“I know the city will be, I know the garden will bloom when there’re such people in a soviet country!” – The Yugoslav communist Stefan Bogdanovski’s life and death in the USSR

Abstract

It is incorrect to limit the study of the phenomenon of Yugoslav, and generally foreign, communist emigration to the USSR in the 1920- 1940s to figures of the first and second row. The fates of those who did not hold high positions in the Communist Parties or Comintern may also be regarded as a reflection of significant historical processes. In particular, the life of Svetozar Jovanović (a.k.a. Stefan Bogdanovsky, 1897–1941), a shoemaker from the village Mirijevo, 25 km from Požarevac, is an illustrative example of the relationship between the state machine and the “little man” who dared to “play politics.” During the brutal era of world wars, several authoritarian and totalitarian regimes tried to deprive him of his freedom and his life, which ultimately happened in 1941 in German-occupied Kyiv. From 1914–1918 there were many occasions in which S. Jovanović could have died on the battlefield or in the Austro-Hungarian POW camp, where he ended up in 1915. Demobilized in 1919, the former soldier of the Serbian army joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, in which a few years later he took the position of “secretary” regional committee”. In 1928, Jovanović, who was facing arrest, was sent by the party to Moscow to study at the Communist University of National Minorities of the West (KUNMZ). Having received a Soviet passport and now member of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the student received a new “school name,” namely, “Stefan Pavlovich Bogdanovsky.” From now on, he, like millions of Soviet citizens, had to constantly seek some form of “peaceful coexistence” with the authorities, and, consequently, yield to its pressure, make inevitable “compromises with conscience.” His instinct of self-preservation warned Bogdanovsky from participating in internal party squabbles, and a “duty journey” to Spain (1936–1939) saved him from the Great Terror. During the three years Bogdanovsky spent abroad, most of his classmates and senior party comrades were executed. In fear of the prospect of following them, he, upon returning to the USSR, renounced his wife, who was arrested during his absence by the NKVD and sentenced to five years in a GULAG. Bogdanovsky left for Kyiv, where he started a new family. Having dodged the “punishing sword of revolution,” our hero, however, did not cease to be a hostage to big European politics. In September 1941, he shared the fate of more than half a million soldiers and commanders on the Southwestern Front who defended Kyiv and found themselves surrounded by Germans.