 Hello. Good afternoon to everybody for also coming back after lunch. I'm glad to see that the room is still full. Thank you to the organizers for inviting me here. And thinking about the first speech, the welcoming speech, and where the vice-rector talked about the situation in Europe and globally. Croatia is one of these places where there is this strong revisionism. I guess we can talk about the other Yugoslav successor states more generally. When I was asked to talk about the memory of the Spanish Civil War in Croatia and the former Yugoslavia, I knew that I had to put it in the context of what was going on in general with revisionism. I'll start with an introduction about the Yugoslavs in Spain, what they did in the Second World War, what the memory was like during socialist Yugoslavia, and a bit of a dark note with the current situation in Croatia, but in other places. And I also have the second edition of this pamphlet that was published by Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. So if people are interested in it, I have a number of copies for free, so you're welcome to come up after the lecture and I can share them. So I wanted to initially say who were these Yugoslav volunteers. Many of them were soldiers, but other ones served there also as journalists, as artists. And then these woodcuts are from a volunteer that was sent to do propaganda work basically. And he later also became very important during the Second World War in Yugoslavia in designing a lot of the art. We're all aware of the power of art and painting and other arts that came out of the Spanish Civil War. Just to show you the situation of Yugoslavia in the 1930s, it was divided into these so-called Bonovinas. It was an attempt to destroy national identity. So the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnian Muslims, they didn't really have the republics that they would have later or the independent states that we have now. It was an attempt to create a Yugoslav nationality. But there was, of course, attention. And so the Yugoslavs that went and fought in Spain came from a country that already had a dictatorship. It wasn't a fascist dictatorship, it was definitely an authoritarian system. So when they went to fight in Spain, they had the idea that they would come back and carry the revolution to Yugoslavia from the very beginning. So if all the documents and the letters that you can read in the archives, they're really, they're fighting in Spain, but their real goal is to come back and carry the revolution back to Yugoslavia. And the main organizer, as in many other countries, was the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Very early on they formed this Yugoslav National Committee, which is based in Paris. And at the time of the Spanish Civil War, the General Secretary is this guy named Milan Gorkic, nicknamed Zomer, also based in Spain, or sorry, in Paris. But during the course of the actual Spanish Civil War, there's a lot of internal fighting, and not directly because of Spain, but certainly partly due to the war in Spain, we have the emergence of a new General Secretary, and maybe many of you know here the name of Jose Pobros Tito, who had other code names of Valter or Otto. He would really become known as Tito only during the war in Yugoslavia. But he's in charge of organizing the volunteers. He also comes to Paris briefly and organizing the volunteers that are then going into Spain. So the role of the Communist Party is crucial, but only about half of the volunteers were actually Communist Party members. The rest were from all different kinds of political backgrounds. So we can see the way that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia thought about the war in Spain. I mean, here's just one from a letter from October 1936. Spain is the central question of all international politics. The struggle of the heroic Spanish people is not just a struggle, which will result in the victory to defeat democracy only in Spain. Rather, it is the beginning of an armed conflict between fascism and democracy of the entire world. So I think they really had this much broader vision. Of course, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was part of the common turn and they weren't really making autonomous decisions necessarily, but definitely in the internal letters and communications, we can see that their idea was not just limited to Spain but going further. How did the Yugoslav volunteers get to Spain? There were initially hopes to mobilize huge numbers to bring them over because there was a lot of people who wanted to go and fight in Spain and one of the earlier ideas was to organize this ship, which was almost 200 volunteers to get on this ship. It was sailing from Montenegro then to the Dalmatian coast and then bring them over, but the Communist Party was quite infiltrated by police agents and so on and so this episode ends rather in a big disaster, a number of people get arrested and this actually leads to Gorikic's fall and so Milan Gorikic, he is recalled back to Moscow and then disappears in Stalin's purges. And there's this period between 37 to 39 where Tito is the de facto general secretary but he's not really confirmed until 1939. So the Spanish chapter of the Yugoslav Communist Party is actually really quite crucial for the future developments and after that the volunteers come in much smaller numbers. Also many of the volunteers didn't come directly from Yugoslavia. Many Yugoslav workers were working in Belgium, France, some were working in Spain, many came from North America, so a lot of them came from different parts of Europe and the world and another important segment was the students. I mean we all know also the importance of youth and young people in revolutionary movements. The Yugoslav students studying in Prague were no different and a number of these volunteers that did come from Prague in a student group, they all came and about a group of 20 of them decided to leave their skiing vacation and then all came to Spain and they became quite important also later in the Yugoslav revolution. So just to give you an idea of some of the main units that they fought in the Dmitrov Battalion of the 15th Brigade and they had their own newspaper the Dmitrovac and then we had the Djokovic Battalion and some later different units and so on. They were also involved in the medical court. I give you this image of the statue and it's named after Matje Gubets who was a 16th century Croatian peasant leader of an uprising and so even though the volunteers, many of them, consider themselves to be Yugoslav as a unified and sort of an internationalist sense there was still the national question in Yugoslavia and actually the Communist Party even creates the Croatian Communist Party and the Slovene Communist Party in 1937. So there's on one hand this super national Yugoslav identity and choosing to name a unit after Croatian peasant leader was a very conscious effort by the Communist Party and in fact this was used in their material sent back into the country. Look, Croats are fighting in Spain under the name of this peasant leader and they will then bring revolution back to Yugoslavia and back to Croatia. And the numbers, for a long time the number about 1,700 was the standard official number but more recent research by a French scholar in his dissertation he writes about 1,900 total Yugoslav volunteers and here's just giving you a sense of where they came from you can see the majority come from Croatia and Slovenia and as we heard also earlier from the presenter on Poland not all of these just because they came from Croatia didn't mean they were Croats they were also Serbs from Croatia or Croats from Bosnia and so on one reason why many come from Croatia is not necessarily because they were particularly more revolutionary but many of them were actually the ones working abroad so a lot of the Croats actually came these were the ones who were already based in France or Belgium or North America I'm not going to get into all the details here but we can see that they were involved the Yugoslav units were involved in many of the most important battles of the international brigades and since we're talking here and we're gathered here about the 80th anniversary of the leaving of the international brigades the Yugoslav volunteers actually don't return home they actually stay and then are incorporated into Spanish units because they lose their citizenship when they come to Spain so also probably those who are from Austria or Italy where they had fascist regimes they couldn't go back so the Yugoslav volunteers stay to the very very end of the war just another quote so Proleter is the main communist newspaper that was published in the 1930s and again we can even see the call to sort of Croatian patriotism or nationalism in this quote so they're saying that Zagreb is actually being defended in front of Madrid by the Croatian communist with hundreds of volunteers of all nationalities from Yugoslavia so we see this duality of both having this international Pan-Jugoslav identity but also playing to Croatian national feelings and this is this commander, he's the highest ranking Yugoslav in the Spanish Civil War and he also is recalled to Moscow and then disappears in the purges I already mentioned George Andreevich Kuhn, he's the artist he wanted to fight in the trenches with the others but he was giving a directive, no you have to do the wood carving and the painting and then transmit the ideas for the future generations and so as I said he also was important during the partisans in Yugoslavia he designed actually the coat of arms of Yugoslavia which you may have seen with the torches and the star and one of the highest ranking members of the Yugoslav Communist Party who was sent in 1937 to the International Brigades actually dies in battle Blagoje Padovich as part of the 13th Brigade and why I'm bringing him up specifically is there was, as I said there were a lot of internal fighting and settling of accounts and the Padovich case is often brought up especially since the 1980s and 1990s in this wave of revisionism and the collapse of Yugoslavia as one of these conspiracy theories that it was actually Tito liquidating a potential rival for control and one of the arguments for that is this image that was taken of Padovich on the battle site, allegedly with a bullet hole in his back so was he shot by an NKVD agent of Liko Begovich who was the guy who took this photograph and I'll get to Begovich a little bit later but I mean I'm sure in the chaos of the battlefield people were maybe he had turned and got hit in the back but this image has been used since the 1980s and the 1990s as proof of Begovich getting evidence to send back to Tito after the fall of the Republic the Yugoslav volunteers share the fate of many of the Republican soldiers and they end up in the French camps as you can see here about almost 500 of them end up in these camps and this created like a big movement in Yugoslavia itself to bring these prisoners back so in a way that Communist Party was getting publicity through this campaign and all kinds of people were signing petitions to release them in a way that I would argue that while many of the volunteers received experience in the battlefield it was the experience in the camps that really gave them the party discipline and the unification, the unity and the vision that was then to be so important during the Second World War and many of them do then return back to Yugoslavia and they form, if not... I mean dealing with the numbers I mean they couldn't form the majority of the troops of course but they were very important because of their experience and again the party discipline to come back and especially the beginning of the uprising in Yugoslavia they were distributed and sent to various units and they're the ones who would help guide the resistance in 1941 and 1942 in particular so here we have Tito and Koca Popovic volunteer as we can see about 350 of the Spanish veterans returned to Yugoslavia I didn't really mention but about half of them actually die in Spain many then return either to North America or also about 350 or still end up in prison and in concentration camps about 350 managed to make it back to Yugoslavia about 250 are active in the People's Liberation War here's a monument to Žikica Jovanovic Španac so a lot of the veterans had this nickname and were added Španac so Spaniard to the end of their name and he's important because he starts the uprising in Serbia in July 7th of 1941 he shoots two police officers that come to try to arrest the communists if we're talking about revisionism and memory now actually that date is no longer a date in Serbia and now it's commemorated the two police officers that were killed by him so memory and memorials and memorialization is changing and I mentioned here the Svetko Flores and he's in charge of bringing the Yugoslavs who are by 1941-1942 many of them are in German labor camps and then they bring them back into Yugoslavia so it was a very well thought out well planned mission to bring the Spanish veterans back they come to Zagreb and then they're sent off to their various missions and another important thing is they often sent a Croat to Serb areas or a Serb to a Bosnian area again to this idea of what later comes out is called brotherhood and unity and to show that not the other side aren't always just killers because the war in Yugoslavia wasn't just between the resistance and the occupiers but it was a multi-sided ethnic war with a lot of civilians being killed and one of these Spanish veterans who is sent into the field is Marko Oreskovic and we can even see this song that was our poem and a song that was sung during the time and afterwards comrade Marko is a Croat by birth but he's like a mother to the Serbian people because he was an example of not all Croats are these ustaša, these Croatian fascists and he was important in organizing the uprising then and he was actually even killed by Serb nationalists in 1941 as I said the numbers of only about 250 is not that large of a number but they do take up crucial positions, they're often political commissars they were important in the first two years and by the end of the Second World War there are four main Yugoslav armies so the partisan armies turn into actual armies are all led by Spanish veterans and 59 of the veterans are recognized as people's heroes the highest award given from the Second World War 130 of them died during the war, 30 are promoted to the rank of general so they had quite important careers during the war and after the war many of them hold high positions in diplomacy and politics and the party and the army and so on not all of them made it back to Yugoslavia but many of them fight in other resistance movements and I already mentioned Vlajko Begovic so this is the photographer who took the picture of the dead Blagoje Padovic earlier here a number of his photos so also the Alba archive has a lot of his photographs because he was in charge of the 15th Brigade photograph corps so there's a lot of very interesting photographs of him and just a daily life of Spanish peasants it's quite interesting to take a look not just of Army members in the field so after the war the Spanish veterans of a particular level they were the first ones to engage in the revolution and while the Spanish Revolution failed in Yugoslavia they succeeded and they were known as Nashi Spanci, our Spaniards many many publications about them but they're also important actually individual memory actors and one of them is Cedro Kapur also a volunteer from Bosnia Herzegovina and he's very crucial in publishing the books organizing the veteran associations they have association of Yugoslav volunteers in the Spanish Republican Army many books, memoirs, they worked in schools they had the 50th anniversary in 1986 and Yugoslavia had actually boycotted Franco Spain until 1977 I mean two years even after he died there were many memorials built not just to partisans who had been Spanish fighters then die in the Second World War but actually there's memorials to those who died in Spain so here's just two examples of communists who died in Spain and then subsequently they had monuments built to them now before I get to the final part of my talk where I talk about the revisionism I think it's important to understand that the memory of the Spanish Civil War and the memory of the volunteers was so incorporated and immersed in the general cultural memory and memory politics of the partisans in the Second World War they were, of course, many of them were also both partisans and Spanish veterans they went to a lot of the different commemorations here's a famous monument at Sutiska for those of you who've been following them there are a lot of memes on the internet about these socialist memorials this is one of the most famous ones and we can see them posing here so the commemorative culture, the Spaniards were very much the Spans were very much interpreted into it there were many memoirs of them here's this one, August Cezárez, it's the Spanish Encounters which was published in 1938 in Toronto but probably only like five of the books actually made it to Yugoslavia and then reprinted in the 60s and he's also a famous modernist author beyond being in Spain I mean I guess sort of like a Hemingway kind of figure the partisan, the Spansy were also in the films maybe you've also heard of these partisan movies there's a lot of them often times one of the figures is this Spanatz the older, experienced, revolutionary sometimes more dogmatic, sometimes more hardline than the local situation on the ground the Spansy could be both a positive and maybe even a negative element because the situation in Yugoslavia was different than what it was in Spain but you can see that these characters appear in a number of films as well and by the 80s this sort of aura that they had these even higher revolutionaries becomes problematic even as the Yugoslav system itself was in crisis and falling apart the Spansy in general become labeled as Narodny Hedoi all of them get this rank, so this is an important event and then a year later they become, they all also take over this Spomenits of 1941, they become the first fighters I think in the earlier lecture about the French veterans that only happens in the 90s I suppose as being recognized as actual veterans but they get the equal rights to those who rose up in 41 and with their sort of legacy they try to, they write a letter to the Central Committee in 1984 saying we need to call an extraordinary congress we need to deal with the political and economic crisis in Yugoslavia and then they basically get called in for an interrogation by the Central Committee and we can already see that the crisis has gone so long they also get also tarred in the press as that they were they're called Slobonnistrelci or loose cannons so this rank they had no longer carries its weight I've called it the Twilight of the Revolutionaries and so when two years later the 50th anniversary they've kind of been sort of shamed in public by the regime and as we go into the 90s of course you all know there was a terrible war in the form of Yugoslavia as the country falls apart there was a short war in Slovenia and then in Croatia and then a much nastiest war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and then even going to the conflict in Kosovo and new waves of revisionism the destruction of the partisan and the socialist narrative now replaced by new nationalist narratives that's the memory scape, the destruction of old monuments and anti-fascist monuments, the building of monuments to collaborators here's another image of this Marko Reskovic the one on the ground is from the Dalmatian coast but the bust is Marko Reskovic, the Croat who helped fight for Serbs this is in Belgrade and it's been graffitied and other lectures I've spoken a lot about the destruction of memorials I'm just giving you two examples I mean the upper image was actually looked like a giant fist but now it's been completely blown up this is in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the lower one is in Croatia, a toppled monument so physically destroying the land, the memory scape and then we have Draža Mihajlović who was the leader of the Četnik movement which briefly had served as a resistance movement that collaborates with Italians and even the German forces so collaborators are now being celebrated as fighters for nationalist heroes the university where I teach at used to be called the barracks of the Spanish volunteers the Spanish volunteers barracks and we hear an image from 1991 where they were moving another here's the memorial to Blagoje Parovic who was the Commissar killed in 1937 and his monument had a central place in his hometown of Nevesiňa and in Bosnia-Herzegovina now has been removed the outskirts even though the square still carries his name but you can just see now like a big blank spot in the middle of the square and why I wanted to talk about the integration of the Špansi and the commemorative process earlier in Croatia especially but in other areas as well as the rejection the destruction of the partisan heritage the Špansi are also being thrown out with that you know throwing out the baby with the bathwater so their fate is also many monuments have been defaced, damaged, torn down some of them for material purposes because of the raw materials other ones because of ideological reasons and this is also now extended to an attack on Tito because Tito is at least in Croatia by many seen as someone who led to this post-war repression against the Croatian people and they're trying to say well he was already an NKVD agent and a liquidator way back in Spain there's these ideas that he was in Spain shooting people and they dug out this is just one example they dug out this photo I mean you can't even see the guy's face and this is also actually in one of the French camps so why would Tito go into a French camp but for these revisionists it's not important but we can see how deep the attack to deconstruct everything about the historical past is going so I'm just going to try to conclude in the next two slides on a slightly more positive note because there is still remembrance practices and there is still I think a lot of values and lessons we can take from the Spanish Civil War that isn't always so associated with the post-war Communist repression in the form of Yugoslavia this was in 2016 was this conference in Belgrade and it was also tied into a little commemoration we had this is the International Brigade Monument in Belgrade and the street of the international brigades that's it leads right to the monument you can see someone graffitied this public spaces or ours next to it so it was also a very great conference between politicians and scholars and intellectuals from Spain that participated in this discussion and I have to do a little, the final slide the promotion of Arieka where I teach which will be the European Capital of Culture in 2020 and this is what these barracks now look like so this is our new university campus the only existing building that's left is the building in the very front it looks like the more grayish Austro-Hungarian building hopefully we can use these memory scapes projects I also have some material about Arieka 2020 if you're interested in I'm also inviting everyone to come to Arieka in 2020 and hopefully the campus which is now a bastion of intellectual freedom and ideas could then actually maybe again have a plaque or something dedicated to the volunteers that fought in the Spanish Civil War thank you