Worker's Education in the Early Yugoslav Communist Party

Worker's Education in the Early Yugoslav Communist Party examines the inventive educational practices developed by Yugoslav communists during the 1920s and 1930s in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, focusing on how ordinary workers received education in music, literature, and art despite the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) being banned in 1920. Employing a history-from-below approach, the book reconstructs communist education in workers' common houses, reading rooms, and seemingly apolitical organizations such as Esperanto societies and anti-alcoholism groups, as well as prisons (Glavnjaca, Lepoglava, Sremska Mitrovica), which communists perceived as ideological schools of communism. The analysis reveals how educational materials were smuggled into prisons by couriers, who were predominantly women, using suitcases with false bottoms, concealed in clothing, or hidden in baby carriages. The book explores education as a crucial mechanism in the ideological battle between communists (the "seduced masses") and social democrats (the "pragmatic policies"), demonstrating how communists used education to gain influence over the Yugoslav working class and advance class struggle. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in modern European history, labor history, communist studies, history of education, and Balkan studies.