Branko Petranović

Branko Petranović (31 October 1927 — 17 June 1994) was a Serbian historian and a Belgrade University professor specializing in history of Yugoslavia.

Career Branko Petranović was born in Cetinje, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Primary and secondary school education he finished in Kotor, Cetinje and Belgrade. From January 1944 he joined Tito's partisans. He finished undergraduate studies at Belgrade University: at the Faculty of Law in 1950 and at the Faculty of Philosophy in 1956. From 1958 he dedicated himself to historiography and started his academic career as a researcher at the History Department of the Institute of Social Sciences (May 1958-August 1963). He earned his PhD degree at the Belgrade University Faculty of Law in 1962. As a researcher he worked at the Department for the History of the Yugoslav Workers' Movement of the Workers' Movement Research Institute in Belgrade (September 1963-January 1969) and the Institute of Contemporary History (January–November 1969). From 1969, he was an associate professor and from 1975 a full professor at the Belgrade University Faculty of Philosophy, Department of History. Petranović was also a member of editorial and advisory boards of numerous historical journals and anthologies (Istorija XX veka, Istorijski glasnik, Vojnoistorijski glasnik, Jugoslovenski istorijski časopis, etc.).

Most his academic research and career was dedicated to the 20th century epoch and to Yugoslavia. Historian Ljubodrag Dimić, in his Foreword to Branko Petranović: The Yugoslav Experience of Serbian National Integration, stressed that the twentieth century epoch in Yugoslavia was not inclined to the historian, especially not to the one who was trying to gain rational knowledge about the history of the Yugoslav state and society. In the first years following the Second World War, ideological and political conditions were not favorable for the study of history. The knowledge of history was considered to be unnecessary and, quite often, undesirable. The interests of the revolution, the people, the state and the working class were colliding with the postulates of the profession. These, for a historian, unfavorable social conditions were something he faced and understood as a dictature. Even when his works were influenced by the ruling communist ideology and its phraseology, the same works provided numerous insights into main problems of the historic development of Yugoslav state. As a historian, he was led by his principle stating that a historian cannot dedicate himself to the history of his times without confronting his own work and results to other historians research. Kingdom of Yugoslavia History of Serbia in WWII Communist Yugoslavia WWII resistance movement in Europe role of a historian in contemporary epoch

Selected works