Serbia

Foreign statesman 1882–1962 ○ Natural causes

The soldier-premier caught between a coup and defeat

In November 1918, reporting from Zagreb, Simović wrote that the overwhelming majority were 'taken with the idea of Yugoslav solidarity', and he blocked Italy's attempt to occupy Ljubljana by having the Serb Army enter the city first.

Dušan Simović was a Royal Yugoslav air force general who led the 27 March 1941 coup and became prime minister amid crowds cheering the overthrow of the pact with Germany. Yet in power he refused to formally repudiate the Tripartite Pact, hoping to avert a German invasion, and after the German attack he headed the London government-in-exile until 1942.

Counter-revolutionary forces 1893–1946 ✕ Executed

A Serbian nationalist commander who sought to restore the monarchy

In 1941 he rejected Tito's call for a general uprising as premature, and the two resistance movements soon turned their struggle into armed conflict.

Draža Mihailović was a Royal Yugoslav Army officer who led the Chetnik movement, seeking to restore the monarchy and a Serbian nationalist order after the Second World War. He built an organization at Ravna Gora in 1941, but chose to prepare for postwar power and avoid a general uprising rather than follow Tito's Partisans into sustained open resistance, bringing the movements into conflict. Parts of the Chetnik organization and Mihailović's command network collaborated with Axis and collaborationist forces, a choice that weakened the movement in multi-ethnic Yugoslavia and contributed to the Allies shifting support to the Partisans. Captured after the war, he was executed for treason and war crimes, while Serbia's Supreme Court overturned the verdict in 2015 as politically motivated.

Non-Soviet revolutionary 1899–1976 ○ Natural causes

A Stalin supporter at the heart of Tito’s party

At the April 1948 Central Committee meeting, he opposed Tito’s reply to Moscow.

Sreten Žujović was a Serb Yugoslav communist and labour organiser who passed through the First World War and the Yugoslav Partisan struggle. He helped organise the wartime uprising, served with the Supreme Headquarters, and became finance minister after liberation. In the 1948 conflict between Tito and Stalin, he defended the Soviet line as the sole dissenter at the decisive Central Committee meeting, and was removed from the party and office and imprisoned. Released after a public self-criticism in 1950 and later readmitted, he embodied the fracture between revolutionary internationalism and Yugoslav autonomy.

Foreign affairs 1907–2004 ○ Natural causes

Yugoslav partisan-diplomat whom Stalin named a British spy to break off correspondence

Stalin wrote in his March 27, 1948 letter: 'We do not understand why the British spy Velebit continues to remain in the Yugoslav Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the First Deputy Minister.'

A Yugoslav lawyer turned Partisan general and diplomat who served as the Partisans' liaison to Allied military missions during the war and as First Deputy Foreign Minister afterward, negotiating with the Western powers. In his March 27, 1948 letter Stalin singled out Velebit as a 'British spy' and used his continued presence in the foreign ministry as justification for breaking off frank diplomatic correspondence, making the accusation one of the triggers of the Tito-Stalin split. Forced to resign, he was later rehabilitated, serving as ambassador to Rome and London and as Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, embodying Yugoslavia's independent course through the Cold War.