Description

This is the first Croatian translation of the Communist Manifesto by Moša Pijade (1890 – 1957), a Yugoslav communist, politician and Tito’s close friends. Pijade also translated the introductions from previous translations to other languages, to help the reader understand the importance of the work.

For this version Pijade was using as a source the complete works of Marx and Engels in German, published in 1932, and the Manifesto, issued in German language in Moscow, in 1941.

This Croatian version, published as a pamphlet on cheap paper, was issued immediately after the end of WWII, in 1945. At the same time a Serbian translation in Cyrillic script was published.

Pijade, an artist, art critic and author, was born in Belgrade and was of Sephardic Jewish parentage. He joined the Communist party in the 1920s, in which he was active as a writer for the newspapers and magazines. After translating Das Kapital in 1924, Pijade was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison because of his ‘revolutionary activities’, a sentence, which he served for 14 years.

In the prison Moša Pijade befriended Josip Broz-Tito, who was also imprisoned for his illegal communist activities, and the two men became good friends.

During WWII, Pijade became one of the leaders of Tito’s partisans and after the war the President of the Yugoslavian Parliament between 1954 and 1955. In 1948, Pijade convinced Tito to allow the Yugoslav Jews to immigrate to Israel.

References: OCLC 779860956, 441094214 (possibly some of the examples are the Serbian version in Cyrillic script).