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Milorad's father, Milorad T. Drachkovitch, and his wife Jovanka
Milanovich. A successful entrepreneur and banker in Belgrade before entering
politics, he served as Minister of Interior in the Kingdom of Croats, Serbs
and Slovenes (Yugoslavia). While vacationing with his family in Delnice,
a resort on the Adriatic, he was assassinated by the Communists on July
21, 1921. Jovanka was pregnant with Milorad at the time. Her children witnessed
the murder. |
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Although student activism was officially banned in Yugoslavia
in the 1930's, when Milorad was in high school, student literary societies
were an important center of political education and debate. In 1937 Milorad
was elected president of the Nada ("hope") Club, a literary society
at Belgrade's First High School for Boys. He was a forceful advocate for
liberal democracy in the face of a strong Communist faction. |
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Photograph taken in 1935 by Backo Matic, who was executed
by the communists in 1945. Milorad is in the middle and in the front kneeling
is Nemanja Stojanovic. The two men on either side of Milorad have not been
identified: please let us know if you know them. |
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Milorad was active in the youth section of the Serbian Cultural
Club, founded in 1937 by Slobodan Jovanovich and other leading intellectuals
to further the creation of a Serbian state. Milorad served on the editorial
board of the periodical Nova Srbadija. In the few years between high
school and the German invasion of Yugoslavia, Milorad met many of the leading
figures in Serbian culture and the nationalist movement. |
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When Germany invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, Milorad journeyed
to Ravna Gora to join the Chetnik forces under Colonel Mihailovich, where
he became deputy commander of the largest youth military formation. He spent
the next three years fighting a guerrilla war against the Nazis, and two
of his closest friends were killed. This picture shows Milorad in Chetnik
uniform with with his life-long friend Dimitrije "Mita" Djordjevich. |
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Milorad had hoped for a democratic and capitalist Serbian
state with ties to Western Europe, but the consolidation of Yugoslavia under
Communist rule in the autumn of 1944 brought his dream to an abrupt end.
At the urging of friends who feared for his life and that of his family,
Milorad, his mother, his widowed sister, and her child fled Yugoslavia on
the last train from Belgrade to Vienna. "I resolved to study politics,"
Milorad said, "since I couldn't participate in political life."
He became, once again, a student at the University of Geneva. |
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Fluent in French and a great lover of European arts and letters,
Milorad enjoyed student life in Switzerland, receiving his bachelor (1949)
and doctoral (1953) degrees in political science from the University of
Geneva. In addition, he attended the College of Europe at Bruges, where
he met other scholars who were to become life-long friends. Milorad published
two books in quick succession that were well-received by critics: Les
socialismes français et allemand et le problème de la guerre, 1870-1914,
published in 1953, and De Karl Marx a Leon Blum: La crise de la social-democratie,
published the following year. |
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As Milorad began his academic career, the Allied alliance
between the Soviet Union and the United States collapsed, and the antithetical
ideologies of Communism and capitalism crystallized into the Cold War. Milorad's
first hand knowledge of Communism and Eastern European politics were soon
much in demand, and in 1955 he went to New York on a two-year fellowship
from the Commonwealth Fund. In 1958 he emigrated to the United States, teaching
political science at Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley,
before becoming a senior scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University
in 1961. A world authority on the Third International, he wrote and edited
numerous works on Communism. |
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In 1974 Milorad became Archivist of the Hoover Institution,
a position that he held for the next ten years. Responsible for one of the
world's most extensive collections on war, revolution, and peace, Milorad
was free to indulge his life long passion - acquiring books that best reflected
the politics and culture of the time. Here Milorad is meeting with the Russian
writer Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn. |
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Milorad died in Palo Alto, California, on June 16, 1996. For
more information, see: Political and ideological confrontations in twentieth-century
Europe: Essays in honor of Milorad M. Drachkovitch, edited by Robert
Conquest and Dusan Djordjevich. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1996.
For inquires, please send e-mail to the head librarian of the Drachkovitch Library. |
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