Croatian Republican Peasant Party Hrvatska republikanska seljačka stranka | |
|---|---|
| Abbreviation | HRSS |
| President | Franjo Gaži |
| Founded | 1941 (de facto established faction) 12 October 1943 (Executive committee established) 29 June 1945 (renamed Croatian Republican Peasant Party) |
| Split from | Croatian Peasant Party |
| Headquarters | Zagreb |
| Newspaper | Slobodni dom |
| National affiliation | People's Front of Yugoslavia |
| Slogan | Faith in God and Peasant Unity |
The HRSS resulted from the 1941 split of the Croatian Peasant Party; like the other factions, it claimed continuity from the original party founded by Stjepan Radić in 1904. | |
The Croatian Republican Peasant Party (Hrvatska republikanska seljačka stranka, HRSS) was a political party formed from a faction split from the Croatian Peasant Party (Hrvatska seljačka stranka, HSS) in 1941. The HSS was once the most popular political party among the Croats in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but after the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, the HSS splintered in several groups including the faction that would become the HRSS. It joined the Yugoslav resistance led and dominated by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) and by its branch in Croatia – the Communist Party of Croatia (KPH). The prewar leader of the HSS Vladko Maček opted to wait for the war to end, while another faction joined the Ustaše movement that ruled the Axis puppet Independent State of Croatia (NDH).
The HSS faction aligned with the communist-led Yugoslav Partisans organised itself as the HSS executive committee, initially led by Božidar Magovac. The KPH welcomed HSS executive committee participation in the resistance as a way to increase Croatian support for the Partisans. Magovac and KPH leader Andrija Hebrang soon came into conflict. Magovac advocated cooperation of the KPH and the HSS faction led by the executive committee as equals and tried to preserve the HSS executive committee's political independence until after the war. In contrast, Hebrang attempted to entrench the dominance of the KPH in Croatia and to publicly establish and widen as much as possible a split between the Magovac-led faction and the pre-war HSS leadership by pressuring Magovac to denounce Maček as a collaborator. The conflict resulted in political domination of the KPH over the HSS executive committee and replacement of Magovac with Franjo Gaži.
After the war, the HSS executive committee was formally renamed the HRSS and joined the People's Front of Yugoslavia—a KPJ-dominated coalition established ahead of the 1945 Yugoslavian parliamentary election. In that election and the 1946 Croatian Sabor election, the HRSS performed poorly and the KPH decided to wind down the HRSS' operations.