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  • Establishing the South Slavic Radical Labour Press in Canada:The 1931 Reminiscences of Anyox Miner Marko P. Hećimović
  • Stan Granic (bio)

In February 1931 the executive of the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) published a series of resolutions that served as a handbook for the work of cpc members. The sixth resolution was dedicated to language-based mass organizations and it underscored that Slavic and other immigrant workers constituted “an important and integral part of the Canadian working class.” The resolution stressed that Slavic immigrants were employed in all sectors of heavy industry and were among “the most exploited” workers in the country. However, the cpc recognized that, with the exception of Ukrainians, Slavic workers in Canada were not sufficiently organized. To assist in the organizing of Slavic workers “for the revolutionary class struggle of the Canadian proletariat as a whole,” the cpc formed a Slavic Bureau which worked at establishing separate language section clubs and newspapers for those Slavic immigrant workers that were unorganized. Nine months after the cpc resolution appeared, the Toronto newspaper Borba (The Struggle) was launched for South Slavic immigrant workers in Canada.

Before the 1 November 1931 launch of Toronto’s Borba, Croatian and other South Slavic immigrants in Canada who were supporters of the working class, members of trade-unions, or were cpc sympathizers or members, relied on the immigrant press published south of the border. The cpc supported the distribution of the radical immigrant labour press from the US into Canada as a preliminary step in establishing contacts and nurturing connections among South Slavic immigrant workers in Canada. However, at the request [End Page 203] of diplomats of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Canadian government began to prohibit the entry into Canada of these American-based newspapers. This included the Chicago newspaper Radnik (The Worker), which was barred from Canada in 1929. Subsequent efforts in Chicago to publish the newspaper Borba and then Iskra (The Spark), specifically for South Slavs in Canada, met the same fate.

In an effort to reach out to the predominantly unskilled South Slavic mining, forestry, railway, and construction workers in Canada, the cpc and the Canadian Labor Defense League (cldl) also appointed several activists, including the Croats Tomo Čačić (1896–1969) and Edo Jardas (1901–1980), and the Serb Miloš Grubić (1899–1995), to organize these workers. Among the initial efforts taken by Čačić and Jardas to reach out to these workers was to print the Vancouver bulletin Neuposleni radnik (The Unemployed Worker) in 1931 and to distribute it throughout the mining and logging camps of British Columbia and Alberta.

During this period, one of the grassroots contacts that Čačić, Jardas, and Grubić relied upon was the Anyox, BC miner Marko P. Hećimović (1894–1967). Hećimović had been a regular subscriber to Chicago’s Radnik at the time that it was banned in Canada. For this reason, he was contacted to engage and encourage his co-workers to subscribe to and donate to the anticipated launch of Toronto’s Borba. In the reminiscences that follow, Hećimović reveals that key South Slavic members of the cpc and officials of the cldl were in touch with him. He also shares his first encounter with Jardas, describing from his perspective the series of events that led to Jardas assuming the editorship of Borba after Čačić was arrested in Toronto on 12 August 1931 for membership in an unlawful organization and for seditious conspiracy.

Hećimović wrote his reminiscences in 1939 for the Toronto newspaper Slobodna misao (Free Thought), a publication of the Croatian Educational Association (cea). This newspaper was launched on 15 September 1936 as a successor publication to Borba. The change in name and focus of the newspaper was in response to the decisions of the Seventh Congress of the World Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) held in July 1935. By adopting the softer sounding Slobodna misao (Free Thought) as the name of the newspaper, the cea hoped that a broader readership could be reached among the predominantly working-class Croatian immigrant community. This was in keeping with the Comintern’s conscious decision to move away from sectarianism and...

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