Filip Filipović (Serbian Cyrillic: Филип Филиповић; June 21, 1878 – April 1938) was a Serbian mathematician, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and its first secretary. He spent most of his last ten years in the Soviet Union, where he was executed during the Great Purge.
Early years Filip Filipović was born in Čačak on June 21, 1878. His father, Vasa Filipović, was a professor at the gymnasium in Čačak, where he taught mathematics, as well as German and French, and later was the director of a high school in Užice. Filip was one of seven children. His sisters Savka and Dara later belonged to the revolutionary labor movement, where they helped Filip in his political work.
Even as a high school student, under the influence of writers such as Svetozar Marković, he became interested in socialism. After graduating from high school, Filipović entered the Higher Technical School of Belgrade. In 1897 he began participating in the revolutionary movement and was a member of the socialist organization and the general workers' union in Belgrade, where he befriended Dragiša Lapčević.
Filipović began his mathematics studies in Belgrade and continued them at Saint Petersburg Imperial University in Russia. After graduating in 1904, he stayed in Russia and became a mathematics teacher at the Demidovsky Women's Trade School in Saint Petersburg, where he worked until 1912, while also teaching at other schools and in some folk and workers' schools after the 1905 Russian Revolution. He was interested in educational pedagogical problems and the improvement of teaching, co-authoring a text on the pedagogy of mathematics and participating in the First All-Russian Congress of Mathematics Teachers.
The Russian Revolution of 1905 During his studies in Saint Petersburg, Filipović joined the Russian labor movement, and in 1902 he was a participant in student demonstrations. He became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1902 and later joined the Bolshevik faction within it. He participated in the work of Marxist circles, studying the works of Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov and others while he participated in workers' demonstrations and other actions, as well as in the 1905 Russian Revolution, which had a bourgeois-democratic character. According to the directive of the Saint Petersburg Social Democratic Committee, in the fall of 1905 he was supposed to start working politically with the sailors of the Baltic Fleet in Kronstadt, but he was arrested in September of the same year as a result of a police raid on the Petrograd Committee. He was then imprisoned in the Kresty Prison in Saint Petersburg, but after a month he was released on October 17, 1905, due to the Manifesto of Tsar Nicholas.
During his vacation in Serbia in 1902, Filipović visited his family who lived in Užice at the time, where he got to know Dimitrije Tucović better; after his return to Russia he continued to maintain a constant relationship with him. At Tucović's invitation, Filipović began to collaborate in the newspaper "Radničke novine", of which Tucović was the editor, and from 1910 in the newspaper "Borba", which was the theoretical paper of the Serbian Social Democratic Party. His articles were mainly about the Russian revolutionary movement, the struggle of the proletariat in Russia, and the importance that the revolution of 1905 had for the awakening of the working masses, as well as about the "inquisitional" torture of revolutionaries.
Serbia and Yugoslavia At the invitation of Tucović, Filipović returned to the Kingdom of Serbia in 1912. He immediately got involved in political life, becoming a member of the Main Party Administration of the Serbian Social Democratic Party (SSDP) and secretary of the Chamber of Workers.
As the secretary of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Labor in Belgrade, Filipović was elected at the session of the Board of Directors on February 13, 1912, replacing Tucović, who devoted himself to party tasks. After accepting the new position, he initially took care to win the trust of certain trade union officials, who were initially not in favor of him, because they saw him as a foreign man. Filipović quickly overcame the mistrust with his persistent work, activity and dedication to the implementation of numerous tasks, which protected the rights of workers. He strictly took care of the implementation of the Workplace Law, as well as the protection of vulnerable workers' rights. Some time later, he received an invitation from the Moscow newspaper "Pravda" to be its collaborator so that their readers could follow the events in the Balkans.
The beginning of the Balkan Wars temporarily interrupted the work of Filipović, because part of the personnel of the Serbian Social Democratic Party was mobilized into the army. Tucović was sent to the front in Macedonia, and a little later Filipović was also mobilized, but he remained in Belgrade, where he served as adjutant of the local command.
After the end of the wars, he again devoted himself to the labor movement and the renewal of party organizations. He was particularly active in the fight against violations of the Workplace Law, because some employers in the race for profit extended the working hours to 12, 14 and 16 hours, while wages were reduced, and for a time they were not even paid.
In June 1913, Filipović went to Russia again, where he visited the Hygiene Exhibition in Saint Petersburg. During his stay in Russia, he published two articles in the local labor press about events in the Balkans. After returning to Belgrade, in September he spoke at a large protest meeting in the Socialist People's Center in Slavija, where the workers adopted the "Resolution on the indivisibility of the Balkans and the need for peace". Although he was busy with work in the Chamber of Workers, he also attended meetings in other places in Serbia — in Smederevska Palanka, Jagodina, Leskovac and others.
The First World War and internment The beginning of the First World War in 1914 found Filipović as the secretary of the Chamber of Labor and a member of the editorial staff of Radničke novina, where he collaborated with other members of the party leadership, Dušan Popović, Triša Kaclerović, Pavlo Pavlović and Mihail Todorović. Even before the outbreak of war, the Serbian Social Democratic Party ("SSDP") remained faithful to its principles and positions, so its representatives in the National Assembly of the Kingdom of Serbia voted against war loans, and its leader Dimitrije Tucović presented all the horrors of war. Filipović spent the first year of the war in Belgrade, and after the fall of the capital in September 1915, together with the non-mobilized part of the SSDP leadership, he went to Jagodina by agreement.
However, Filipović together with Popović, went to Kruševac instead of Jagodina, where he was caught by the Austro-Hungarian occupation forces. Vasilije "Vasa" Eškićević, the official painter of the Serbian 1st Army, noted in his diary that Filipović said to him on 27.10.1915: "We are not going from here, we are socialists and will wait for the Germans". The implied expectation was that the occupation forces would show some leniency towards the members of the SSDP, as that was the only party in Europe which voted against a government issuing war bonds in 1914 and that this was preferable to the withdrawal with the rest of the army and the civilian refugees. At first he was arrested, but soon he was released, after which he lived for some time in occupied Belgrade. In 1916, expressing an internationalist and revolutionary attitude, he refused to cooperate with the occupier, after which he was arrested and taken to a prison camp in the town of Aschach an der Donau.
In the very difficult conditions of the camp, where hunger and scarcity reigned, Filipović gathered around him a group of social democrats from Serbia and, in order to pass the time with Sava Maksimović and Nikola Popović, he organized a foreign language course. Through the gathered group of social democrats, he led an agitation among the inmates against going to work, which the camp authorities forced the inmates to do. In November 1916, through the members of the Social Democratic Party of Austria, who worked in this prison camp, he managed to send a letter to Popović in Belgrade and asked him to advocate for his release from the camp through the Austrian Social Democrats. After this, Victor Adler, a prominent Austrian social democrat, managed to secure the release of Filipović and a group of social democrats from the camp.
Transfer to Vienna In the summer of 1917, Filipović and his fellow prisoners were transferred from the camp to Vienna, where they were confined. Here he also managed to find employment, but he had to report to the police every week.
Through his contacts with the left-wing Austrian socialist Franz Koritschoner he made contact with the community of emigre Bolsheviks in Vienna. Together with them Filipović founded an illegal organization in Vienna on December 12, 1917, which was considered part of the organization of the Russian Bolsheviks. He also connected with the Bosnian-Herzegovinian social democrat Sreten Jakšić, who came to Vienna several times in late 1917 and early 1918. Through Jakšić, he established cooperation with the newspaper "Voice of Freedom", which was published in Sarajevo as an organ of the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this newspaper, he published articles in which he expressed the views of the Bolsheviks on the national question, and in November 1917 he wrote an article on the third anniversary of the death of Dimitrije Tucović.
At the beginning of March 1918, a delegation of the Russian Red Cross came to Vienna and connected with the Bolshevik group, and Filipović significantly contributed to connecting this delegation with revolutionary-oriented members of the Austrian, Hungarian and Czech labor movements. The Bolshevik group and Filipović played a significant role in the founding of the Communist Party of Austria on November 3, 1918.
They then took part in the revolutionary events that took place in Vienna on November 11, 1918, the day the Republic of German Austria was proclaimed. After this, Filipović, together with other members of the Bolshevik group, spent some time in prison, and at the end of 1918 he was expelled from Austria. At the beginning of December, he arrived in Budapest, where he immediately connected with the Party of Communists in Hungary, as well as a strong group of Yugoslav communists returning from Soviet Russia. On December 18, 1918, Filipović reported to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) about the creation of the organization of Yugoslav communists in Budapest, as well as the political situation in the labor movement of Yugoslavia and the plans for the establishment of the Communist Party.
Founding of the Socialist Labor Party of Yugoslavia (Communists)