Grulovic, Nikola

Born Dec. 4, 1888, in the city of Beska, in Srem; died Feb. 19, 1959, in Belgrade. Yugoslav political figure; a shoemaker by trade. Joined the Social Democratic Party of Serbia in 1904.

During World War I, Grulović was taken prisoner and was sent to Russia (1915). Early in 1918 he organized a Yugoslav Red Guard detachment; in the fall of 1918 he was commissar of the 1st Yugoslav Communist Regiment at Tsaritsyn. In November 1918 he was a member of the Federation of Foreign Communist Groups under the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik), and in the winter of 1918 he was in the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Group under the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik). In February 1919 he returned to his native land. He was a participant in the Unification Congress (April 1919) of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY). In 1920 he was a deputy of the CPY to the National Assembly. Grulovic was a delegate to the Third Congress of the Comintern (1921). In 1935 he was a member of the Regional Committee of the Serbian Communist Party. He took part in the war of national liberation of the peoples of Yugoslavia in 1941–45. From 1949 to 1959 he was a member of the Central Committee of the Serbian League of Communists, and from 1956 to 1959 chairman of the Republic Council of the Serbian National Assembly.