Latinka Perović

Latinka Perović

Perović in November 2013 at the 'Četvrt veka posrtanja' roundtable discussion about the Yugoslav and Serbian media between 1988 and 2013.
Born 1933
Kragujevac, Danube Banovina, Kingdom of Yugoslavia
Occupation historian

Latinka Perović (Serbian Cyrillic: Латинка Перовић; born 4 October 1933) is a Serbian historian and former politician.

Biography

She was born in Kragujevac, Serbia in 1933. At the age of 27, she was already president of the Women's Antifascist Front of Serbia. Perović was Chief Secretary of the Communist Party of Serbia from 1968 to 1972. She was considered the most influential woman in the country at that time and the only one who did not gain her position based on marriage with a more powerful man than herself, but rather through her own intelligence, competence and ambition.

In 1972 Perović was removed from her position because Josip Broz Tito considered her views too liberal. After that, she never returned to politics. Perović devoted herself to historical research and became known as one of the most prominent experts on Serbian history from the 19th century onwards.

She graduated in philology and political science at the University of Belgrade. From 1976 to 1998 she worked at the Institute for Recent History of Serbia. In her writings and studies on modern Serbia, she often emphasizes that Serbia needs a politician who would publicly claim responsibility for the destruction wrought in the former Yugoslavia in order to help the reconciliation with the neighboring states and prevent the recurrence of this kind of tragedy.

Being the founder of modern liberalism in Serbia, some claim Perović is also political guru to Čedomir Jovanović, president of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Serbia.

Since 1993 Perović has been an editor in chief of Currents of History magazine. She rarely appears in public or gives interviews.

References