CAUGHT IN THE TURMOIL OF HISTORY
There is a lot we can learn from the life stories of people who were caught in
the turmoil of the twentieth century history.
There are two recently published books that provide accounts of such
stories:
CAUGHT IN THE TURMOIL OF HISTORY
by Ivana Caccia and Maroje Mihovilović (2024)
and
THE MAKING OF A RADICAL IMMIGRANT
by Ivana Caccia (2025)
Buy the Book Here
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CAUGHT IN THE TURMOIL OF HISTORY is about Soviet spies and how they operated.
The book is about the dramatic life experiences of several members of a single Jewish-Croatian family and about their shattered dreams and ideals. The book is about terror unleashed by the fascist and communist regimes in Europe and Asia in the mid-twentieth century. The book is about the commitment and sacrifices people made in the past when fighting for a valid cause. It is about the danger of giving up on democratic forms of government and allowing authoritarians to assume power, with catastrophic consequences like those experienced in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. It is about the fate of ordinary people in history-making situations. It is about love, inspiration, family ties, tradition, courage, defiance.... |
The events described in the book took place around the globe:
from Pécs in Hungary,
to Osijek, Zagreb and Pula in Croatia,
to Trieste in Italy,
to Paris and the Atlantic Coast in France,
to Moscow and Sverdlovsk in the Soviet Union (Russia),
to Madrid in Spain,
to Lisbon in Portugal,
or Belgrade in Serbia,
... but, also as far as Tokyo and the northern Hokkaido island in Japan, and Perth in Australia.
to Osijek, Zagreb and Pula in Croatia,
to Trieste in Italy,
to Paris and the Atlantic Coast in France,
to Moscow and Sverdlovsk in the Soviet Union (Russia),
to Madrid in Spain,
to Lisbon in Portugal,
or Belgrade in Serbia,
... but, also as far as Tokyo and the northern Hokkaido island in Japan, and Perth in Australia.
Behind those events were:
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Inspired by a highly mythologized 1917 October Revolution in Russia,
many young people joined the progressive, well-organized and well-structured communist movement called Comintern (Communist International), an association of communist parties around the world operating under the umbrella of an idealized Soviet Union.
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Branko & Slavko Vukelić from Yugoslavia were among those idealistic young people who joined the communist movement in the 1920s. |
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Branko Vukelić
was not just a journalist. He was also a spy, part of the famous Soviet secret espionage group based in Tokyo and led by Richard Sorge.
SORGE’S SOVIET SPY GROUP IN TOKYO
Richard Sorge
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Hotsumi Ozaki
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Branko Vukelić
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Max Clausen
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Yotoku Miyagi
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Their mission was to spy on Japan and Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s. They discovered Hitler’s intention to launch an attack on the western border of the Soviet Union in June 1941. They also learned that Japan, although a German ally, had no intention to attack the Soviet eastern borders and focus on Indochina and the Pacific instead.
Sorge let Moscow know. The news arrived just in time for Stalin to deploy fresh troops from the country’s far east and halt Germany’s rapid advance toward Moscow. Not only did this shatter Hitler’s belief in his army’s invincibility, it also radically changed the course of World War II. |
SLAVKO VUKELIĆ (1906−1940)
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Slavko, was Branko’s younger brother. He had a sharp technical mind, specializing in electro-mechanical innovations of the times (shortwave radio, radar, etc.), and was a warm, gentle person.
In early 1930s, he acted as a Soviet spy while living in France. To escape arrest, he settled with his young family in Russia. As the GRU agent, he went to Spain and Portugal during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. He was, along numerous other fellow communists, an innocent victim in 1938 of Stalin’s massive purges within the army and communist party ranks of all those denounced for not toeing the prescribed line of the Stalinist totalitarian regime. |
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For Slavko’s story, read CAUGHT IN THE TURMOIL OF HISTORY.
VILMA VUKELIĆ, NÉE MISKOLCZY (1880−1956) was Branko and Slavko’s mother
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For her story, read her memoir, A PAST RESCUED FROM OBLIVION, and CAUGHT IN THE TURMOIL OF HISTORY.
IVE MIHOVILOVIĆ (1905−1987) was Branko and Slavko’s brother-in-law
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Ive was born in a small village in Istria, a region of Croatia which was, for centuries, a Venetian province and then part of Italy from 1920 to 1945. The experience of fascist violence in Trieste, made him a committed anti-fascist for life.
Settled in Zagreb (Croatia), he became a highly regarded journalist. In the course of his lifetime, he was imprisoned three times – in Fascist Italy in 1929, by fascist Ustashas in Croatia in 1945, and by the Yugoslav communist authorities in the immediate post-WWII hunt for alleged foreign spies and war collaborators. Ive was, positively, not one of them. |
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A different style of engagement in the turbulent mid-20th century is the subject of the other publication:
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The radical immigrant implied in the title of this book, is Edvard (Edo) Jardas, a young Croatian who arrived in Canada in May 1926 and worked for several years as a lumberjack in the hinterland of British Columbia. He was a steadfast member of the Communist Party of Canada and a militant trade union activist in his Croatian community. |
Jardas’ biography serves as a lens to examine the life of the Croatian immigrant community in the hostile social and natural environment of Canada and the struggles of his compatriots with issues of integration and the enduring challenges faced by immigrants in navigating multiple identities and allegiances.
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The community was deeply engaged in the political debates concerning the Croatian status in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later renamed as Yugoslavia) since its foundation in 1919. Their immigrant press dealt passionately with those concerns. |
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The book is also very much a study in Canadian history. It is an account of the political radicalization of the Canadian working class inspired by the international communist movement at the time of major economic and political upheavals of the post-WWI decades. |
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In 1937, Jardas joined the International Brigades to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. He was wounded in battle, losing a leg, but remained committed to the antifascist cause for the rest of his life.
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In summer of 1948, Jardas returned to Yugoslavia at the crucial moment in the history of the country, when Yugoslavia split away from the Soviet communist bloc and chose its own socialist type of government. A committed patriot and a tireless political activist, he held various government positions, the most consequential as the mayor of Rijeka, the biggest harbour on the Adriatic Sea. To learn more about him and the historical circumstances surrounding his activities, buy and read THE MAKING OF A RADICAL IMMIGRANT. |
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“We should imagine ourselves, for a moment, a hundred years back in time, and make an effort to grasp how people in those days perceived as an inspiring novelty something that we today consider as self-evident and ordinary. We must keep reminding ourselves that, what today sounds like empty phrases, was once new and unexpected, that those long and loud tirades were effectively uplifting and attractive, that different political theses revealed new truths, that it took a lot of courage to utter them for the first time, and a lot of naive elation to repeat them. For the people in those days, a hundred years ago, who believed in the possibility of a better world, no sacrifice was too excessive. They were convinced that the wheel of history, once moved, could never again return to the same place; that there was no going back to the old prejudice, superstitions, medieval darkness, and ghoulish persecutions and accusations. They were convinced that people had awakened for good, and their eyes would stay opened.”
Quoted from Vilma Vukelić, A Past Rescued from Oblivion, p. 19