Bust of Vladimir Ćopić “Senjko”

Vladimir Ćopić “Senjko” was the most famous revolutionary from the Croatian Littoral in the interwar period. He was born in Senj on 8 March 1891 and studied law in Zagreb, but his studies were cut short by the outbreak of the First World War. As an Austro-Hungarian soldier, he was captured and sent to a Russian POW camp. Ćopić was not allowed to join the Yugoslav Volunteer Corps because he refused to swear an oath to the Serbian King Peter Karađorđević. As a result, he was not allowed out of the camp until the October Revolution, and soon after his release, he joined the Bolsheviks. In 1919, he returned to Yugoslavia to spread communist propaganda and participated in the Party’s founding congress in Belgrade in April. He was immediately elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), and after it was banned, he was sentenced to two years in prison. 

In 1925, he was forced to flee to the USSR, where he attended the International Lenin School for four years. Ćopić worked in Prague as a Comintern instructor to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and from 1932, together with Milan Gorkić and Blagoje Parović, de facto led the KPJ. After a conflict with Gorkić, Ćopić volunteered to go to Spain, where he arrived in January 1937. He became a political commissar and then the commander of the XVth International Brigade, also known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, leading the volunteers in the battles of Jarama and Brunete. 

In the spring of 1938, he was singled out by Josip Broz Tito as one of only two intellectuals who should be considered for working in the party leadership (the other being Božidar Maslarić). Ćopić arrived in Moscow in late August 1938, roughly at the same time as Tito. The two comrades wrote reports for the Comintern on the condition of the party and plans for re-establishing its activity among the masses in Yugoslavia. However, the NKVD arrested Ćopić on 3 November 1938, and he was shot five months later. The Soviet Union rehabilitated him in 1958. In 1976, his hometown of Senj unveiled a bust of Ćopić, but it was removed in the 1990s when the legacy of the Spanish Civil War volunteers was erased along with that of the communist-led Partisan movement. While thousands of monuments, busts, and memorial plaques were destroyed or badly damaged during Croatia’s War of Independence, this bust was saved by employees at the Senj City Museum and is currently stored in the museum’s basement, while the pedestal sits empty in a city square.