The Communists and the Serb Rebellion, c. April–September 1941

The Partisan movement in Bosnia-Hercegovina was the product both of long-term socio-economic developments at home and of the short-term ‘accident’ of foreign invasion and occupation; it involved the merger of a traditional Serb-peasant uprising and a modern urban-revolutionary movement; and it represented both a characteristic chapter and a turning-point in modern Bosnian history. The Axis powers of Germany and Italy, by destroying the Yugoslav kingdom, changed the course of Bosnian history. Their installation in power of the Ustasha regime, and the latter's genocide of the Serb population of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, unleashed a resistance movement that would take shape as the Partisans. Yet the Partisans were not simply an armed response to the new order, but a revolutionary movement of a specifically Bosnian kind.