Bogdan Radica papers

Bogdan Radica* was born in Split, an Adriatic port town in the Habsburg province of Dalmatia (Croatia) on August 26, 1904. He was educated at universities in Ljubljana (Slovenia), Florence, and Rome.

During the interwar period Radica was a member of Yugoslavia's itinerant intellectual elite. He was a journalist and essayist who found his themes mainly in European literature and culture. Radica wrote for many Yugoslav publications, and also contributed articles to newspapers and magazines in Italy, France, and Switzerland. He was a correspondent for Obzor, a leading Zagreb daily newspaper, and wrote for the journals Nova Evropa, also published in the Croatian capital, and Srpski knji evni glasnik of Belgrade.

Radica served in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia's foreign service for over a decade before the Axis invasion of that country in 1941. In 1929 he was appointed correspondent for the official Yugoslav press agency Avala in Athens. The following year he entered the diplomatic corps and became the first press attaché at the Yugoslav Legation in the Greek capital, where he remained until 1935. While serving in Athens, Radica wrote about contemporary Greece for Yugoslav and Greek publications. He also participated in the founding of a journal devoted to Balkan affairs, titled Les Balkans.

In the succeeding five years, Bogdan Radica served as press officer attached to the Yugoslav delegation to the League of Nations in Geneva. During this time he also resumed his studies of nineteenth-century politics under the noted Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero, an anti-fascist Italian émigré and a professor at the University of Geneva. In 1939, a book of interviews with his mentor, titled Conversazioni con Guglielmo Ferrero, was published in Lugano. That series of encounters was included in Radica's book, Agonija Evrope, in which he recounted his meetings with prominent European intellectuals of the interwar period - among whom were Benedetto Croce, André Gide, Maksim Gorky, Paul Valéry, Thomas Mann, and Carlo Sforza. The book was published in Belgrade in 1940.

Radica was appointed to a position in the Yugoslav government's central press bureau in Belgrade in June 1940, but was named chief of the Press Department of the Yugoslav Legation in Washington, D.C. before he could assume his duties in Belgrade. According to Radica, his original assignment was opposed by the German and Italian foreign ministries, who objected to his liberal political views and frequent associations with anti-fascist circles. Radica assumed the work of the legation's press section in Washington, D.C. in the autumn of 1940.

As the Second World War progressed and various national and political feuds rent the ranks of the royal Yugoslav government-in-exile, Radica found himself increasingly at odds with official politics, especially as directed from Washington by the Yugoslav ambassador, Konstantin Fotich. Partially as a result of these ideological frictions, Radica was transferred to the newly-established Yugoslav Information Center in New York City in March 1942, where he remained until September 1943, when the center itself was closed.

Radica refused official reassignment to Buenos Aires in October 1943. He regarded this transfer as a bald attempt to remove him from the ongoing political debate in America over the question of Allied support for the competing anti-fascist factions in Yugoslavia. He decried the nationalistic biases of many Serbian members of the Yugoslav government and army in exile who supported Draza Mihailovich's Chetniks (of which Ambassador Fotich was a prominent example), and increasingly favored Tito's all-Yugoslav partisan movement. From the beginning of 1944, Radica was no longer on the exile government's payroll.

Radica continued his journalistic efforts in the United States as a specialist on Yugoslav and Balkan issues, as well as Italian affairs. He wrote for The Nation and The New Republic, and was accredited as The Nation's correspondent for Italy and the Balkans in October 1944. Still, throughout 1944 he maintained various contacts with representatives of the royal Yugoslav government whose views were similar to his own. After the change in government in June, which led eventually to the unification of Tito's provisional government and the exile government, Radica was reappointed to the diplomatic service. In the autumn of 1944 Radica arrived in London, and by a decree of February 1945 he was officially reinstated. In April he left for Yugoslavia to assume his new duties in the Ministry of Information in Belgrade.

Radica quickly became disillusioned with the new Communist order in Yugoslavia. At the end of May 1946, he resigned his post, condemned the Yugoslav regime and its "totalitarian Communism," and refused to return to Yugoslavia, having travelled to Rome on an official passport in October 1945. Radica emigrated to the United States in June 1946. He served as director of studies on Yugoslavia at the Mid-European Studies Institute in New York from 1949-1950. He accepted a teaching position at Fairleigh-Dickinson University in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1948, becoming a regular member of the faculty in the Department of History in 1950, and Emeritus Professor of History in 1974. Radica became a United States citizen in 1957.

In the postwar period Radica became a leading intellectual among Croat émigrés. He continued his journalistic activities, both in the mainstream American press and in the émigré Croat media, but now with almost exclusively political themes which reflected his anti-Communist attitudes. His articles appeared in The Reader's Digest,, The Nation, The New Republic, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Commonweal. Radica often contributed to various émigré academic and popular publications in the United States and Canada, and even South America and Australia. He collaborated especially closely for a time with the Winnipeg newspaper Hrvatski Glas, and was long associated with the quarterly journal Hrvatska Revija, which originally appeared in Buenos Aires. In 1971, a collection of his interwar essays was published under the title Sredozemni povratak, and his diary from the years 1944-1946 appeared as Hrvatska 1945 in 1974. Radica also wrote a two-volume memoir, Zivjeti nedozivjeti, published in 1982 and 1984. All his books were issued by the publishing arm of Hrvatska Revijain Munich.

In 1990, in the wake of the first free, multi-party elections in Croatia in the postwar period, Radica returned to Yugoslavia for the first time since he had fled in 1945. He was welcomed with honors in his hometown of Split by various dignitaries of the new, non-Communist government.

Radica married Nina Ferrero, daughter of Guglielmo Ferrero, on April 24, 1935. The Radicas had two children, a son Leo, and a daughter Bosiljka.

*The anglicized version of his surname, which he used professionally in America, is Raditsa.