Situation in Kosovo and Metohija before the Kosovo crisis of 1998–1999: The attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church

Abstract

Kosovo and Metohija is a territory in the south of modern Serbia, associated with the history of emergence and development Serbian statehood and the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) in the 13th–15th centuries. Being the center of the sacred places of Serbian Orthodoxy, Kosovo and Metohija during the Ottoman yoke was turned into a hotbed of forced de-Christianization by ousting the Orthodox population and replacing it with Islamized Albanians. This strategy survived the Turkish era and was continued during the period of occupation in 1941–1945, as well as in the subsequent period of communism, culminating in the expulsion of Kosovo Serbs and the mass destruction of the SOC’s shrines with impunity under the so-called Kosovo crisis 1998–1999 and NATO aggression against Yugoslavia. The support of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) for the Kosovo Serbs and the SOC in Kosovo and Metohija during the years of the Kosovo crisis is relatively well known and studied, including in the author’s monograph. This article, in turn, is devoted to Russian-Serbian interchurch relations in the previous period, starting from 1945 and with an emphasis on the 1980s. The visit of Patriarch Pimen of Moscow and All Russia in Kosovo and Metohija as part of his tour to Yugoslavia in 1984, as well as the subsequent development of contacts with the SOC on the Kosovo theme, is presented in detail. The article uses unpublished documents from the Archive of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Archive of Yugoslavia, the Archive of Serbia, as well as materials published on the pages of the official periodicals of the Russian Orthodox Church and the SOC in noted historical period.