The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Chetniks

(Russian, chetniki; Serbo-Croatian, četnici), in the Balkans:

(1) From the 15th to the 19th century, participants (mainly haiduks) in the armed struggle waged by partisan detachments for national liberation from the Ottoman yoke. Prominent members of the Chetnik movement in Bulgaria in the 1860’s included G. S. Rakovski, P. Khitov, F. Tofo, S. T. Karadzha, and Khadzhi Dimitur.

(2) Members of a reactionary organization, participants in the nationalistic Greater Serbia movement (headed by General D. Mihajlovic) and other antinationalist groups in Yugoslavia that fought against the forces of people’s liberation during World War II.

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References in periodicals archive

The mission was directed by the 1943 shift in the Churchill government's support for Yugoslavia, from the pro-Royalist Chetniks led by the Anglophile Drazha Mihailovic to the pro-Soviet communist partisans' leader Tito, as advised by the SOE's centre in Cairo.

Evelyn Waugh's Yugoslav Mission: Politics and Religion

they constantly told us that we had to bear small Chetniks" (Vranic 157-302).

Genocidal Rape, Enforced Impregnation, and the Discourse of Serbian National Identity

A Serbian military officer named Dragoljub "Draza" Mihailovic led disparate elements of varying loyalty to the Yugoslavian monarchy-in-exile called Chetniks. Josip Broz Tito led a second group of communist resistance units known as the Partisans.

Challenges in coalition unconventional warfare: the allied campaign in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945

Despite Esma's painstaking efforts to protect her daughter from the truth of her conception, she cannot prevent the ultimate outcome, which is to tell Sara, having been forced to do so by her at gun point, that she was raped by "Chetnik" soldiers in the "prisoner of war" camp during the war, and that Sara's father is one of the men who raped her (Esma's Secret, 2006).

'Giving memory a future': confronting the legacy of mass rape in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina

Many Muslims accused the Serbs of following in the tradition of the Chetnik royalist and nationalist militias of the early 20th century in trying to create a Greater Serbia at the expense of other ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia.

Conflicting truths: with the trial of the former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic due to begin, Nick Hawton reflects on his time reporting in a region where history is still used to justify war

BRANKO (Nodding toward Alma): Make a Chetnik. Lose your virginity already.

Honey Brown Eyes

Many of the rescued Americans, indignant and heartbroken at this treatment of a genuine hero, volunteered to go to Belgrade to testify for the Chetnik leader, but were denied permission to enter the country.

WWII's forgotten: Serbian heroes: Gregory Freeman's superb book, The Forgotten 500, recounts the story of the American and Allied airmen rescued by Serbian General Draza Mihailovich and his heroic fighters

A una mujer musulmana le dijeron que "daria a luz a un nino chetnik que cuando fuera grande mataria musulmanes" (249).

Los usos del sexo

The operation was attributed to Tito's Yugoslav intelligence, although the possibility that this was an attempt at revenge by a Chetnik activist was not dismissed.

Pope Paul VI Allegedly Helped Croatian Fascists