Svetozar Marković

Svetozar Marković (1846-1875) was a Serbian socialist leader and writer, regarded as one of the early promoters of socialism in the Balkans. A political activist, literary critic and philosopher, he built an activist anthropological outlook tied to a concrete programme of social change. He matters because he was among the first to bring socialist ideas into Serbian politics.

Born in Zaječar in 1846, the son of a police clerk, he spent his childhood in Rekovac and Jagodina before his family moved to Kragujevac in 1856. He studied in Belgrade, at the Velika škola, and after a strong record as a student he received a scholarship to study in St Petersburg. There he came under the influence of Russian radicals of the 1860s, followers of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and met Dmitry Pisarev and Lyuben Karavelov. Fearing arrest for his socialist sympathies, he left Russia in 1869 and settled in Switzerland, where he lost his scholarship after an article critical of the Serbian constitution and regime appeared in the newspaper Zastava.

Back in the Balkans he gathered a group of students, among them the future radical leader Nikola Pašić, and denounced the deal struck between the Liberals and the regency. In 1871 he launched Radenik, Serbia's first socialist newspaper, which the government banned the following year. That same year he published in Novi Sad his most notable work, Srbija na istoku (Serbia in the East). In it he read the revolt against the Ottomans as a social rather than a religious movement, and warned that a centralised state could slide into despotism sustained by a parasitic bureaucracy. In its place he argued for democratic federalism built on the zadruga, the traditional Balkan family community.

Imprisoned in 1874 for press offences, he became a symbol of popular discontent after a trial that drew many peasants. He left prison gravely ill with tuberculosis and died in 1875 at the age of 28. Shortly afterwards socialists won seats in the National Assembly for the first time, a sign of the impact his work had on Serbian politics.