Stjepan Radic
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.