opposing lines (part I, N 49, 76, 95, 99, 100, 112, 129 etc.).
Although the July crisis of 1914 has been thoroughly studied in the literature, the researcher will also find a lot of new information on this issue in the publication. Interesting, in particular, are previously unknown materials on the attitude of the Balkan states to this crisis (Part II, N 346, 445, 465) and Turkey (L 1 " 385, 412), as well as England, Italy and France (N 413, 414, 427, 450, 469, 485).
The seventh volume of the publication contains important documents on the prehistory of the First World War, which prove the inconsistency of the concepts of bourgeois historiography that the Habsburg monarchy allegedly started a war against Serbia in response to the anti-Austrian activities of the latter. In fact, as can be seen from the documents, Austria-Hungary in April-May 1914, that is, long before the Sarajevo assassination, began to concentrate troops on the border with Serbia (part I, N 568, 594, 603; part II, L 1 " 184, 205), pursuing the goal of capture not only it, but also the Novipazar Sanjak with further access to Thessaloniki (part I, N 498, 502). On May 30, 1914, according to the Serbian Ministry of War, the General Staff of Austria-Hungary approved a military plan for attacking Serbia (Part II, No. 184), and on June 2 of the same year (26 days before Sarajevo!) The commander of the Austro-Hungarian forces in Bosnia, General 0. Dotiorek, issued a secret order on the immediate preparation of the invasion of Serbia by these troops (Part II, " N " 205).
Other important new sources on the role of the Balkans in the outbreak of the World War of 1914-1918 are two documents discovered, one by the Yugoslav historian A. Mitrovic in the collections of the German Political Archive for Foreign Affairs in Bonn and the other by the author of these lines in the Soviet archives. The first document, Wilhelm II's secret instruction to the State Secretariat for Foreign Affairs of August 16, 1913, helps to determine when the Kaiser's government's transition in Balkan policy from neutrality to war took place. "Now,"the document said," the most important task of our policy can be relegated to the background: to preserve peace in Europe." The instructions set out the task of creating a military-political bloc in the Balkans under the auspices of Germany, and in case this plan was not feasible, to conquer the Balkans .36 The history of storing this document is interesting. First it was in the vaults of the Foreign Ministry, then in the chancellery of Wilhelm II in Potsdam, and after his flight to Holland it was transferred to the Bonn archive, where it remains to this day. With an experienced hand, it was hidden in the secondary Oxford dossier and only accidentally fell into the hands of a researcher.
Another document - the secret report of the Chief of Staff of the Kiev Military District to the Chief of the General Staff of Russia dated February 8, 1914-is kept in the Central State Military Historical Archive of the USSR. It reported that at a meeting of the General Staff of Austria-Hungary held in Vienna on January 24, 1914, a memorandum of the German State Secretariat for Foreign Affairs was read out.-
34 See AVPR, f. Politarkhiv, d. 131, ll. 91-94.
35 Osterreich-Unparns Aussenpolitik von der Bosnischen Krise bis zum Kriegsaus-bruch 1914. Bd. V. Wien - Leipzig. 1930, NN 4911, 4924.
36 Cit. по: Mitrovic A. Prodor na Balkan i Srbija 1908 - 1918. Beograd. 1980, s. 149 - 150.
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lam on the new direction of German Balkan policy. The document also deals with the expediency of a preventive war in the Balkans and Europe in order to disrupt the program of rearmament of the Russian army .37
These documents confirm the conclusion contained in the collective work of 38 historians of the GDR that German imperialism set a course for war already in the autumn of 1913, and did not pursue a policy of delaying it, as many bourgeois historians continue to say. On June 8, 1914, 20 days before the Sarajevo assassination, Wilhelm II assured Vienna of German support if Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia. "The third Balkan war, in which we will take part, will soon begin," 39 he wrote. The Habsburg monarchy, believing in Germany's help, decided to go to war with Serbia long before the infamous ultimatum of July 23, 1914. "We started the war earlier," wrote in his diary dated July 3 of the same year, the Minister of Finance of Austria - Hungary L. Bilinsky 40 .
Interesting data on the July crisis of 1914 and the position of both allies in the Central Coalition on the eve of World War II were provided by the Austrian historian F. Fellner, using previously unknown materials from the family archive of the head of the Chancellery of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Austria-Hungary, Count A. Hoyos .41 The latter, as can be seen from his diary, did not believe in the official version of the Sarajevo murder. "I have never believed that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was planned and carried out with the participation of the ruling circles of Belgrade and St. Petersburg." 42 However, the same Hoyosch was one of the initiators of drawing up a provocative ultimatum and, as later wrote in his memoirs, the Minister of the Austrian government, John. Redlich based his calculations on the fact that Serbia would reject the provocative Austro-Hungarian note, and this would provide a pretext for launching a war against it. June 15, 1914 Redlich wrote in his diary: "I visited Alec Hoyos today. He told me confidentially that the time for war was favorable, but a solid justification was needed." Hoyos further informed Redlich that his government intended to "cut Serbia short" and deprive it of its independence. He said that a note is being prepared that "will cause a sensation in Europe." When asked by Redlich if this would lead to war, Hoyosch replied:: "So much the better!" 43 .
The author of the ultimatum, the secretary of the Office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Baron A. Musulin, prepared a document that put Serbia in a hopeless situation: rejection of the ultimatum led to the rupture of diplomatic relations and war, acceptance of Austro-Hungarian demands - to the loss of the country's independence. "We have set Serbia an impossible task," said Hungarian Presidential Minister Graf Tisza 44 . But until a response was received from Belgrade, Vienna was experiencing anxious moments. Redlich wrote in his memoirs that at Ballplatz, waiting for a response from Serbia, they showed great nervousness. "The tedious wait," he recalled, "lasted until 8: 25 a.m. (July 24), when Count Kinski (Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) called me and said:" Rejected." I said, " Hooray!" Then Redlich and his friends, who were supporters of the war, happily went to the Bristol restaurant and People's Park. "We listened to the orchestra, which, unfortunately, without strong inspiration, performed patriotic songs and military marches," Redlich wrote. "There wasn't much of an audience, and no one was particularly enthusiastic." 45
The publication contains new documents on the discussion of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum by the Serbian government (N 537, 538) and on the attitude of the European villages.-
37 TSGVIA SSSR, f. 2000 / s, op. 4, d. 4, l. 4.
38 Deutschland im ersten Weltkrieg. Bd. 1. Brl. 1970, S. 139 - 145.
39 Cit. по: Fischer F. Griff nach der Weltmacht. Die Kriegsziele des kaiserlichen Deutschlands 1914 - 1918. Dusseldorf, 1971, S. 58.
40 Cit. no: Кann R. Kaiser Franz Josef und der Ausbruch des Weltkrieges. Eine Betrachtung iiber Quellenwert der Aufzeichnung von Dr. Heinrich Konnas. Wien. 1971, S. 16.
41 Fellner F. "Mission Hoyos". In: Velike Sile, pp. 387-418.
42 Hoyos A. Der deutsch-englische Gegensatz und sein Einflusei auf die Balkan-politik Osterreich-Ungarns. Brl. 1922, S. 77.
43 Redliсh J. Schicksalsjahre Osterreichs 1918 - 1919. Das politische Tagebuch. Bd. 1. Graz - Koln. 1953 - 1954, S. 236.
44 Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch 1914. Bd. 1. Brl. 1927, N 49.
45 Redliсh J. Op. cit., S. 236.
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jav to Serbia's response to this note. However, the compilers of the collection did not use all the documents on this issue. Thus, they did not provide materials on the conversations between Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia L. Pacu and Regent Alexander with Charge d'affaires of Russia V. N. Strandtman, which took place before the delivery of the official response of Serbia to the Austro-Hungarian Envoy in Belgrade, Baron V. Giesl. Their content is described in the well-known Soviet publication of documents. In the same place, the compilers could find the protocol record of the extraordinary meeting of the Council of Ministers of Russia of July 24, 1914 on the Serbian question .46 The tsarist government, in the interests of Serbia, offered to transfer the note to Austria-Hungary for international arbitration.
Instead of this important document, the publication reproduces an insufficiently accurate account of the conversation between the Serbian Envoy in St. Petersburg, M. Spalajkovic, and S. D. Sazonov. It is well known that Spalajkovic often sinned against the truth. This was noted by the Serbian government itself. There are a number of inaccuracies in the publication. Not all documents are provided in full. Some of them, due to the unsatisfactory storage of materials stolen by the Austro-Hungarian occupation authorities, were so damaged that they could not be read by the authors of the publication. The disadvantage of the publication is the lack of footnotes and a geographical index, which makes it difficult to work with it.
The publication is generally highly appreciated, as it provides researchers with many new and valuable sources on the history of international relations in the Balkans on the eve of the First World War.
Yu. A. Pisarev
46 International relations in the era of imperialism. Documents from the Archives of the Tsarist and Provisional Governments, 1878-1917. Ser. III. T. V. M.-L. 1934, N 19.
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