This essay about the situation at the University of Zagreb after the Second World War is deposited in the Dinko Tomašić Collection. Tomašić consulted it in his research into Yugoslav communism. Stjepan Kuhar, a medical student, escaped from Croatia, and on that occasion wrote a short essay in Graz on events and circumstances at the University of Zagreb in 1952. Kuhar was convinced that the communist revolution was not only a simple change of elites at the top of society, but also an attempt to forge a “new man,” which was supposed to be one of the centrepieces of education “according to the law of dialectical and historical materialism,” i.e., in line with the new ideology of communism.

In the process of converting the universities into communist universities, Kuhar highlighted three obstacles that stood in the way of the communist government:  the lack of teaching staff and textbook materials to promote communist doctrine, and resistance by students and professors themselves to the ideologization of university courses and university life. Something that intensely characterized life at the post-war universities was the “dictatorship of Partisan students” who tended to abuse their privileges, not respecting the standard university hierarchy and internal rules. Their “purges” of political opponents affected not only students but some professors from the Faculty of Medicine (Rikard Hauptfeld, Zvonimir Kušević), which entailed their withdrawal from the university.