Activities and affiliations

Security, intelligence and policing Yugoslavia state institutions 1909–1983 ○ Heart attack

Tito's third man, who directed the Cominform purges

Interior minister Ranković wrote after the 1948 split that 'it was impossible to know whom to trust and that one's closest comrades may now be the enemy.'

A Yugoslav communist leader regarded as the third most powerful figure after Tito and Kardelj. In May 1944 he created OZNA, the Partisan security agency; after the war he headed the interior ministry and the State Security Administration (UDBA) and oversaw the anti-Stalinist purges that followed the 1948 Soviet–Yugoslav split, building special camps for Cominformists on Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur in 1949. In Kosovo, the period 1947–1966 is colloquially called 'the Ranković era' for a police-state repression of Albanians; lesser campaigns targeted Hungarians in Vojvodina and Muslims in Sandžak. He opposed federal decentralization and defended centralism, and in 1966 the Brioni plenum removed him from all posts and expelled him from the party. He died in Dubrovnik in 1983.