Nikola Pašić
Nikola Pašić dominated Serbian politics for forty years and became the first prime minister of Yugoslavia. Born in 1845 in eastern Serbia to a modest merchant family, he trained as an engineer in Zurich, where he encountered Russian revolutionary circles, and returned to found the Radical Party in 1881 on a programme of peasant democracy, local self-government and Serbian national unification. He was condemned to death in absentia in 1883 after the Timok rebellion, spent six years in Bulgarian exile, and was amnestied. He was prime minister on and off from 1891, and his relations with the monarchy were consistently poor. The Black Hand — the secret society of Serbian officers who had murdered King Alexander and his queen in 1903 and thrown their bodies out of a window — was a rival centre of power he spent years trying to break. That is the unresolved question about June 1914. His government almost certainly had some warning that the Sarajevo plot was being prepared by officers of Serbian military intelligence, and the message sent to Vienna was so oblique that it conveyed nothing. He answered the Austrian ultimatum by accepting all but one of its terms. He then led Serbia through invasion, the retreat across the Albanian mountains in the winter of 1915 in which perhaps 240,000 died, and exile on Corfu. He negotiated the union with the Croats and Slovenes and became prime minister of the new kingdom in 1918. He governed it as a Serbian state, which is the origin of everything that followed. He died in 1926.
- Lived: 1845 CE – 1926 CE
- Nationality: Serbian
- Roles: prime_minister, statesman, nationalist
