Women of Goli Otok

Abstract

Ljubinka Škodrić. Žene Golog otoka. (Kažnjenice zbog Informbiroa u Jugoslaviji). Beograd : Vukotić media, 2025. 367 pp. ISBN 978-86-81510-96-4

The monograph Women of Goli otok by Ljubinka Škodrić, a senior research associate at the Institute for Contemporary History in Belgrade, and a specialist in women’s history during the World War II, is an exploration of women’s experiences in Yugoslavia’s conflict with the Informburo, an organization founded by the Soviet Union in 1947. Also known as the Tito–Stalin conflict, it was the resistance of a smaller and weaker state to a larger and stronger one, and also the resistance of an individual to the pressures from the authorities and the collective. Goli otok, the Yugoslav gulag, is synonymous with the anti-Stalinist struggle using Stalinist methods. Accused of sympathizing with the Informburo, over 1,000 women served their sentences in various prisons and camps between 1948 and 1956. The author’s task was to provide an integral view of women’s experiences during that period, as well as the consequences and traces of the conflict that were not erased even until the end of the existence of the Yugoslav state.