Aleksandar Kadijevic
University of Belgrade, Serbia
Between 1920 and 1941 almost 350 Russian architects and constructing engineers built a lot of public and private buildings in the friendly city of Belgrade, which had adopted them after their exile from homeland after the Revolution and bloody Civil war. As a special professional group, obviosly favorized by Yugoslav king Aleksandar I Karadjordjevic, they gained highest positions in official state administration (Krasnov, Loukomski, Baumgarten, Androsov etc). Very productive and ideologically loyal to the ruling dynasty, Russian technicians left strong creative and historical trace in the midwar Belgrade, especially in its sillhouets, bridges, churches, ministery buildings, public monuments, mansions and representative palaces. Many of educated eyewitnesses, contemporaries and later historiographic scholars, used to qualify their efforts as crucial and impressive. Some of them clearly spoke about Russian Belgrade, emphasizing their important civilization role during that time.
Gradually, the positive and narrative attitude towards Russian Belgrade arose but after WWII, new communistic regime in Yugoslavia started to impose its oblivion. In postmodern and postcommunistic period, for different reasons historical places which represented Russian Belgrade became actual again, as a sign of political and historiographic revenge towards long period of cultural oblivion. Thus, todays Serbian historiography has a special task to explain in which aspects Russian Belgrade still exists. In that process, especially significant for Serbian and Russian architectural historians, the methods from different social and cultural-historical sciences are very helpful.