Anti-Fascism and its Memory in Yugoslavia and the Post-Yugoslav Space

Jelena Đureinović

The Spanish Civil War, as the pivotal event in the global history of the struggle against fascism, involved around 2000 Yugoslav volunteers. The Yugoslav National Committee for Aid to Republican Spain in Paris collected aid and coordinated the transfer of Yugoslav volunteers across the Pyrenees into Spain, supported by similar committees established in places with significant Yugoslav migrant communities, such as France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and the United States. At home, in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was the main organiser of pro-republican activity, managing the transport of volunteers to Spain, raising awareness about the war and fundraising. The Yugoslav state maintained the façade of neutrality. It advocated for non-intervention, but it essentially sided with Franco and used the Spanish Civil War as an opportunity to settle accounts with its main internal political enemy – the communists – and justify their even larger repression than before (Bešlin 2024, Pavlaković 2016). The sending of volunteers and fundraising for the republican side was banned in early 1937, and the state employed harsh tactics to curtail and disable any pro-Republican activities, fearing that the war in Spain would strengthen the communists’ position in the country.

Yugoslav communists understood the Spanish Civil War as a lesson for the later revolution, and indeed, the Spanish volunteers would become key actors in the uprising against fascist occupation and socialist revolution in Yugoslavia that began in 1941. The People’s Liberation War, as the antifascist struggle and socialist revolution is usually referred to, grew from a series of communist-led uprisings in summer 1941 into a mass movement and army with wide popular support by the end of the war. The Partisans laid the foundations of Yugoslav state socialism and political, cultural and state structures in the territories they liberated during the war.

As the birthplace of Yugoslav state socialism, the People’s Liberation War was, naturally, the central historical reference in Yugoslav society and its multifaceted antifascist and revolutionary memory culture. The dominant war narrative centred on three elements of the struggle: the people’s liberation, socialist revolution and brotherhood and unity of all Yugoslav people (Karge 2010). The culture of remembrance encompassed rich memoryscapes of thousands of monuments dedicated to the People’s Liberation War (Horvatinčić and Žerovc 2023), as well as the commemoration of fallen Partisans with their names given to schools, streets, public institutions and factories across the country. Cultural production and popular culture also invoked the antifascist struggle and revolution. Although the war narrative was state-sponsored, the memory culture was also inherently an everyday phenomenon with mass participation of various organisations and population at large, with anniversaries of wartime events becoming community celebrations for all generations and including re-enactment marches, nature hikes and sporting events (Baković 2022). The memory of the People’s Liberation War also played an important connecting role during decolonisation, fostering solidarity and identification with the anti-colonial liberation movements and their struggle among Yugoslav Partisans, now key political actors, and in broader society (Đureinović 2024).

The first challenges to the official war narrative emerged during the 1980s, but it was only during the dissolution of Yugoslavia and with the creation of nation-states that antifascism and socialist revolution became an unsuitable past. As Yugoslavia disintegrated through armed conflicts in the 1990s, the emerging political elites hurried to free themselves from the legacies of socialist Yugoslavia. The People’s Liberation War, as the symbol of Yugoslavia, became the subject of radical revision in the often-parallel processes of erasure, demonisation, inversion and appropriation of antifascism (Đureinović 2023, Đureinović 2020, Trbovc and Pavasović Trošt 2013). At the same time, the governments, right-wing political parties and groups and historians have invested enormous efforts in the rehabilitation of Partisans’ enemies and defeated forces of WWII, recasting them into national heroes and innocent victims of communism because of the executions and trials at the end and after the war (Luthar 2012, Pavlaković, Brentin and Pauković 2018, Pauković 2019).

Across the post-Yugoslav space, whether the political actors criminalise or appropriate the People’s Liberation War and antifascism, the common denominator of post-socialist politics of memory of antifascism is the erasure of its emancipatory and revolutionary dimensions (Đureinović 2025). It goes hand in hand with the physical disappearance and disregard for the Yugoslav antifascist memory culture (Janev 2017, Schwandner-Sievers 2010), which takes place parallel to the global hype surrounding the Partisan monuments, which is orientalising, equally depoliticising and deprived of meaning (Kulić 2018). In the spaces of leftist activism, cultural practices, private memories and bottom-up celebrations of antifascism across the region that used to be socialist Yugoslavia, however, the People’s Liberation War still serves as inspiration (Hofman 2021).

Selected reading:

Baković, Nikola. ‘Retracing the Revolution: Partisan Reenactments in Socialist Yugoslavia’. In Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History, edited by Vanessa Agnew, Juliane Tomann, and Sabine Stach, 105–25. London: Routledge, 2022.

Batinić, Jelena. Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Đureinović, Jelena. ‘Internationalizing the Revolution: Veterans and Transnational Cultures of Memory and Solidarity between Yugoslavia and Algeria’. International Review of Social History 69, no. S32 (2024): 139–58. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000652.

Gužvica, Stefan. ‘The Spanish Inquisition: Factional Struggles among the Yugoslav Interbrigadistas’. Istorija 20. Veka, no. 1 (2019): 53–74. https://doi.org/10.29362/ist20veka.2019.1.guz.53-74.

Hofman, Ana. ‘“We Are the Partisans of Our Time”: Antifascism and Post-Yugoslav Singing Memory Activism’. Popular Music and Society 44, no. 2 (2021): 157–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2020.1820782.

Horvatinčić, Sanja, and Beti Žerovc. Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia. Ljubljana, Berlin: Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory, Archive Books, 2023.    

Jakiša, Miranda, and Nikica Gilić, eds. Partisans in Yugoslavia: Literature, Film and Visual Culture. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015.

Jelušić, Iva. ‘Entertainment and Fun in the Service of Survival: Theatre of the People’s Liberation in the Battles of Neretva and Sutjeska’. War & Society 44, no. 1 (2025): 14–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/07292473.2024.2409537.

Karge, Heike. ‘Mediated Remembrance: Local Practices of Remembering the Second World War in Tito’s Yugoslavia’. European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire 16, no. 1 (2009): 49–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/13507480802655394.

———. Steinerne Erinnerung – versteinerte Erinnerung? Kriegsgedenken in Jugoslawien (1947-1970). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010.

Kirn, Gal. The Partisan Counter-Archive: Retracing the Ruptures of Art and Memory in the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110682069.

Manojlović Pintar, Olga, ed. Jugoslovenski dobrovoljci u odbrani Španske republike. Belgrade: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 2024.

Pavlaković, Vjeran. The Battle for Spain Is Ours: Croatia and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2014.

———. Yugoslav Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. Research Paper Series of Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe 4. Belgrade: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016. https://rosalux.rs/rosa-publications/yugoslav-volunteers-in-the-spanish-civil-war/.

Stubbs, Paul. ‘Re-Imagining Anti-Fascist Internationalisms: Bandung, Belgrade and Havana’. History in Flux : Journal of the Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, Juraj Dobrila University of Pula 6, no. 6 (2024): 169–96. https://doi.org/10.32728/flux.2024.6.8.

Trifković, Gaj. Sea of Blood: A Military History of the Partisan Movement in Yugoslavia 1941-45. Warwick: Helion Company, 2022.

Vukliš, Vladan. Jugosloveni i Španski građanski rat. Belgrade, Banja Luka: Čigoja štampa, Arhiv Republike Srpske, 2024.

Vukliš, Vladan. Sjećanje na Španiju: Španski građanski rat u jugoslovenskoj istoriografiji i memoaristici 1945–1991. Banja Luka: Arhiv Republike Srpske, 2013.