Wrangelists serving as Yugoslav border guards on Kozjak during the 1920s

The case of Simeon Britvin

Abstract

In her discussion, the author focuses on the question of how the reception and perception of the northern Yugoslav border (or, rather, the new Yugoslav–Austrian border) in the Kozjansko (popularly Kobansko) region in the 1920s were affected by the fact that the border was guarded by a significant number of soldiers that formerly served under General Peter Wrangel and represented one of the most problematic groups (traumatized by the world war and the Russian civil war) within the population of the Russian emigrants in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes after the First World War. In her cultural and historical study, the author highlights several criminal proceedings and examines in detail the case of a former soldier of the Russian Imperial Army and a Wrangelist Simeon Britvin, who was stationed as a border guard on Kapunar (a hill above Radlje ob Dravi) and in 1922, aided by two Slovenian women, murdered the owner of the farm where the border guardhouse was set up.