Imagining the Zadruga Zadruga as a political inspiration to the left and to the right in Serbia, 1870-1945

Abstract

The concept of zadruga has shown its persistence over a long historical time and on completely opposite sides of the political spectrum. The zadruga was positioned as key political ideal for Svetozar Marković’s early socialists since the early 1870s, but it was also a key ideal of the extreme right in the 1930s and 1940s (Dimitrije Ljotić, Milan Nedić). As a key political term, zadruga was employed in very different contexts – from an imaginary idyllic socialist society of equals in the mid-1800s to the cornerstone and bulwark of racial purity almost a century later. In this article zadruga is explored as a polical, economic and social ideal. This comparative study has revealed deep similarities between populist socialism and extreme right-wing ideologies of the 1930s and 40s. Although those movements were temporally and ideologically distant, there was a single conceptual pattern that united them, and which can be summed up with a single word – the zadruga, as a persistent ideological cornerstone.