Radic, Stjepan

Radić, Stjepan

(styĕ`pän rä`dĭch), or

Stefan Radich

(stĕ`fän), 1871–1928, Croatian politician. Of peasant origin, he early became active in politics and founded (1905) the Croatian Peasant party. In 1918 he opposed the union of Croatia with Serbia, Montenegro, and Slovenia (later Yugoslavia), fearing Serbian centralism, and favoring a Croat peasant republic. After World War I, Radić dominated Croatian politics, and fought for a federal state structure within Yugoslavia and for Croatian autonomy, as well as for land reform and reduced peasant taxes. Despite the electoral success of his party in Croatia, he refused to participate in the national parliament, thus allowing the premier, Nikola PašićPašić or Pashitch, Nikola
, 1845?–1926, Serbian statesman. After studying engineering, he became interested in politics and was elected (1878) to the Serbian parliament.
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, to impose a centralized government on Yugoslavia. Leaving Yugoslavia in 1923, he visited Moscow. After his return to Yugoslavia he was imprisoned by Pašić because of his association with the Soviet Communists, and his party was disbanded. Radić was soon released from prison and became (1925) Yugoslav minister of education. Resigning in 1926, he returned to the opposition. He died of wounds inflicted by an assassin on the floor of parliament.

Radić, Stjepan

 

Born July 11, 1871, in Trebarjevo Desno; died Aug. 8, 1928, in Zagreb. Croatian public figure, political leader, and publicist.

Radić graduated from the School of Political Science in Paris in 1899 and contributed as a journalist to Czech, Russian, and French newspapers and magazines. He visited Russia in 1896; subsequently he lived in Prague and in 1902 settled in Zagreb. Together with his brother, A. Radić, he founded the Croatian Peasant Party in 1904. He developed the theory of peasant rights (unity of interests among the peasantry, the peasantry’s political hegemony, and moderate agrarian reform) and the theory of agrarianism (the perpetuation of small-scale agriculture and the primacy of an agrarian economy).

Radić visited the USSR in 1924 and joined the Peasant International. In 1925 he became a minister in the bourgeois government of the kingdom of Yugoslavia. Beginning in 1927 he opposed the Great Serbian bourgeoisie. Radić was fatally wounded in the skupshtina (national assembly) by a Great Serbian chauvinist.