Živko Topalović

Živko Topalović (born March 21, 1886 in Užice , Serbia ; † February 11, 1972 in Vienna , Austria ) was a Yugoslav socialist and critic of communism . He was the founder of the Socialist Party of Yugoslavia and co-founder of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia before turning away from communism.

Early years

Topalović finished high school in Užice in 1904 and then studied law at the University of Belgrade . He has a PhD in criminal law. He then worked in a specialist area in Berlin and Paris in order to collect professional qualifications. With the outbreak of the First Balkan War in 1912 he returned to Serbia and was a reserve officer. After the Balkan Wars he became an advocate of socialist ideas. In 1915, during World War I , he was wounded and taken prisoner. As a prisoner of war, he remained imprisoned until the end of the war.

Political activity

After the war he co-founded the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and became its second party secretary. However, he separated from the JCP when it joined the Comintern , which at the time demanded the dissolution of Yugoslavia as “the product of the Greater Serbian, hegemonistic bourgeoisie, which in turn became a satellite of the capitalist bourgeoisie of France”.

Topalović then acted as chairman of the Socialist Party of Yugoslavia. He was an opponent of the authoritarian government of King Alexander as well as the Yugoslav communists, and a member of the Free Trade Union Movement in the League of Nations . After the murder of King Alexander in 1934, he withdrew from politics and continued to work only as a lawyer.

Second World War

During the Second World War he initially lived in seclusion in Belgrade, but was then contacted by Dragoljub Mihailović in 1943 . Mihailović hoped for political gains mainly through Topalović's contacts with Clement Attlee , since Mihailović assumed that Winston Churchill would lose the upcoming elections as British Prime Minister (which it did). He also wanted a “left answer” to the Yugoslav communists under Josip Broz Tito . In January 1944 Topalović took part in the so-called St. Sava Congress . As a result of this congress, the Yugoslav People's Democratic Community (Jugoslovenska Demokratska Narodna Zajednica - JUDENAZ) was founded, of which Topalović was chairman. At the same time he became a member of the Central National Committee , the political organ of the movement around Mihailović. In May 1944 Topalović was sent to the Allies in Italy , where Ivan Šubašić , Prime Minister of the Yugoslav royal government in exile, which had since entered into a coalition with the Yugoslav Communists under Tito under pressure from the Allies, had offered him a ministerial post in the new government. Topalović refused, although the communists had also been against Topalović's participation in a new government. His real goal of strengthening Allied support for the Yugoslav Army in Mihailović's homeland , he could not achieve. He explained the “Serbian” situation to Mihailović as tragic and accused the party of Mihailović's gross weakness, while the communists, on the other hand, are much better organized, which explains their success.

Late years

Topalović stayed in Italy until the end of the war, was initially arrested, but not extradited to the new Yugoslav government under the communists, but sent to France . He then moved to Geneva , where he denounced the Allies in newspapers for their failure to support Mihailović '. In the new, communist Yugoslavia, he was sentenced in absentia to 20 years imprisonment.

In 1948 Topalović went to Paris, where he founded the International Socialist Bureau . There he wrote numerous books on the new political conditions in Yugoslavia and the labor movement in Europe. He warned against the Cominform as the new scourge of Europe. He was the main editor of the magazine "Le Bireau", as well as editor of "Le Syndicalisme Exile" and "La Future".

He contributed to the founding of the International Federalist Movement in Strasbourg in 1948, the Congress of the Peoples of Europe, Asia and Africa in Paris in 1949, the founding of the Free Yugoslav Union in 1949 and the Union of Serbian Federalists in 1956. In the early 1970s Topalović moved to Vienna, where he died in 1972. His last book was the three-volume "How the Communists Got Power in Yugoslavia".