Stjepan Stevo Filipović (1916-42): His Spirit Will Never Die

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102 years ago, Stjepan Stevo Filipović was born on 27 January 1916. Filipović was a Yugoslav communist, a partisan, and People’s Hero of Yugoslavia, the “Yugoslav Che Guevara”. He was born in Opuzen in Croatia, then part of Austria-Hungary. He was a locksmith by trade. He graduated from primary school, then, his family moved to Mostar (Bosnia-Herzegovina), where he graduated from the second level at the gymnasium. After that, he studied in Sirmii and Kragujevac (Serbia).

He was an active revolutionary since 1937, actively involved in demonstrations and strikes, for which he went to prison for a year in 1939. In 1940, he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Filipović then did party work on the local level in Kragujevac; after the occupation of Yugoslavia by German troops in April 1941, the Party transferred him to Valjevo. There, he helped to set up clandestine radio stations and trained the first partisan groups. His personal courage and bravery in combat made him the commander of the local unit. On 15 August 1941, in an attack on Lajkovac, Filipović, armed only with a gun and grenades, put to flight a German machine-gun detachment squad. In this battle, his unit killed and wounded around 40 German soldiers. He received a commendation from Tito, the commander of the partisan forces. He received such again for his attack on Krupan.

At the end of September 1941, he was commissar of his unit for a short while. When his unit received reinforcements, he became a battalion commander. On 24 February 1942, the Chetniks ambushed Filipović… they wounded him and took him captive. The Chetniks handed him over to the Germans in Sabac, they transported him to Valjevo and tortured him for two months. A court sentenced him to death, with the execution date set for 22 May 1942. The Germans made all the locals come to the execution. In his last moments, Filipović spoke about the partisan movement, reminding them that the Red Army’s victory was inevitable and that the cruelty and bestiality of the fascist invaders would bring a prompt and just punishment to them. A photographer managed to capture the moment when Filipović spoke the words that became the slogan of the antifascist movement in Yugoslavia… “Death to fascism, freedom to the people!” Unable to stop the “communist propaganda”, the executioner decided not to wait for the appointed time, but to execute Filipović immediately. The execution took place 15 minutes earlier than planned.

On 16 February 1949, Filipović won the highest Yugoslav award, People’s Hero of Yugoslavia. On 28 October 1960, they dedicated a monument to Filipović in Valjevo. In the 1980 s, a monument existed in Filipović’s hometown of Opuzen, but in 1991 Croatian nationalists destroyed it. The modern Yugoslav left respects Stjepan Filipović, “our Che Guevara”, for his bravery, honesty, fearlessness, and internationalism.

27 January 2018

Yevgeny Ivanov

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The Bear in the Slavic Imagination

Illustration by Viktor Britvin

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Amongst the Slavic peoples, the bear is one of the main characters in folklore zoölogy, being a symbol of fertility, health, and strength. The Slavs have always respected bears… they considered them the masters of the forest. The Slavs dated the coming of spring with the bears waking up from hibernation. They believed that bears had special wisdom, which could protect them from witchcraft, disease, and all sorts of bad things.

7 July 2016

Slavyanskaya Kultura

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25 June 2016. International Day of Slavic Friendship and Unity

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11 June 2016. The 74th Anniversary of the Massacre of Lidice… An Enormity Repeated Many Times in the Third World by the Neoliberal USA

This memorial represents the 82 Czech kids from Lidice gassed at Chelmno (what does that tell you about the Holocaust Denier Patrick Buchanan and his drooling disciples Dreher and Whiteford?)

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On 10 June 1942, in present-day Czechia* (then, the German-run Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia), the fascists destroyed the village of Lidice. The Germans killed all 192 men present (one man was in prison and two were in the Czech forces in the UK; they survived), they deported 213 women to concentration camps (153 returned after the war) and gassed 82 children at Chelmno (6 more kids died in German orphanages and 17 other children passed to German families returned after the war). The fascists even killed all the pet and farm animals. This made the death-toll of Lidice stand at 340 out of 513 total inhabitants (that’s two-thirds of all the souls present in the village)… sounds like a present-day American drone bombing, doesn’t it?

• Czechia: I’d say that this is the best Englishing of the Czech “Česko”… “Czech Republic” is overly pretentious and a bit “over-correct” (in the linguistic sense); it identifies a nation-area with a particular form of polity and a particular state. It’s why we prefer “Germany” to “German Federal Republic”, amongst others.

Here’s a point to ponder… American “conservatives” (both Repugs and Dems) protected the German killers in their portion of postwar Germany. They allowed them high positions in the government, military, and intel apparats. Now, why doesn’t it surprise us when we see the USA acting like Nazi Germany on the international stage? Note well that the more-unbalanced members of the American apparat want to repeat Operation Barbarossa! We all know how that ended… give heed to the fact that Chilly Hilly wants such an invasion. What does that tell you about her? What does that tell you about her backers?

There is an Orthodox tie-in to this… Bishop Gorazd Pavlík of Praha took the blame for the Czech murderers of the fascist hangsman Heydrich holing up in his cathedral. Of course, that meant that the fascists killed him. He’s a Martyr, the Church of Serbia glorified him in 1961; his feastday is 22 August/4 September.

BMD