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S·OVO, 17.1, SPRING 2005
[. . .] Many of our greatly esteemed and accountable officials believed that the Republican red army would win [. . .] On the other hand, all Croatian nationalists were certain that Franco would be victorious.3 [Our towns and villages] do not want to sacrifice any victims for ideas which have rent apart bloody Spain. We have our worries and our needs, we have our own struggle, in which the entire Croatian nation is participating, and before which all others must be placed in the background.4
Although nearly all political activity in Croatia in the 1930s (then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) revolved around the ‘national question’, international events, such as the Spanish Civil War, captured the attention of the reading public and exerted an influence on political parties across the spectrum, from the leaders of the Croatian national movement, the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS — Hrvatska seljachka stranka), to the illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ — Komunistichka partija Jugoslavije) and the Ustaša movement. Right-wing Croatian nationalists benefited the most from the Spanish Civil War in the short run, since the victory of General Francisco Franco, backed by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, seemed to herald the dawning of a new, fascist Europe. Even though the Ustaše did not get any direct experience in the Spanish conflict, media coverage and propaganda laid the foundation for support of the Ustaša regime when they were installed by the Axis forces in April 1941, particularly among the Church establishment and the right wing of the HSS. The communists, while suffering an initial setback with the loss of the Republic and Popular Front movement, gained considerable experience in the Spanish Civil War, both in terms of military skills and in mobilizing anti-fascist groups in Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, for the HSS, seemingly at the apex of power in 1940, the Spanish Civil War signalled the beginning of its disappearance from the political stage, because Croats and other Yugoslavs turned to increasingly radicalized political options as Europe became engulfed in war. In this period, newspapers were the main source of information about international and local news, and each political party distributed one, if not several, publications that outlined their position on a broad range of topics. After the declaration of the royal dictatorship on 6 January 1929, King Aleksandar banned many papers, along with all political parties, while heavily censoring others. The elections of 5 May 1935 — still rigged by the Yugoslav regime and by no means restoring a true parliamentary democratic system — nonetheless signalled the thawing of Aleksandar’s authoritarian solution to Yugoslavia’s interminable crises. Regent Pavle, who ruled in place of young King Peter after the assassination of his father in Marseilles in 1934, sought a compromise with the Croats and lifted the ban on political parties although some, notably the Croatian Party of Rights (HSP — Hrvatska stranka prava) and the KPJ, remained illegal under the Obznana, a law 3
Mile Budak, ‘Povjesna odgovornost’, Hrvatski narod, 21 April 1939, p. 1. This weekly was the main mouthpiece for the Ustaša movement, whose leaders were mostly still imprisoned in Italy. Mile Budak (1899–1945), a writer and later education minister in the NDH, was one of the few émigrés who returned from exile in 1938. 4 Editorial in Hrvatski dnevnik, 18 April 1937, p. 5, which was the daily newspaper of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS).