Socialist Republic of Croatia
| Socijalistička Republika Hrvatska Socialist Republic of Croatia |
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| A federal unit of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia |
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| Capital | Zagreb | ||||
| Official language | Serbo-Croatian (western variant) | ||||
| Established In the SFRY: - Since - Until |
June 13, 1943 June 13, 1943 June 25, 1991 |
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| Area - Total - Water |
Ranked 2nd in the SFRY 56,524 km² 0.227% |
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| Population - Total - Density |
Ranked 2nd in the SFRY 4,784,265 84.6/km² |
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| Currency | Yugoslav dinar (dinar) | ||||
| Time zone | UTC + 1 | ||||
Socialist Republic of Croatia (often abbreviated SR Croatia; Serbo-Croatian, Croatian: Socijalistička Republika Hrvatska, SR Hrvatska) was a socialist state and a sovereign constituent country of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It is the predecessor of the modern-day Republic of Croatia. It became part of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia in 1943. In 1990 [1][2], the state was reformed as Croatia adopted a multi-party system and free market economy.
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Names
The Socialist Republic of Croatia was founded as the Federal State of Croatia (Croatian: Federalna Država Hrvatska, FD Hrvatska) on May 9, 1944 at the 3rd session of the ZAVNOH. Yugoslavia was then called the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia (Demokratska Federativna Jugoslavija, DFJ), it was not a constitutionally socialist state, or even a republic, in anticipation of the conclusion of the war, when these issues were settled. On November 29, 1945, the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia became the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (Federativna Narodna Republika Jugoslavia, FNRJ), a socialist People's Republic. Accordingly, the Federal State of Croatia became People's Republic of Croatia (Narodna Republika Hrvatska, NR Hrvatska).
On April 7, 1963, the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (FPRY) was renamed into the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Yugoslavia (and therefore Croatia) gradually abandoned Stalinism after the Tito-Stalin split in 1948. In 1963 the People's Republic of Croatia also accordingly became the Socialist Republic of Croatia.
In 1990, after the first free elections, the prefix "socialist" was dropped, so between 1990 and independence of Croatia in 1991, it was officially named Republic of Croatia, the name that it still bears.
Economy
In the People's Republic of Croatia, private property was nationalized. This caused the old landowners as well as the Catholic Church to lose large amounts of money and property. The republic underwent a major rebuilding process in order to recover from World War II. A notable phenomenon during this process were the major volunteer public works that rallied young people in the building of roads and other public facilities. In contrast to popular opinion, the vast majority of public works of the period (among others, the Adriatic coastline highway) were financed by the federal government.
The economy developed into a type of socialism called workers' self-management (radničko samoupravljanje), in which workers partially shared profit in state-run enterprises. This type of socialism was first introduced in Croatia, then in other parts of Yugoslavia. Croatia gave one of world's biggest, if not the world's biggest name in the field of workers' self-management in economic theory, Branko Horvat. This kind of market socialism created significantly better economic conditions than in the Eastern Bloc countries. Croatia went through intensive industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s with industrial output increasing several-fold, and with Zagreb surpassing the Yugoslav federal capital Belgrade in the amount of industry in the city (even though Belgrade is much larger than Zagreb).
Factories and other organizations were often named after Partisans who were declared People's Heroes. Before WWII Croatia's industry was not significant, with the vast majority of the people employed in agriculture. By 1989 the country was completely transformed into a modern industrialized state. At the same time, the Croatian Adriatic coast began to take shape as an internationally popular tourist destination, all coastal republics (but mostly SR Croatia) profited greatly from this, as tourist numbers reached levels still unsurpassed by modern Croatia. The government brought unprecedented economic and industrial growth, high levels of social security and a very low crime rate. The country completely recovered from WW2 and achieved a very high GDP and economic growth rate.
History
In the post-war period, a camp for Croatian Germans was opened at Valpovo, where over 1000 inmates died between 1945 and 1946.[3]
Croats were less numerous in Yugoslavia compared to the Serbs, but Tito, whose father was Croatian, adopted a carefully contrived policy to manage the conflicting national ambitions of the two nations: nationalism on either side was suppressed. The constitution of 1963, the one that introduced the country name Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, SFRY, didn't allow Serbs to have all the political power in the country. Indeed, this was true to such an extent that the Serbs grew increasingly more disgruntled. Croatians participated in state politics at the highest levels: five out of the nine Prime Ministers of the SFRY were Croats. The Serbs, however, in the same way that happened in the old Kingdom of Yugoslavia, dominated the military and the secret services[4][5], as most of the generals in the Yugoslav People's Army were either Serbian or Montenegrin.
Trends after 1965 (like the fall of OZNA and UDBA chief Aleksandar Ranković in 1966[6]) led to the Croatian Spring of 1970-1971, when students in Zagreb organized demonstrations for greater civil liberties and greater Croatian autonomy. The regime stifled the public protest and incarcerated the leaders, but many key Croatian representatives in the Party silently supported this cause, so a new Constitution was ratified in 1974 that gave more rights to the individual republics, much to the (eventual) satisfaction of the protesters.
Post-Tito period (1980s)
| History of Croatia | |
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_with_crown.svg.png) This article is part of a series |
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| Early history | |
| Prehistoric Croatia | |
| Origins of the Croats | |
| White Croatia | |
| Medieval history | |
| Littoral Croatia · Pannonian Croatia · Pagania · Zachlumia | |
| Kingdom of Croatia | |
| Republic of Poljica | |
| Republic of Dubrovnik | |
| Habsburg Empire | |
| Kingdom of Croatia | |
| Kingdom of Slavonia | |
| Illyrian Provinces | |
| Kingdom of Dalmatia | |
| Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia | |
| State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs | |
| Yugoslavia | |
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Kingdom of Yugoslavia |
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World War II |
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| Socialist Republic of Croatia | |
| Contemporary Croatia | |
| War of independence | |
| Republic of Croatia | |
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Croatia Portal |
In 1980, after Tito's death, political and economic difficulties started to mount and the federal government began to crumble. The economy was actually in a very good shape until the fall of communism, and Croatia was the most prosperous of the six republics. However, probably due to the imminent end of the Cold War and all the subtle benefits Yugoslavia received because of it, inflation soared. The last federal prime minister Ante Marković, who was Bosnian Croat, spent two years implementing various economic and political reforms. His government's efforts were initially successful, but ultimately they failed due to the incurable political instability of the SFRY.
Ethnic tensions were on the increase and would result in the demise of Yugoslavia. The growing crisis in Kosovo, the nationalist memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the emergence of Slobodan Milošević as the leader of Serbia, and everything else that followed provoked a very negative reaction in Croatia. The fifty-year-old rift was starting to resurface, and the Croats increasingly began to show their own national feelings and express opposition towards the Belgrade regime.
On October 17, 1989, the rock group Prljavo kazalište held a major concert before almost 250,000 people on the central Zagreb city square. In the light of the changing political circumstances, their song "Mojoj majci" ("To my mother"), where the songwriter hailed the mother in the song as "the last rose of Croatia", was taken to heart by the fans on the location and many more elsewhere because of the expressed patriotism. On October 26, parliament declared All Saints Day (November 1) a public holiday.
Towards independence
In 1990, during the 14th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the delegation of Serbia led by Milošević insisted on replacing the 1974 constitutional policy that empowered the republics with a policy of "one person, one vote", which would benefit the majority Serb population. This caused the Slovenian and Croatian delegations (led by Milan Kučan and Ivica Račan, respectively) to leave the Congress in protest and marked a culmination in the rift of the ruling party.
Ethnic Serbs, who constituted 12% of the population of Croatia, rejected the notion of separation from Yugoslavia. Serb politicians feared the loss of influence they previously had through their membership of the League of Communists in Croatia (that some Croats claimed was disproportionate). Memories from the Second World War were the rhetoric coming from the Belgrade administration. As Milošević and his clique rode the wave of Serbian nationalism across Yugoslavia, talking about battles to be fought for Serbdom, emerging Croatian leader Franjo Tuđman reciprocated with talk about making Croatia a nation state. The availability of mass media allowed for propaganda to be spread fast and spark jingoism and fear, creating a war climate.
In March 1990, the Yugoslav People's Army met with the Presidency of Yugoslavia (an eight member council composed of representatives from six republics and two autonomous provinces) in an attempt to get them to declare a state of emergency which would allow for the army to take control of the country. Serbian and Serb-dominated representatives (Montenegro, Vojvodina and Kosovo) already in consent with the army, voted for the proposal, but as representatives of Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Bosnia voted against, the plot failed. The dying country had yet to see few more Serb leadership's attempts to push the plan for centralizing the power in Belgrade, but because of resistance in all other republics, the crisis only deteriorated. This led to international involvement and Serbia's branding as the source of the crisis, which, together with the destruction of cities and numerous war crimes committed by Serb paramilitaries in Croatia and Bosnia, resulted in UN sanctions for Serbia and its ally Montenegro. With the end of 1991 the second Yugoslavia effectively ceased to exist as a state, with no leadership representing it in the beginning of 1992.
1990 - 1991
The Republic of Croatia, without the prefix "Socialist" in its name, was a constituent republic within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1990 and 1991. The creation of a constituent republic based on democratic institutions occurred in 1990 when elections were held. Franjo Tuđman was elected Croatian President that year and promised independence if reforms were not introduced. While generally heading towards independence, the government attempted final negotiations with the Serbian government to create a confederal Yugoslavia in which Croatia and other republics would be autonomous and powers would be decentralized. This was not accepted.
From 1990 to 1991, Croatia faced political crisis within Yugoslavia as Serb-populated areas attempted to form an enclave called Serbian Krajina which intended to separate from Croatia if Croatia itself attempted to separate. The crisis began with the Log Revolution as Croatian Serbs cut down trees which they used to block roads. This hampered Croatian tourism and caused alarm in the province of Dalmatia as Croatia was having the 1990 European Championships in Athletics taking place in Split.
Croatia's status as a constituent republic came to an end in 1991 after a referendum on independence where a majority of Croatians endorsed independence from Yugoslavia (93% of the total number of votes). Serb-controlled areas of Croatia became part of the unrecognized Republic of Serbian Krajina, which would not be under Croatian control until 1995. Its main portion was liberated by Croatian forces in 1995 (Oluja - Storm); a rump remained in eastern Slavonia under United Nations (UN) administration until its peaceful reincorporation into Croatia in 1998.
Insignia
 Flag of the Federal State of Croatia, used during World War II (1943-1945) |
 Coat of arms of the Federal State of Croatia, used during World War II (1943-1945) |
See also
- Croatia
- History of Croatia
- Timeline of Croatian history
References
- ↑ "Odluka o proglašenju Amandmana LIV. do LXIII. na Ustav Socijalističke Republike Hrvatske" (in Croatian literary language). Narodne novine. February 14, 1990. http://narodne-novine.nn.hr/clanci/sluzbeni/1990_02_7_71.html. Retrieved 2009-05-09.
- ↑ "Odluka o proglašenju Amandmana LXIV. do LXXV. na Ustav Socijalističke Republike Hrvatske" (in Croatian language). Narodne novine. July 25, 1990. http://narodne-novine.nn.hr/clanci/sluzbeni/1990_07_31_610.html. Retrieved 2009-04-27.
- ↑ Geiger, Vladimir, [http://www.cpi.hr/download/links/hr/7042.pdf Udio djece među stradalim Folksdojčerima u jugoslavenskim logorima (1944.-1948.)], Croatian Institute of History
- ↑ Balkanized Election, TIME Magazine, Jan. 19, 1925
- ↑ The Opposition, TIME Magazine, April 6, 1925
- ↑ The Specter of Separatism, TIME Magazine, February 07, 1972
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