Mladen Stojanović

Stojanović's home town of Prijedor around 1910

Stojanović was the third child and the first son of Serbian Orthodox priest Simo Stojanović and his wife Jovanka. He was born in Prijedor on 7 April 1896. Bosnia-Herzegovina was then occupied by Austria-Hungary; Prijedor was located in Bosanska Krajina, the north-western region of the province.[1] Stojanović's father was the third generation of his family to serve as a Serbian Orthodox priest. He had graduated from a theology faculty, becoming the first in the family to attain a higher level of education. Simo was active in the political struggle for ecclesiastical and educational autonomy for the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Mladen Stojanović's maternal grandfather was a Serbian Orthodox priest from Dubica, Teodor Vujasinović;[2] he had participated in Pecija's revolt against the Ottoman Empire.[3]

Stojanović completed his elementary education at the Serbian Elementary School in Prijedor in 1906. In 1907, he finished the first grade of his secondary education at the gymnasium in Sarajevo, before he entered the gymnasium in Tuzla, where he would complete the remaining seven grades. His brother Sreten Stojanović—who would become a prominent sculptor—joined him at the Tuzla gymnasium in 1908.[1]

Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina on 6 October 1908, which caused the Annexation Crisis in Europe. The Kingdom of Serbia protested and mobilised its army, but then on 31 March 1909, it formally accepted the annexation.[4] In 1911, Mladen Stojanović became a member of the secret association of students of the Tuzla gymnasium called Narodno Jedinstvo (National Unity); its members described it as a youth society of nationalists.[5][6] It was one of a group of diverse student organisations later called Young Bosnia, which strongly opposed Austria-Hungary's rule over Bosnia-Herzegovina.[7] The activists of Young Bosnia were Bosnian Serbs, Muslims, and Croats, though most were Serbs.[8] The first organisation regarded to be part of this group was established in 1904 by Serb students of the Mostar gymnasium.[7] 1905 saw considerable political unrest among the Serb and Croat students of the Tuzla gymnasium. Although the provincial government imposed the name "Bosnian" on the language of the province (Serbo-Croatian), the students demonstratively termed it as Serbian or Croatian depending on their ethnic affiliation.[9]

The gymnasium in Tuzla, which Stojanović attended from 1907 to 1914

Young Bosnia's activists regarded literature as indispensable to revolution, and most of them wrote poems, short stories, or critiques.[10] Stojanović wrote poems,[11] and read the works of Petar Kočić, Aleksa Šantić, Vladislav Petković Dis, Sima Pandurović, Milan Rakić, and later the works of Russian authors.[12] In his final years at the gymnasium, he read Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Bakunin, Nietzsche, Jaurès, Le Bon, Ibsen, and Marinetti.[13] National Unity held meetings at which its members presented lectures and discussed current issues concerning the Serbian people of Bosnia-Herzegovina.[12] All members of the association were Serbs.[5] Generally, Stojanović's lectures were about educating people on practical issues of health and the economy. During the summer break of 1911, Stojanović travelled across Bosanska Krajina lecturing in villages.[14] One of the aims of Young Bosnia was to eliminate the backwardness of their country.[7]

In early-to-mid 1912, Stojanović and his schoolmate Todor Ilić joined Narodna Odbrana (National Defence),[5] an association founded in Serbia in December 1908 on the initiative of Branislav Nušić. It aimed to organise a guerrilla resistance to the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and to spread nationalist propaganda. National Defence soon established a network of local committees throughout Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Its members from the latter territory gathered intelligence on the Austrian army and passed it to the Serbian secret service.[15]

Stojanović and Ilić travelled illegally to Serbia during the summer break of 1912 to receive military training that National Defence organised for its members. They stayed for several days in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, where they met Gavrilo Princip, another activist of Young Bosnia who was also a member of National Defence. Stojanović and Ilić then spent a month at army barracks in Vranje in southern Serbia, undergoing military training under the command of Vojin Popović, a famous Chetnik guerrilla fighter. When they returned to school, they resumed their activities with National Unity. Its members decided that Muslims should also be drawn into the association. After Trifko Grabež was expelled from the Tuzla gymnasium for slapping a teacher during a quarrel, the association organised a school strike. Most of the students who participated were Serbs; the strike gained little support among students of other ethnicities. The school took disciplinary measures against Ilić and Stojanović, who were regarded as the main organisers of the strike, and Ilić lost his scholarship.[5]

In the autumn of 1913, Stojanović commenced the final year of his secondary education. National Unity was visited that year by a group of activists of Young Bosnia who were university students in Prague, Vienna, and Switzerland. They held a series of lectures for the members of the association, explaining their views on the current political situation, and promoting the unity of South Slavic peoples in their struggle to liberate themselves from Austria-Hungary. These lectures influenced Stojanović to adopt a Yugoslavist stance. At the beginning of 1914, Ilić and Stojanović became, respectively, the president and the vice-president of National Unity, which numbered 34 members, including four Muslims and four Croats.[16] At that time, National Unity was one of the most active groups of Young Bosnia.[17]

According to Vid Gaković, who was a member of National Unity in 1914, Stojanović was an ambitious and talented young man. He was determined that his voice would be heard and he liked being the centre of attention. He was severe to younger members of the association, whom he sometimes sharply criticised. Nevertheless, younger students liked being around him. Gaković described him as a tall and handsome man who greatly cared about his appearance; he wore a bow tie and a broad-brimmed hat.[18]

On the morning of 28 June 1914, in Sarajevo, Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria—heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary—and his wife Sophie.[19] Princip was a member of a group of conspirators, which included Trifko Grabež; the whole group was arrested by the Austrian police after the assassination.[20] Blaming Serbia for the attack, Austria-Hungary declared war a month later, initiating World War I.[21] Shortly after the assassination, Stojanović wrote in his notebook a quote from Giuseppe Mazzini: "There is no more sacred thing in the world than the duty of a conspirator, who becomes an avenger of humanity and the apostle of permanent natural laws."[7] On 29 June, Stojanović took his final exams at the Tuzla gymnasium. Soon afterwards, he and Ilić wrote a draft of their manifesto to South Slavic youth,[16] referring to Young Bosnia in a sentence:[6]

Зар не осјећате, синови једне Југославије, да у крви лежи наш живот и да је атентат бог богова Нације, јер он доказује да живи Млада Босна, да живи елеменат којег притишће несносни баласт империјалистички, елеменат који је готов да гине.

— Do you not feel, sons of the one Yugoslavia, that our life lies in blood and that assassination is the god of gods of the Nation, because it proves that there lives Young Bosnia, that there lives an element which is pressed upon by the unbearable imperialistic ballast, an element which is ready to die.[6]

Vojislav Vasiljević, a close friend of Princip's, was a member of National Unity, and when the Austrian police searched his notebooks they found a list of members. Vasiljević kept this information as evidence of the payment of membership fees.[6] All those on the list, including Stojanović, were arrested on 3 July 1914.[16] Soon after, Stojanović's younger brother Sreten was arrested for anti-Austrian revolutionary correspondence between himself and Ilić.[18] Beside the conspirators behind the assassination, six groups of activists of Young Bosnia were arrested.[6] The group containing the members of National Unity was called the Tuzla group. The criminal investigation against them began on 9 July, and lasted for more than a year.[16] They were kept in prisons in Tuzla, Banja Luka, and Bihać. In the Banja Luka prison, they were all kept in the same room, enabling them to organise political and literary discussions. They issued a comic and satirical magazine, called "Mala paprika" (Little Paprika), the copies of which they made using carbon paper. A number of copies found their way out of the prison.[18]

In the Bihać prison, the Tuzla group created a literary magazine named "Almanah" (Almanac). In its first and only issue, Mladen contributed several poems and an essay. Its editor-in-chief was Ilić, while Sreten Stojanović and Kosta Hakman contributed illustrations. The Stojanović brothers and Ilić learned French during their incarceration.[18] The trial of the Tuzla group was held between 13 and 30 September 1915 in Bihać. Ilić was sentenced to death, Mladen to sixteen years' imprisonment, and the other members of the group received sentences between ten months and fifteen years.[6] Especially aggravating for Ilić and Mladen was their participation in the 1912 military training in Serbia. The Austrians became aware of this because their army temporarily took Loznica in western Serbia at the beginning of World War I, and there they found National Defence documents containing records of all Bosnians that attended the training.[16]

Mladen and other members of the Tuzla group were sent to the prison in Zenica. Three months after they were sentenced they were joined by Ilić, whose death penalty had been commuted to 20 years' imprisonment. In the Zenica prison, each convict had to spend the first three months in solitary confinement. This was very hard on Mladen, who became mentally unwell and became so emaciated that Ilić could hardly recognise him. He recovered and took a course in shoe-making which was given in the prison. Afterwards, he fell seriously ill and had to undergo surgery in the prison hospital.[22] In late 1917, the Austrian authorities pardoned all convicts of the Tuzla group except Ilić. Mladen went to his family in Prijedor. After a medical examination, he was declared unfit for army service due to his surgery and as a result was not drafted into the Austrian army. He entered the School of Medicine, University of Zagreb, shortly before the disintegration of Austria-Hungary in November 1918.[22]

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes—renamed Yugoslavia in 1929—was created on 1 December 1918, and incorporated Bosnia-Herzegovina.[23] Stojanović continued studying medicine in Zagreb. As a former activist of Young Bosnia, he was offered a King's scholarship but he refused it. In Zagreb, he reunited with his former schoolmate Nikola Nikolić, who had also been a member of National Unity. After his release from the Zenica prison, Nikolić was drafted into the Austrian army and sent to the Russian front where he surrendered to the Russians and participated in the October Revolution. Nikolić's account of the revolution influenced Stojanović to adopt a more leftist stance. During this period, Stojanović's favourite authors were Maksim Gorky and Miroslav Krleža. His professor of anatomy, Drago Perović, arranged for him to visit an anatomical institute in Vienna. Stojanović went there several times in 1921 and 1922 and befriended members of a leftist association of Yugoslav students at the Vienna University.[24] When they held a protest against the king and government of Yugoslavia, Stojanović took part and delivered a speech. Behind the protest stood the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunistička partija Jugoslavije, KPJ).[25]

Stojanović graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1926, and he worked for two years as a trainee physician in Zagreb and Sarajevo. He then opened a private practice in Pučišća on the Adriatic island of Brač. In 1929, he returned to Prijedor, where he opened a practice on the first floor of the Stojanović family house, where his mother had lived alone since his father's death in 1926.[26][27] Stojanović soon became a popular figure in Prijedor; his patients said that simply talking with him was curative. He treated poor people for free; he once sent a homeless man to a hospital in Zagreb and paid for his surgery.[26] Stojanović earned well and had a good standard of living.[28] People from other areas of Bosanska Krajina also went to him for medical treatment. In villages around Prijedor, where brawls were common, rowdies sang about him:[26]

Doctor Stojanović

In 1931, Stojanović was contracted to the Prijedor branch of the state railway company to provide healthcare for its employees.[29] In 1936, he was contracted to an iron ore mining company in Ljubija, a town near Prijedor, and would visit the mining company clinic twice a week.[30] He also taught hygiene at the gymnasium in Prijedor.[31] Together with other intellectuals from the town, he gave lectures to the miners at their club in Ljubija. His lectures were usually about medical issues, but he also described the economic and social position of workers in more advanced countries. He socialised with the miners and treated their family members for free.[30] He was very active socially, and also participated in sports. In 1932, he founded the tennis club of Prijedor, which continues to bear his name.[26][32] Stojanović once bought new kit for all members of the Rudar Ljubija football club.[33] His contracts with the railway company and the mining company were both terminated in 1939. The railway employees protested in Prijedor, and Stojanović's contract with that company was subsequently renewed.[29]

The Ljubija miners were on strike between 2 August and 8 September 1940.[30] Some of the leaders of the strike were members of a secret KPJ cell in Ljubija, which was formed in January 1940. The KPJ had been outlawed in Yugoslavia since 1921. The KPJ organisation of Banja Luka sent its experienced member Branko Babič to help the strike leaders.[34] According to Babič, a communist from Prijedor introduced him to Stojanović at the beginning of September 1940. Babič stayed for several days at the doctor's house, running the strike. Seeing Stojanović as a communist sympathiser, Babič proposed that he join the KPJ. Stojanović at first declined, saying that he still had bourgeois habits, though he had read much of the Marxist literature. After further conversations with Babič, Stojanović agreed to become a member of the party.[28]

At the end of September 1940, Babič and all five members of the Ljubija cell held a meeting at which they unanimously decided to admit Stojanović into the KPJ.[34] Babič held him in high esteem and regarded him as ardently devoted to the communist cause.[28] Some communists, however, continued to refer to Stojanović as a communist sympathiser,[35] and some regarded him as a "salon communist".[28]

Partition of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers

On 6 April 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded from all sides by the Axis powers, led by German forces.[36] Stojanović was assigned as a physician to an infantry battalion based in Banja Luka. For several days after the invasion this battalion moved toward Dalmatia, before it completely disintegrated without fighting the enemy, and Stojanović returned to Prijedor.[37] The Royal Yugoslav Army capitulated on 17 April, and the Axis powers proceeded to dismember Yugoslavia. Almost all of modern-day Croatia, all of modern-day Bosnia-Herzegovina, and parts of modern-day Serbia were combined into a puppet state called the Independent State of Croatia (Croatian: Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH).[36] It was an "Italian-German quasi-protectorate",[38] which was controlled by the fascist Ustaše led by Ante Pavelić. One of its policies was to eliminate the ethnic Serb population of the NDH through mass killings, expulsions and forced assimilation, and many Serbs fled from the NDH to the German-occupied territory of Serbia.[36]

These repressive measures included taking prominent Serbs hostage against Serb attacks. To avoid being taken as a hostage, Stojanović paid 100,000 dinars to the Ustaše in Prijedor.[37] Resistance began to emerge in occupied Yugoslavia; royalists and Serbian nationalists under the leadership of then-Colonel Draža Mihailović founded the Ravna Gora Movement, whose members were called Chetniks.[39][40] The KPJ, led by Josip Broz Tito, prepared to rise to arms at a favourable moment.[41] In the view of the KPJ, the fight against the Axis and its domestic collaborators would be a common fight of all Yugoslav peoples.[42][43]

Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, began on 22 June 1941.[45] On the same day, the Ustaše began arresting communists and their known sympathisers in the towns of Bosanska Krajina, including Prijedor. The communists had predicted this, and most of them avoided capture by escaping to the villages or hiding in the towns. Stojanović was one of the few communists arrested in Prijedor.[46] He was imprisoned with the Serb hostages on the second floor of a school in the town. They were subjected to forced labour, being led each morning through the town to repair the road to Kozarac. The column of hostages was usually headed by Stojanović carrying a shovel on his shoulder.[37] The Croatian Home Guards guarding the prison treated him well. While detained, Stojanović lectured a group of hostages about Marxism.[47]

On the day of the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, the Executive Committee of the Communist International—headquartered in Moscow—telegraphed the Central Committee of the KPJ to take all measures to support and alleviate the struggle of the Soviet people, and to organise partisan detachments to fight the Axis in Yugoslavia.[45] The Executive Committee also stressed that the fight, at the current stage, should not be about socialist revolution, but about the liberation from the Axis occupiers. In response to this appeal, the leaders of the KPJ decided on 4 July in Belgrade to launch a nationwide armed uprising,[41] which began three days later in western Serbia.[48] The members of the KPJ-led forces were called Partisans, and their supreme commander was Tito.[41] On 13 July, in Sarajevo, the KPJ Provincial Committee for Bosnia-Herzegovina, headed by Svetozar Vukmanović, organised the province into military regions: Bosanska Krajina, Herzegovina, Tuzla, and Sarajevo.[49][50]

Flag of the Yugoslav Partisans

The Prijedor communists were keen to rescue Stojanović from his imprisonment, but their attempts to bribe the Ustaše to release him failed. They also considered storming the school in which he was kept.[47] On 17 July, just after midnight, Stojanović asked a guard to let him go to the toilet on the first floor of the school. The guard let him go and followed closely behind him. When they were halfway down the stairs, Stojanović shouted "Fire!" as smoke came from a room on the second floor. During the commotion of the guards and hostages extinguishing the fire, Stojanović entered the toilet and escaped through the window.[51] He went to the village of Orlovci, several kilometres from Prijedor, where he was accompanied by Rade Bašić—a young communist who had earlier escaped from the town. Bašić escorted Stojanović toward Mount Kozara (978 m (3,209 ft) high),[47] north of the Prijedor plain.[52]

After Stojanović's escape, the Ustaše arrested his wife, Mira. His son, Vojin, born in 1940, was cared for by Mira's former husband. Mira was released from prison after several months, and she and Vojin went to Dubrovnik.[53] Stojanović's brothers and sisters had lived in Belgrade since before the war.[54]

Mladen Stojanović park, Banja Luka

On 19 April 1942, the headquarters of the 2nd Krajina Detachment changed its name to the 2nd Krajina National Liberation Partisan Detachment "Mladen Stojanović". The Kozara Partisans vowed to avenge Stojanović's death on all the "enemies of the people".[96] The 2nd Krajina Detachment and four companies of the 1st Krajina Detachment liberated Prijedor on 16 May 1942.[71][96] On 7 August 1942, the Partisans' supreme headquarters proclaimed Stojanović a People's Hero of Yugoslavia.[95]

A monument to Stojanović was created by his brother Sreten after the war and erected in Prijedor. Streets, firms, schools, hospitals, pharmacies, and associations were named after Stojanović throughout socialist Yugoslavia, and songs were composed celebrating him as a hero.[95] A Partisan film about him, titled Doktor Mladen, was released in Yugoslavia in 1975. Stojanović was played by Ljuba Tadić, who received an award for his performance at the Pula Film Festival.[97]

Each year in April, Stojanović is commemorated in Prijedor and wreaths are laid at his monument. At the 2012 commemoration, the president of the Partisan War Veterans' Association of Republika Srpska declared:[98]

Mladen je bio čovjek za primjer, revolucionar od najranije mladosti pa do kraja života, najpopularnija ličnost ustanka na Kozari, Krajini i mnogo šire i jedan od najhrabrijih boraca i rukovodilaca Narodnooslobodilačke borbe. Zato je njegov je lik ostao da živi u sjećanju zajedno sa slavom herojske Kozare.

Mladen was a model person, a revolutionary from his early youth to the end of his life, the most popular figure of the uprising in Kozara, Krajina, and a much wider area, and one of the bravest fighters and leaders of the National Liberation War. That is why his image lives on in the memory together with the glory of the heroic Kozara.[98]

In his youth, Stojanović wrote poems, only one of which is published—in a 1918 issue of the literary magazine Književni jug,[11][99] whose editor was future Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić. For this poem, Stojanović was inspired by the Serbian epic hero Ailing Dojčin. A number of Stojanović's poems are preserved in a notebook that belonged to his closest school friend Todor Ilić. According to the poet Dragan Kolundžija, Stojanović's poems are lyrical miniatures composed in free verse, focused on man and nature, and filled with melancholy. Kolundžija finds that what inspired Stojanović to write poetry is reflected in his verse Krvav je bol (Pain is bloody).[11] According to poet Miroslav Feldman, who first met Stojanović in 1919 in Zagreb, his poems were sad and permeated with a yearning for a brighter, more joyous life.[25]

Stojanović wrote an essay, which is published as the foreword to a 1920 book of poetry by Feldman, titled Iza Sunca (Behind the Sun). In 1925, Stojanović initiated the creation of an anthology of Yugoslav lyric poetry. On this project, he worked with Feldman and Gustav Krklec. The poets completed the anthology, but for an unknown reason it was never published.[100] Stojanović's poetic inclinations were manifested in his letters to his wife Mira Stojanović, especially when he writes about his patients:[101]

I, kad se podižu i osjećaju strujanje snage i proljeća u svojim žilama ja kao da dolazim sebi, ostavlja me neki zanos i ja tražim druge bolesne oči djece, žena, majki, staraca; nalazim ih i ponovo zaboravljam sve.

And, as they rise and feel the stream of power and spring in their veins, I seem to come to [as though] some kind of ecstasy leaves me, and I look for the other ailing eyes of children, women, mothers, old men; I find them and again I become oblivious to everything [else].[101]

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• Gallery of photographs of Mladen Stojanović