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.

Socialist-bloc leader 1909–1983 ○ Heart attack

Tito's third man who directed the Cominform purges and guarded Yugoslav centralism

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

The third most powerful figure in Yugoslavia after Tito and Kardelj, Ranković served as interior minister and head of the State Security Administration (UDBA), where he directed the anti-Stalinist purges following the 1948 Cominform split. He built the Goli Otok labor camp and oversaw the arrest and imprisonment of tens of thousands of 'Cominformists', while also leading harsh repressive policies against Kosovo's Albanian population. A staunch opponent of federal decentralization and defender of Serb-dominated centralism, he fell from power in 1966 after a scandal involving the bugging of Tito's bedroom, spending the rest of his life barred from public office.

Socialist-bloc leader 1911–1995 ○ Natural causes

Yugoslav dissident who attacked Western communist parties at the Cominform and later dissected the communist system in The New Class

I traveled the entire road of communism: from a youthful revolutionary, to a zealous Stalinist, to complete disillusionment.

A Montenegrin-born Yugoslav communist leader and one of Tito's closest comrades in the Partisan struggle and postwar state-building. At the founding conference of the Cominform in 1947, he joined Edvard Kardelj in delivering the sharpest criticism of the French and Italian Communist Parties for their 'parliamentary opportunism,' and his memoirs remain a key source on the conference's internal dynamics. After raising demands for democratization within the party and denouncing bureaucratic privilege, he was stripped of all positions in 1954; his book The New Class, smuggled out of prison, argued that communist party officials had become a new exploitative ruling class, sparking an international sensation. He spent over three decades in prison and under surveillance, becoming the first prominent dissident in communist Eastern Europe.

Scholar 1920–2013 ○ Natural causes

An independent statistician who recalculated Yugoslavia’s wartime losses

In 1985, he presented Yugoslavia’s wartime losses as separate figures for actual and demographic losses.

Bogoljub Kočović was a Serb jurist and statistician from Sarajevo who studied Yugoslavia’s population and wartime losses. In his 1985 book, he compared the 1921, 1931, and 1948 censuses and estimated about 1.014 million actual losses and 1.985 million demographic losses in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. His work offered an independent estimate distinct from the state figure of 1.706 million and became a central source in the historiographical dispute over the war’s victims.

Foreign statesman 1923–1970 ○ Died

The last king who carried Yugoslavia’s royal legitimacy into exile

On 27 March 1941, Dušan Simović told him: "Your Majesty, from this moment you will exercise your full sovereign power."

Peter II became king of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as a child after the assassination of his father, Alexander I, and was its last monarch. The 27 March 1941 coup ended the regency and declared him of age, but the Axis invasion soon forced him to lead a government in exile from London. His crown represented state continuity against occupation, yet the exile government’s divisions and the Partisans’ military and political victory stripped it of an effective base of power. After the monarchy was abolished in 1945, his permanent exile left unresolved the question of Yugoslavia’s political legitimacy.