‘Tito’s Gulag’ by Martin Previšić review

Bakar, a sleepy Croatian fishing village in the northern Adriatic, nestles in a natural bay far below the Adriatic Highway that winds above it. During the boom decades of the 1960s and 1970s, Western tourists en route to the Dalmatian coast and its idyllic archipelago would drive past but seldom visit. In the more austere late 1940s, this secluded setting served to hide the crimes of Josip Broz Tito’s communist Yugoslavia. Here, as the regime faced the existential threat of Soviet aggression, hundreds of homegrown ‘Stalinists’ were thrown into the hold of the small Punat steamer. For ‘lucky’ ones, the fall was broken by the brittle limbs of those tossed down before them.

Between 1949 and 1956, the evocatively named Goli Otok (‘barren island’) was home to a notorious correctional facility. It owed its existence to the so-called ‘Tito-Stalin Split’ of 1948, when an enraged Stalin expelled the wayward Communist Party of Yugoslavia from the Cominform. Amid the recriminations that ensued, Yugoslav comrades scrambled to the defence of either Belgrade or Moscow. It was a schism that tore a proud revolutionary force apart. More than 15,000 of those who sided with Stalin – or were suspected of so doing – were incarcerated by the Yugoslav regime. In Tito’s Gulag, Martin Previšić painstakingly reconstructs their plight.     

Shellshocked by Yugoslavia’s sudden status as a communist pariah, the Party elite turned to its fearsome Directorate for State Security (UDBA) to root out pro-Stalin ‘Cominformists’. For civilian members, the UDBA was judge and jury. Errant communists were denounced, interrogated, and disciplined. Three-quarters of those processed would end up on Goli Otok. Several thousand more military personnel, convicted in military courts, would also spend time on the barren rock. In characteristic double-speak, the camp was officially known as the ‘marble worksite’. It was constructed by the first inmates in the summer of 1949 and had a dual function: detainees would make an economic contribution to Yugoslavia through the hard labour of stone, metal, and wood processing; at the same time, these ‘traitors’ would be physically and psychologically broken.   

Talk of Goli Otok was suppressed throughout the communist era, only to be blown out of all proportion and abused for political purposes as Yugoslavia disintegrated. Previšić’s quest to document what actually happened is long overdue. His account draws on extensive archival research and rich oral history. Shattering testimony from 25 former inmates, men and women of various ethnicities, conveys the grim realities of Yugoslavia’s early years of Cold War nonalignment. The author was driven by a moral onus to document the plight of those condemned to the wrong side of history. In ‘a race against time’, Previšić conducted interviews between 2009 and 2012. One of his interlocutors was already 100 years old. When the book’s Croatian edition was published in 2019 more than half of the interviewees were dead; none have lived to witness this English translation. Those who found themselves breaking rocks on the euphemistically named ‘Hawaii’ had diverse life stories. Aco Singer, for example, had already survived Auschwitz before the UDBA dispatched him to Goli Otok. Amid the paranoia of the rupture with Moscow, Singer was accused of being both a Gestapo spy and a Soviet agent.

Levels of violence on the island fluctuated with Soviet-Yugoslav tensions. Early on, camp authorities introduced hardened criminals and former fascists into the camp population as agents, with the intention of encouraging violence. New arrivals were forced to run the gauntlet between the ship and the camp, as hundreds of experienced detainees lined up to beat them. This brutal initiation ritual proved fatal for some. Even more sadistic was the ‘boycott’, by which certain inmates were ostracised, abused, and deprived of sleep. Previšić’s chapter on ‘Peter’s Pit’ encapsulates Goli Otok’s rationale. The ‘pit’ was a separate site housing those deemed most dangerous to Tito’s regime. Old communist veterans of the power struggles and prison terms of the interwar years, who participated in the Russian Revolution or the Spanish Civil War, had spent time in the USSR, or had been senior Party and military figures, were subjected to extreme physical and psychological abuse. Among them were open Stalinists and active plotters. Despite the tortures, some proved unbreakable. Milojko Filipčev, beaten unrecognisable, sent a message to the UDBA: ‘Tell them that Filipčev’s father fell in ’41 defending Moscow. The son will not be unworthy of his father.’

Even for those who avoided the worst excesses, the ‘re-education’ of slave labour, appalling sanitary conditions, and debilitating mistrust were everyday realities. Hunger and thirst were a given, as were the monotonous self-recriminating, pro-regime songs. Deaths resulting from violence, suicide, sunstroke, and dysentery were not uncommon, but the biggest killer was a spotted typhus outbreak which swept the camp in 1951. Previšić estimates Goli Otok’s final death toll at 287, but stresses that many more died prematurely following release.   

The last political prisoners left Goli Otok after the partial reconciliation between Moscow and Belgrade. The notorious Punat ended up plying Adriatic waters as a pleasure boat. Nevertheless, former inmates served as UDBA informants for decades afterwards. With the collapse of communism, the ideological dispute that scarred their lives lost all significance. These Yugoslav Stalinists became ‘nobody’s victims’. Previšić’s achievement is to place this enigmatic history in a broader political context. His accessible narrative does a great service to those entangled in it.

One of those was Zlatko Hill. He avoided the Adriatic Highway long after his release; among the sights it affords passing tourists is that of a distant wave-lapped outcrop. Even the sight of Goli Otok remained too much to bear.

• Tito’s Gulag: A History of the Prison Island of Goli Otok 
  Martin Previšić, translated by Desmond Maurer and Johanna Maurer
  Stanford University Press, 576pp, £60
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Richard Mills is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of East Anglia.