It is believed that the lack of courage is the reason why the life of Slobodan Penezić Krcun is not investigated. Recently, "Vukotić Media" published a book by Bojan Dimitrijević about this important figure for the young Yugoslav state.
Slobodan Penezić Krcun is one of those personalities whose biography is difficult to write. Not because of the possible lack of archival material on certain issues from his biography or political career. Although archival materials - party, state, and recently also personal - are available, there is still no interest, and perhaps no courage, to study Penezić's work and biography more studiously.
No, it's because of the expectation to explain his death in a car accident. His controversial role in the war and his political career after the war are still clouded by the question of whether he was assassinated in 1964. Or is it about a case - a serious traffic accident, which was caused by a series of circumstances on the road near Lazarevac? Due to the nature of ideological power in Tito's Yugoslavia and the events that will follow in the period 1964-1966. year, most Serbs still believe that Penezić was killed. That circumstance obscures a realistic view of his biography.
Another circumstance is a significant number of contemporaries (albeit already in advanced years) who met Penezić here or there, or others who heard this or that anecdote about him, related to the football club "Crvena zvezda", to sitting in "Madera" or some another Belgrade tavern, for a statement or an anecdote from his native Užice. This circumstance allows the public to build an image of him based on stereotypes. In this way, an almost romantic-melancholic picture of Penezić was acquired, which the historian can hardly confirm with some archival document, or even some written memories.
The next circumstance is certainly his role in the war - from which his opponents at the time or their successors create the image of Penezić as a murderer - an executioner, who in the name of ideology sent thousands of opponents - Serbs, who did not share the same ideological ideas as himself and his party - to the slaughterhouse.
Slobodan Penezić Krcun was only 23 years old when he became a person who, in wartime circumstances in 1941, decided the fate of many, especially opponents of the communist ideology of which he had been a supporter since his high school days in Užice. The fight "against the fifth column" in the so-called Republic of Užice will mark his war path. Not even the party's organizational secretary Aleksandar Ranković, let alone the general secretary Josip Broz Tito, probably nor the other members of the KPJ Politburo, knew him until they arrived in Užice in those autumn days of the war in 1941. However, he essentially organized the prison himself, before the arrival of the leadership, arrests and interrogates the so-called "fifth columnists". Some are even killed by his fighters before it becomes a wider practice carried out by the partisan leadership.
Some time after the retreat of the partisans from Užice, in June 1942, Penezić was sent to duty in the Second Proletarian Brigade. Although he was only the "deputy political commissar" of that brigade for a long time, Penezić still has direct communication with Ranković, Sreten Žujović, the Central Committee, the Supreme Staff... which is information that speaks of his real power in relation to his formal duties. His wartime love and later wife of Grozdan, Zina Belić, arrived at the "Political Department" of the Second Proletarian Brigade at the same time. Unlike the First, whose composition included partisans from Serbia and Montenegro, the Second Proletarian Brigade was formed exclusively by Serbian partisans who retreated from occupied Serbia in the winter of 1941/1942. year. It will retain its Serbian character until the end of the war. We see many well-known names in the list of brigade leaders. A good part of them, including Penezić himself, will form the post-war state, political, party, military and security leadership and other structures in Serbia or Yugoslavia. While he was alive, the fighters of the Second Proletarian Brigade and Penezić were considered one, because he was the political commissar in its most difficult moments of the war.
When the communist secret police - "Ozna", the post-war "Udba" - was formed in 1944, he was its first man in Serbia and remains remembered and celebrated as the "father of the Serbian service". His close associate, Šumadija partisan Slobodan Krstić Uča writes about those first days: "...I remember well his answer to my question about what Ozna is. Krcun, in his characteristic way, not to waste words, raised his eyebrows, smiled in a friendly manner and uttered one single word: Police!"
A young man who came to power over life and death prematurely, fanaticized in the service of a rather rigid ideology, personally brave but also submissive to the authorities in the Party - Tito and Aleksandar Ranković, in the years after the war he moved in opposites: from cold cynicism to sentimentality, caring towards his family and harsh towards ideological opponents. While managing and allocating funds from the state budget, he was thrifty at home and on the verge of modesty.
The atypical traffic accident in which Slobodan Penezić was killed produced many subsequent comments and memories, from which one gets the impression that Penezić had a grudge against someone before his death. Tito is mostly mentioned. There is simply no documentary confirmation that Penezić resented Tito, who then, using the mechanisms of the Service, removed him in November 1964. Everything is in the domain of personal memories and interpretations of contemporaries. From everything currently available to the researcher, it can be seen that Penezić never publicly disturbed Tito's leading position in the Party and the state. This loyalty to Tito dates back to 1941 and he expressed it until the end of his life.
On November 6, 1964, the president of the Executive Council of Serbia, Slobodan Penezić, and the president of the organizational council in the Serbian Parliament, veteran and UDB colonel Svetolik Lazarević, went to the Fifth District Conference in Titovo Uzice, organized in the midst of preparations for the upcoming Eighth Congress of the Serbian Communist Party. According to the official announcement of the Secretariat for Internal Affairs, sometime after noon, on the section near the village of Šopić, near Lazarevac, Penezić's "oldsmobile" hit a stone buffer on the side of the road, landed and hit a tree on the side of the road. Penezić and Lazarević were killed, and two days later the driver Milorad Lomić also died from serious injuries.
Such a sudden end created a kind of myth about Slobodan Penezić, which has two completely opposite phases and two different contents. In the first phase of 1964–1966, immediately after his death, his devotion to communism and revolutionary nature stand out.
In a sort of intermediate phase, in the time after the Brion Plenum on July 1, 1966, there is a suspicion that Penezić was also removed, as he was killed in a traffic accident. The Brijuni Plenum, at which Penezić's war and post-war comrades from the Service were dismissed: Aleksandar Ranković, Svetislav Stefanović, Vojin Lukić, followed by open criticism of the State Security, some were arrested and interrogated, and other members were quietly retired, updated Penezić's image , and especially those killed on the Ibar highway. His disappearance from the historical and life scenes fit into the course of changes that were made in the security department, which were the prelude to the showdown between Tito and the party with Ranković. Moreover, already after the fall of Ranković, Penezić's name also begins to be forgotten: in various memoirs, encyclopedic references or the reduction of the level of commemoration of the anniversary of his death, and in tavern myths it is combined with Ranković's name and events - changes after the Brijuni Plenum.
In the second phase, during the eighties, Penezić is portrayed in a completely different way - as someone who defended Serbian interests in the Yugoslav state, was a Serbian nationalist and strongly opposed Tito and the leaders from Slovenia and Croatia. During this period, in public, Penezić was transformed into a "Serbian" by Dobrica Ćosić. He portrays Penezić as "the first official who thought about the position of the Serbian people in the new state and the conception of Yugoslav and Serbian politics, reacting publicly to various national closures and anti-Serbism. In my experience, he was the first Serbian politician who saw the Serbian defeats and sensed, I will say a big word, the conspiracy of the national oligarchies against Serbia..."
A good part of this monograph is based on the documentation that his younger son Srđa Penezić left to the Historical Archive in Užice. That material gave this monograph a different stamp, a view from Penezić's personal point of view or his family's point of view. Mostly through his scattered observations in letters, a large number of documents, texts of speeches and written autobiographical memories, then a lot of photos and personal items, according to which we could determine better when it comes to researching Penezić's biography.
This book has the role of marking six decades since Penezić's death, but also of pointing out one of the most significant figures in Serbian history in the middle of the 20th century. She intends to portray Penezić's personality far more than this usual representation. To give him back the complex role he had in the Serbian and Yugoslav historical context in the middle of the 20th century.
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