Yugoslav scholarship about the Spanish Civil War, specifically the Yugoslav volunteers who fought in the International Brigades, was almost exclusively tied to the partisan struggle during the Second World War and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Many countries in the Soviet bloc published books about their heroes who fought fascism before Western Europe reacted and raised monuments to Spanish Civil War veterans. However, many lost their lives during Stalinist purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s since they were potentially compromised cadres who returned to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other countries only after the Red Army's occupation. Yugoslav volunteers, however, generally had a more prominent status in the country (and historiography) since the Yugoslav resistance movement liberated the country with only minimal support from the Soviet Union.

The participation of the Spanish veterans, ‘Our Spaniards’ (naši Španci), in the People's Liberation War was significant, especially during the first year of resistance after the Axis invasion and occupation in 1941. Josip Broz Tito, who led the partisans to victory in 1945 and ruled the country until his death in 1980, together with many other leading political, military and diplomatic figures in communist Yugoslavia, had either fought on the republican side in Spain or had been involved in organising their participation. For example, the commanders of the four Yugoslav Armies in the final months of the Second World War were all veterans of the Spanish Civil War – Peko Dapčević, Petar Drapšin, Kosta Nađ and Koča Popović. Although there is no evidence that Tito actually crossed into Spain during the war, we know that he was crucial in coordinating the Yugoslav volunteers from Paris and subsequently organising their return from German labour camps once the decision to mount an armed resistance in Yugoslavia was made in 1941.

Thus, forty years of Yugoslav historiography focused on the Spanish Civil War as the logical precursor to the partisan victory and subsequent communist revolution. Historians and veterans themselves published dozens of books collecting information on the Yugoslav units, the heroes of the party who had fallen in Spain, Yugoslavia or as members of other resistance movements and the revolutionary continuity of the Spanish veterans even in their post-war contributions to building Yugoslav socialism. There was an impressive effort to collect the veterans’ memoirs and oral histories, which provide a fascinating window into the idealistic minds of Yugoslav revolutionaries. Nevertheless, there were many blind spots in the historiography, such as the role of women and anarchists, uncensored discussions about internal party divisions and mistakes committed by the Spanish veterans during the Second World War. Some of these issues appeared in the late 1980s, but for the most part they remained on the margins of historical research.

The violent dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the wave of historical revisionism that accompanied the new nationalist narratives swept aside the collective memory of the Spanish Civil War. In Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina – the countries that experienced the greatest degree of violence during Yugoslavia's disintegration – the partisan movement was tarred with the formerly taboo issue of communist crimes while Nazi-fascist collaborators were rehabilitated and recast as nationalist heroes. Other former communist countries also vigorously revised their historiographies, including the chapter on their volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, such as Poland, which began pushing a conservative interpretation of the past in order to erase all traces of communist influence. While the rehabilitation of collaborators also took place in Slovenia, North Macedonia and Montenegro, the partisan movement (and the Spanish veterans) were not subject to such systematic demonisation as in the other three Yugoslav successor states. Whereas Yugoslav historiography had depicted the volunteers in the Spanish Civil War as the first anti-fascists, revisionists traced the origins of communist mass crimes to the violence in Spain and Stalinist purges. The internationalist position of the Yugoslav volunteers could not fit within the new nationalised histories of the Second World War, and the younger generation of historians applied the methods of social and cultural history to national histories. Since the Spanish Civil War affected almost exclusively those who fought in it, the trends described in the other contributions to this roundtable did not really apply to contemporary historical research in the Yugoslav successor states. For all intents and purposes it seemed that the important episode of the Spanish Civil War was almost completely erased from collective memory and historiography in the former Yugoslavia.

Despite this seemingly grim case of historical amnesia, in recent years there has been a renewed interest in the region about the legacy of the Spanish Civil War. My own book (The Battle of Spain is Ours: Croatia and the Spanish Civil War, 2014) examined the debates in Croatian society about the war in Spain beyond the official communist narrative of the International Brigades. Due to extensive press censorship and limited political freedoms, heated debates about ideological issues could take place about Spanish events that in reality alluded to the situation in interwar Yugoslavia. Members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and adherents of the Ustaša movement (the fascist collaborators who took power in 1941) were active in collecting aid, organising protests, distributing pamphlets and publishing newspapers that anticipated the brutal conflict to come. Some younger scholars in Croatia have begun analysing anarchists in Spain (Luka Pejić), women volunteers (Ana Lovreković and Barbara Blasin) and the experience in French camps (Igor Jovanović), but no significant publications have yet been published. The case of the anarchists is particularly interesting since they were almost completely excluded from the communist historiography, and mostly came from the Istrian peninsula, at the time a part of Italy. Along with the invisible anarchists, there were certainly many Italianised Slavs from Istria who volunteered or were mobilised to fight in Spain as part of the pro-Franco Italian units. The Italian-controlled territory of present-day Croatia and Slovenia could provide fertile ground for the new trends in Spanish Civil War historiography, such as the impact on the civilian population, propaganda efforts, forced mobilisation and the complex fate of such individuals in post-war Yugoslavia. Other recent publications in Croatia follow the trends of the communist-era historiography, such as a collection of documents from Spanish diplomats during the Second World War (Spanish Diplomacy and the Independent State of Croatia/ Španjolska diplomacija i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, 2013) and a collection of interviews with Spanish veteran and Yugoslav politician Ivo Vejvoda (Goodbye Twentieth Century/ Zbogom XX. stoljeće, 2013).

The most active scholarship on the Spanish Civil War in the region is produced in Serbia, where the successor to the Spanish Civil War veterans’ association continues to organise commemorations, conferences (such as the one dedicated to the eightieth anniversary of the civil war) and publications. Milo Petrović's 2014 volume included contributions from Spanish and ex-Yugoslav scholars and explored nationalist revisionism in the region based on case studies of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Unfortunately, other than the contributions by Spanish scholars, the authors from the region did little new research and relied on uncritical interpretations of the Yugoslav volunteers produced during the communist era. The newest publication is by historian Olga Manojlović Pintar, who provides an in-depth analysis of the crisis provoked within the Yugoslav communist leadership by the Spanish veteran associations’ letter of 1984 that called for more robust reforms. The Final Battle: Spanish Veterans and the Yugoslav Crisis of the 1980s (Posljedna bitka: Španski borci i jugoslovenska kriza osamdesetih, 2019) is more about the final decade of Yugoslav politics and Yugoslav communism than the Spanish Civil War, but it does provide considerable insight into how veteran associations functioned, not only as mnemonic actors but active political subjects that threatened the establishment precisely because of their symbolic capital as the most revolutionary, and thus legitimate, anti-fascists. As Manojlović Pintar explains, the Central Committee quickly quashed the criticisms of the Spanish veterans and publicly chastised them, but ultimately it proved how weak and fragile the Yugoslav system had become following Tito's death.

Vladan Vukliš, a young historian and archivist from Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, published a detailed analysis of Yugoslav historiography from the years immediately after the Second World War up through the early 2000s (Sjećanje na Španiju, 2013), but the real innovative contribution is expected from his forthcoming dissertation. Nevertheless, his book serves as a road map for understanding the Yugoslav experience in the Spanish Civil War for those able to read Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian.

The role of Tito in the Spanish Civil War deserves special mention. Since his death in 1980 there have been efforts to deconstruct his cult of personality, from conspiracy theories that the real Tito died in the October Revolution and was replaced by a Russian agent to a narrative that he should be counted among the greatest mass murderers in history. There is certainly no doubt that Yugoslav communists killed tens of thousands of real and suspected collaborators and class enemies, sent thousands of others to political prison camps and implemented a single-party system that used authoritarian methods to stay in power. However, Tito also led a successful multiethnic, anti-fascist resistance movement that liberated their own country, stood up to Stalin and put Yugoslavia on the international map due to his savvy diplomatic skills during the Cold War. In the battle over Tito's legacy, nationalist historians in Serbia and Croatia have sought to prove Tito's role in Spain as a People's Commissariat for International Affairs’ (Naródnyiy Komissariát Vnútrennikh Del; NKVD) agent sent to liquidate his rivals. Pero Simić's Tito: Phenomenon of the Century (Tito: Fenomen stoljeća, 2009) and the Zagreb-based magazine Military History (Vojna povijest) have used questionable sources and rumours to argue that Tito's bloodthirstiness originated in Spain. One of the more bizarre arguments for placing Tito in Spain was a photograph of a Brigadier showering in the Gurs camp that Vojna povijest claimed was Tito, even though the identity of the individual is impossible to determine, the photograph was already published in communist-era books and the camp was located in France and obviously not Spain. A somewhat less revisionist, but no less sensationalist, narrative of Tito as an international super spy was depicted in the popular history book by Denis Kuljiš and William Klinger, Tito: Untold Stories (Tito: Neispričane priče, 2013) It is clear that Tito continues to generate interest and controversy in the former Yugoslavia, and his movements during the Spanish Civil War remain mysterious enough to feed conspiracy theories.

Finally, some international scholars have worked on the Yugoslavs in the Spanish Civil War. Herve Lemesle's 2011 dissertation is the most comprehensive and systematic analysis of the Yugoslav volunteers. Lemesle's research revised the number of volunteers from 1,664 to 1,910, and his work provides an impressively detailed picture of the Yugoslavs in Spain. However, at over 1,000 pages and in French, the work has limited visibility, and is also not in communication with the most recent trends in the historiography of the Spanish Civil War. Stefan Gužvica, a PhD student at the University of Regensburg, has produced a sophisticated analysis of the internal political battles of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia during the war in Spain, relying on new materials from Russian archives.

In conclusion, research on the Spanish Civil War in the former Yugoslavia has been swept aside by debates about the Second World War and the conflicts of the 1990s, with much of it politicised and from narrow national perspectives. However, numerous topics and historical sources remain to be researched, and efforts to internationalise history departments through international projects could lead to the kind of innovative approaches to understanding the civil war discussed in the other contributions (comparative research on veterans, understanding violence, Europeanisation of memory). Public history projects, such as the Cultural Memory of the Spanish Civil War exhibition, part of Rijeka2020 – European Capital of Culture, show that the younger generations know very little about the conflict, while older visitors recalled some details from their school textbooks. Local memories of Spanish volunteers in areas where the partisan legacy was not erased, such as in the region around Rijeka, persist to this day, although in many parts of the former Yugoslavia the Spanish Civil War suffered the same fate of revisionism as the anti-fascist narrative of the Second World War.