Post by sarmat on Jul 17, 2009 8:49:45 GMT 3
Kingdom of Serbs, Croatians etc and later Yugoslavia were essentially Serbian dominated empires and Communist Yugoslavia only worked as long as Tito was alive.
May be it was Serbian dominated the same as Austro-Hungary was Germano-Hungarian dominated. But the point is that both Austro-Hungary and Yugoslavia were trying to create a coherent "one, unified" identity of Southern Slavs.
two official languages for a multi-ethnic emprie is good enough. how many official languages did the Soviet Union have?
Well. I don't think USSR is the best example to compare. But officially every republic within the USSR had its own official language. In any case, ethnic minorities are usually unhappy when their language is oppressed and doesn't have official status.
besides it's not recommendable to have so many official languages, just look at India, there needs to be some sort of overall lingua franca to easen communication on the federal level.
I actually like very much Indian example. Everybody doesn't feel
'"descriminated" and English and Hindi are becoming linguas franca naturally, not because of some violent enforcement but of natural necessity.
well there is a difference between prisoners of war and deserters. Czechs etc were the latter, while Russia indeed took over a million Austro-Hungarian prisoners afetr the battle of Lemberg and the siege of Przemysl, the K.u.K. Army from then on was more stabilized and was mostly on the advance thereafter and numbers of subsequent PoWs low.
By 1917 Russia had 2 million POWs mostly Austro-Hungarians. And Romanian, Ukrainians and Italians were deserters as well.