Young Bosnia member who shot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo in 1914
Born to a poor Serb farming family in western Bosnia, he studied in Sarajevo and in 1911 joined Young Bosnia, a secret society seeking to free Bosnia from Austrian rule and unite the South Slavs. Expelled from school after anti-Austrian demonstrations, he went to Belgrade. Armed and trained through the Serbian secret society the Black Hand, on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo he shot dead the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie. The assassination set off the July Crisis and the First World War. At his trial he declared himself a Yugoslav nationalist; too young for the death penalty, he received twenty years. He died of tuberculosis in the prison of the Theresienstadt fortress in 1918.
Career timeline
- 1911Joined Young Bosnia
- 1914.06.28Assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo
- 1914.10Sentenced to twenty years
- 1918Died in Theresienstadt prison
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.
Career timeline
- 1918–1924Labour movement and trade-union organiser after the war
- 1924–1933Joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and worked as a party organiser
- 1938–1940Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia
- 1941–1944Partisan command and Supreme Headquarters work in Serbia and Yugoslavia
- 1945–1947Federal Minister of Finance of Yugoslavia
- 1948Supported the Cominform line during the Tito–Stalin split
- 1948–1950House arrest and imprisonment, released after self-criticism
- 1950–1971Readmitted to the party; executive at Borba and an economic institute
