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New Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro)

Nova komunistička partija Jugoslavije

Presentation of New Communist Party of Yugoslavia
Flag of New Communist Party of Yugoslavia
Former flags of New Communist Party of Yugoslavia

See also:

Serbia and Montenegro

Presentation of New Communist Party of Yugoslavia

New Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Nova komunistička partija Jugoslavije - NKPJ) was founded in 1990 as an entirely new all-Yugoslav party, with no legal connections with the former League of Communists of Yugoslavia. It was intended to keep existing as such even after the dissolution of Yugoslavia in early 1990s, although there are no information about its activities anywhere outside Serbia and Montenegro nowadays. The party Constitution, adopted on 21 December 1995, reflects that intention.

Tomislav Todorović, 30 September 2004

Flag of New Communist Party of Yugoslavia

The Constitution of the party says:

Article 7.

The symbol of the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia is a five-pointed star in red colour with a sickle and a hammer in gold colour.

The flag of the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia is in red colour. In its top left corner is the symbol of the Party. At the right side, just beside the symbol, are letters NKPJ in gold colour. The letters may be written in Cyrillic or in Latin alphabet.

All organizations of NKPJ formed on the basis of this Constitution may have their seals which, besides their territorial attributes, shall contain marks of affiliation to the NKPJ and the symbol of the Party.

The seals of the party organizations in the republics of the former Yugoslavia contain text written in Croat, Slovenian and Macedonian languages and orthographies.

In centre of the seal is drawing of the symbol of the Party - five-pointed star, sickle and hammer.

The party flags used in real life, however, differ from the description given in the Constitution in an important detail: the hammer and sickle are not gold, but red within a gold border which conjoins them into one single charge, placed beside the star. The width of the borders of the star and of the hammer and sickle changes depending to the part of the charge so as to produce the illusion of the charges as three-dimensional objects. The star has a distorted form, resembling the star from a flag of the German Communist Party used ca. 1990, so that flag from Germany might have provided the inspiration for these flags' designers.
None of these details are specified by the party Constitution. The party symbol designed like this can also be seen at the party website.

The colour shade of the charges' borders and the letters which is employed in the images is based on the symbol's images from the party website, but the exact shade employed on the flags is not fixed: it varies from yellow through gold to dark yellow or even darker. The first public appearance of the symbol I was able to record was in the KVADART magazine (Radomir Vuković, Patria Partija, KVADART #5, p. 14; Belgrade) in 1996, and the flags were seen on TV and in the press many times since then; they must have been introduced shortly after the party Constitution was adopted.

Flag of the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia, with Cyrillic or Latin letters - Images by Tomislav Todorović & Mladen Mijatov, 30 September 2004

It shall be noted that only the flag version with Cyrillic letters was seen in real life so far; it is predominant because the primary alphabet of Serbian language is Cyrillic.
The image of the version with Latin letters is a reconstruction, created by employing the Latin version of the same font as that used for the Cyrillic letters. However, it is described in the party Constitution and might be used outside Serbia and Montenegro, if the party organizations do exist there, but also in Serbia and Montenegro, in areas with mixed population, where Latin alphabet is more widely used. This is why both images are given here and, in my opinion, two versions of the flag shall be treated as equally important.

Tomislav Todorović, 30 September 2004

Former flags of New Communist Party of Yugoslavia

The New Communist Party of Yugoslavia has originally used flags similar to those of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia: a red five-pointed star in the canton, fimbriated gold and charged with gold hammer and sickle, with gold letters NKPJ beneath the star, all on red field. This was chosen as a symbol of ideological (though not legal) continuity with the early Communist Party of Yugoslavia (which since 1952 bore name League of Communists of Yugoslavia), whose flags differed only in the party name abbreviation (KPJ). I saw the flags only in 1992 elections campaign, but they must have been in use since 1990, when party was founded, until adoption of its present Constitution in 1995.

Former flag of the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia, with Cyrillic or Latin letters - Images by Tomislav Todorović & Mladen Mijatov, 30 September 2004

As well as in the case of the present flag, only the version with Cyrillic letters was seen in real life.
The image of the version with Latin letters is a reconstruction. However, all the remarks on existence of the present flag version with Latin letters stand even more for the previous flag: the equality of alphabets is not likely to have been introduced as late as in 1995 (the old Communist Party of Yugoslavia has always respected it, too), and if the party organizations outside Serbia and Montenegro have ever existed, they must have been founded before the wars in Yugoslavia had begun (1991). Both versions of the flag shall therefore, in my opinion, be considered as equal, in theory if not in practice.

Tomislav Todorović, 30 September 2004