Epilogue in 1945 the Croatian Writer Vladimir Nazor
EPILOGUE In 1945 the Croatian writer Vladimir Nazor (1876–1949), who joined the Partisans at the end of 1942, wrote a poem entitled ‘Poems of the Fist’, in which he declared that the Croats were not Goths but ‘an ancient fragment of Slavdom.’ Whoever dared to claim differently, Nazor wrote, would ‘feel our fist.’1 After the collapse of the NDH in May 1945, the new communist authorities soon turned Nazor’s threat of violence against the proponents of the non-Slavic theories of Croat origin into actual policy. The leading proponent of the Gothic theory, the 78 year-old historian and Catholic priest Kerubin Šegvić, was sentenced to death, and subsequently executed, by a Yugoslav military court, on the grounds that his theory on ‘the non-Slavic origin of the Croats’ was designed to ‘demolish Slavic unity’ and ‘incite national hatred among the peoples of Yugoslavia.’2 In spite of its theoretical adherence to Marxist internationalism, the lead- ership of the new Yugoslav state under Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) also strongly promoted the racial-supranational ideologies of pan-Slavism and Yugoslavism, at least in the early period of its rule. Belgrade was chosen as the site of the Soviet ‘Pan-Slav Congress’ held in December 1946, because Marshal Tito was regarded as Stalin’s most ‘trusted communist fighter’, while ‘the Yugoslavs were regarded as the second ranking Slav nation’ after the Soviet Union. At the end of his opening speech at the Congress, Tito made a ‘three-fold toast, to Slav solidarity, to our greatest Slav brother, the Soviet Union [and] to its leader of genius, Stalin.’3 Theories of the non-Slav origin of the Croats were not officially welcome in Yugoslav academic and political life.
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