Radoje Pajović (14 April 1934 – 2 June 2019) was a Yugoslav and Montenegrin historian who worked at the Institute of History at the University of Montenegro for forty years.
Radoje Pajović was born on 14 April 1934 in the village of Drenovštica in the Nikšić municipality of Zeta Banovina in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia,[1] the son of Ilija and Stana (née Perunović).
[2] His family was actively involved in the anti-fascist struggle in Montenegro during World War II, and in his childhood he associated himself closely with the movement on an emotional level.
[3] Pajović completed high school in Nikšić, then in 1957 he commenced studying at the Department of History at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy.
[5] The historian Kenneth Morrison, Professor of Modern Southeast European History at De Montfort University, described Pajović's book on Đurišić as an "excellent analysis".
[a] He was a founding member of the Doclean Academy of Sciences and Arts, Matica crnogorska and Montenegrin PEN during the difficult period of the breakup of Yugoslavia.
[10] Pajović wrote that Montenegro had been violently annexed by the Kingdom of Serbia in 1918,[9] a position supported by the Montenegrin historian Srđa Pavlović, adjunct professor and research associate at the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies at the University of Alberta, in his 2018 book Balkan Anschluss: The Annexation of Montenegro and the Creation of the Common South Slavic State.
[11] Pajović also claimed that historical evidence confirms the existence of an autocephalous[b] Montenegrin Orthodox Church (CPC), and that it had been unlawfully abolished by force by Prince Regent Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1920.
This was examined by František Šístek, assistant professor at the Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2011.
[19] Pajović has been praised for his objective writing about collaboration with the Axis powers in Montenegro during World War II, which is absent any bias due to his family's active involvement in the struggle against fascism.
[21] At the conclusion of World War II, thousands of Chetniks and other collaborationist troops from Montenegro were captured by the Partisans as they attempted to escape from Yugoslav territory to surrender to the Western Allies.
[22] These troops were killed by the Partisans in what the historian Jozo Tomasevich describes as "preventative defense" and an "act of mass terror and brutal political surgery, similar to that practised by the [Chetniks] earlier in the war".
[24] After World War II, Montenegro was established as a socialist republic within a federated Yugoslavia, which muted many of those who had promoted a separate Montenegrin identity, but Serb-nationalist ideas remained below the surface outside the region around Cetinje.
[26] This occurred in the context of an economic crisis which enveloped Yugoslavia during the 1980s and undermined the legitimacy of the Montenegrin branch of the Yugoslav communist party, which Serbian nationalists in Montenegro exploited in late 1988 and early 1989 to take control.
[9] In January 2019, Pajović stated that Serbian clero-nationalist circles were spreading false information claiming that the human rights of Serbs in Montenegro were in danger.
He condemned as gross and false propaganda the 2019 assertion by the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Irinej, that the situation of Serbs in Montenegro was worse than in the genocidal Independent State of Croatia during World War II.
At the same event, Adnan Prekić – assistant professor of history at the University of Montenegro – stated that no-one explained Yugoslav political movements during the interwar period and World War II as well as Pajović.