Slobodanka Stefanović - život jedne ilegalke

Abstract

Slobodanka Stefanović belongs to the generation of young men and women who reached adulthood during the thirties and who were willing to fight for the revolutionary transformation of their country. Her life and work as a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, a member of the resistance, and a close associate of the important people in the post-war Yugoslavia, was sporadically mentioned in post-war historiography, and more recently it has been followed by the arbitrary media interpretations that have relied heavily on the process of her political rehabilitation. Her activity within the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, her work as a member of the resistance, her arrest, imprisonment, stay in the Institute for Compulsory Education of Youth in Smederevska Palanka and her tragic death soon after the liberation of Požarevac in 1944 are closely connected to her relationship with Slobodan Penezić Krcun, the relationship that has still been insufficiently studied. Judicial rehabilitation did not clarify the circumstances of her engagement during the Second World War, or the circumstances of her death, it only defined that her life ended without a proper judicial procedure and a verdict. Slobodanka Stefanović's life and death represent the rigorous relation of the Communist Party towards its members, which implied the complete subordination of the individual to the interests of the movement and its ideology. Mistakes, weakness and dispiritedness were not forgiven even to erstwhile friends, and if a transgressor was a woman, severe punishment was due because of the traditional view on women's role in society regardless of the emancipatory potential of the communist movement.