PREBIRAČEVIĆ: IMPERIAL RUSSIA ENTERED the WAR BECAUSE OF SERBIA, SELFLESSLY BACKING IT

BELGRADE, NOVEMBER 11 /SRNA/ - Serbs and Russians regard November 11 as World War I Liberation Day, Vladimir Prebiračević, director of the Serbian-Russian center "Majak" in Novi Sad, told SRNA. He said marking the date was a chance to be reminded that Russian Tsar Nicholas II Romanov and imperial Russia had entered the war because of Serbia.

"It is an opportunity to say how much we owe the Russian tsar and the Russian people. Russia went to war with our enemies on August 1, 1914, solely because of the Russian tsar's attitude toward Serbia, and helped it in every way," Prebiračević said.

He said Tsar Nicholas had played a key role in saving the Serbian soldiers who reached the Adriatic coast after retreating across Albania in late 1915 and early 1916. The Western allies had hesitated to send ships to evacuate them because of their own geopolitical interests and military calculations, he said.

Everyone knew the song "Lađa francuska" /The French Ship/, he said, but it was mostly Italian ships that came to Albania to carry the exhausted Serbian soldiers to Corfu and other places to recover. They came only after the Russian tsar issued an ultimatum to the Entente powers that he would pull out and make a separate peace with Germany unless naval vessels were sent to rescue the Serbian army.

"In the liberation of Serbia after the breakthrough on the Salonika Front, a division of the Russian army took part and died alongside Serbian soldiers in freeing Serbian lands," Prebiračević said.

He noted that the alliance between the two peoples went back much further. More than 5,000 Russian volunteers fought alongside the Serbs for liberation from the Turks in the Serbian-Ottoman wars of 1876-1878, he said.

"The Serbian field marshals, who held the highest ranks in our army in World War One, had decades earlier learned their trade and fought their first battles as lieutenants and second lieutenants alongside Russian soldiers, under the command of Russian officers. That detail alone is extremely important, yet few people know it," he said.

Prebiračević also said that during World War I the Serbs had received weapons, military equipment and medical supplies from the Russian Empire free of charge, whereas they had paid all the other allied countries, such as France, for them for years after the war ended.

"We have relations with Russia, the Russians and the Russian Empire, then the USSR and today the Russian Federation, that run deep through history," he said.

Serbia was the first country to be attacked in the Great War and won the first Allied victories, at Cer and Kolubara.

It was the last to end military operations and, with 1.24 million lives lost, suffered the heaviest losses of World War I in proportional terms.