Antun Mavrak

Antun Mavrak (1899 – 8 April 1938) was a Croatian revolutionary and top functionary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ).

Mavrak was named as organizational secretary of the underground KPJ in August 1930 and remained in that leading post until his removal in December 1931. Although expelled from the Communist Party, Mavrak continued to live in the Soviet Union under the name Karl Yakovlevich, working as a laborer. Mavrak was arrested during the Terror of 1937-38 and was executed as an alleged spy in 1938.

Mavrak was posthumously rehabilitated by the Soviet government in 1963.

Biography Early years

Antun Mavrak was born in 1899 in Bosnia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an ethnic Croatian family.

Following completion of his secondary education, Mavrak enrolled at the University of Zagreb, where he studied law. At issue was a perceived tendency of the underground Yugoslav party towards putschism at the expense of factory organization, with the first half of 1929 marked by a series of gun battles between KPJ insurgents and the police as party radicals vainly attempted to ignite a mass "armed uprising" via isolated street fighting.

With the KPJ shattered by their tactics and the inevitable reprisals of the Yugoslav government, the Comintern sought a new leadership to bring the factional war revolutionary posturing to an end and to set about rebuilding the organization. Mavrak proved a poor choice as a party leader, however, failing to appeal to the dominant left wing of the KPJ and alienating a large section of the party faithful by attempting to end publication of the party theoretical magazine Klasna borba (Class Struggle) as a "waste of time."

On 7 December1931, top officials of the KPJ met with relevant Comintern officials to determine a new leadership for the Yugoslav party, with Filip Filipović returned for a second stint as the leader of the party organization.

The Soviet government posthumously rehabilitated Mavrak in 1963, thereby essentially admitting that the charges made against him during the terror of 1937-38 were without basis.