The repression of the communist regime in Yugoslavia against political opponents in the Socialist Republic of Croatia in the 1970s

Abstract

The paper analyzes the arrest and trial of a group of opponents of the communist regime in Yugoslavia in the mid-1970s in the Socialist Republic of Croatia, who were convicted of founding a terrorist organization that collaborated with Croatian anti-Yugoslav émigrés in the West. The verdict is compared with the investigative documents of the Yugoslav intelligence service, but also with the authorized record of the conversation that the author of this paper had with the first defendant Tomislav Držić in 2019. It is argued that this was a group of regime dissidents whose activity consisted of anti-regime conversations, writing anti-regime texts that were not disseminated, reading Croatian émigrés' propaganda materials and Držić's occasional contacts with émigré in Canada Stjepan Dubičanac, rather than a terrorist organization that could seriously shake the regime.