CAUGHT IN THE TURMOIL OF HISTORY
Buy the Book Here
|
The book 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:
|
|
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.
|
Branko & Slavko Vukelić from Yugoslavia were among those idealistic young people who joined the communist movement in the 1920s. |
|
|
|
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
|
Hotsumi Ozaki
|
Branko Vukelić
|
Max Clausen
|
Yotoku Miyagi
|
|
|
|
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)
|
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. |
|
VILMA VUKELIĆ, NÉE MISKOLCZY (1880−1956) was Branko and Slavko’s mother
|
|
IVE MIHOVILOVIĆ (1905−1987) was Branko and Slavko’s brother-in-law
|
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. |
|
To find more about him, read the book.
“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