In 1948, the Cominform, the Soviet-dominated organization that represented communist parties throughout Eastern Europe, expelled its Yugoslav branch, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, for "nationalist" tendencies. The following year, Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia's leader, began mass arrests of suspected Stalinists. Prior to the expulsion everyone in Yugoslavia had been a Stalin supporter—or claimed to be—and the result was a campaign of terror comparable to the Stalinist Terror of the 1930s. Using previously unexamined archival material and drawing on interviews with the few remaining survivors of Goli Otok, historian Martin Previšić delves into the origins of political repression under Tito and the daily workings of the prison camp island. Over this period, Yugoslav security forces arrested some 13,000 people and imprisoned them on Goli Otok, or "Barren Island," a desolate prison island off the coast of Croatia, where they were subjected to brutal treatment rivaling any Soviet gulag. Originally published in Croatian in 2019, this English translation is the first book to fully examine this shocking and revealing episode from the region's past.

Martin Previšić is Associate Professor at the University of Zagreb's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.