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New Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Serbia)

Nova komunistička partija Jugoslavije - NKPJ

Presentation of the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia
Flag of the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia
- Newer flag (2013)
- Older flag (1995-2013)
- Earlier flag
League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia

See also:

Presentation of the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia

The 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 informations about its activities anywhere outside Serbia and Montenegro nowadays. The party Statutes (text), adopted on 21 December 1995, reflects that intention.

After the end of Serbia and Montenegro in 2006, the Montenegrin branch continued as the New Communist Party of Montenegro (Nova komunisticčka partija Crne Gore), but it is not clear whether it still exists there, since there have been no reports about its activity. The Serbian branch has continued under the original name and although it was de-registered in 2010, having failed to fulfill the registration conditions according to current legislation, it is still active.

Tomislav Todorović, 15 November 2014

Flag of the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia

The flag of the party is prescribed in Article 7 of the party's Statutes.

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 the letters "NKPJ" in gold colour. The letters may be written either in Cyrillic or Latin alphabet.
All organizations of the 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 the centre of the seal is the drawing of the symbol of the party - five-pointed star, sickle and hammer.

Only flags with Cyrillic letters, the primary alphabet of Serbian language, were seen in real life so far. However, the provision about the use of both scripts is still part of the Statutes, so the existence of flags with Latin letters, theoretical at least, may not be excluded.

Tomislav Todorović, 15 November 2014

Newer flag

Flag of the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia, with Cyrillic or Latin letters - Images by Tomislav Todorović, 15 November 2014

A newer variant of the flag employs the emblem in which the hammer and sickle are all gold, as prescribed by the Statutes, but so is the star, which is supposed to be red. This could be influenced by the emblem of party youth wing, which is the most active part of the movement. Such flags were seen in Belgrade on 12 June 2013 (photo), 24 March 2014 (photo) and 30 June 2014 (photo).

Tomislav Todorović, 15 November 2014

Older flag

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

The party flags used in real life, however, differ from the description given in the Statutes: 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's Statutes.

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 No. 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.

The flag sometimes has a gold fimbriation along the top, fly and bottom edges (photo, 15 June 2013), although it is not prescribed in the party's Statutes.
The typeface, not specified in the Statutes, may also vary (photo).

Tomislav Todorović, 15 November 2014

Earlier flag

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

The New Communist Party of Yugoslavia 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 a red field. This was chosen as a symbol of ideological (though not legal) continuity with the early Communist Party of Yugoslavia (named since 1952 the 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 the party was founded, until adoption of its Statutes in 1995.

As well as in the case of the present flag, only flags with Cyrillic letters were seen in real life.
The image of the flag with Latin letters is a reconstruction. However, all the remarks on existence of the flag 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).

Tomislav Todorović, 30 September 2004

League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia

Flags of the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia - Images by Tomislav Todorović, 15 November 2014

The League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia (Savez komunističke omladine Jugoslavije - SKOJ; website) is the youth wing of the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia. It was founded in 1992 and named after the youth wing of the original Communist Party of Yugoslavia (presentation).

Its emblem, which appears in the center of a red flag, is based on that of the party, but seems to be a recent creation. It consists of hammer, sickle and star, all in gold, surrounded by two semi-circular segments in red, bordered gold and charged with the abbreviation "SKOJ", in Latin script at the top and in Cyrillic script at the bottom.
The flag was seen in Belgrade on 18 February 2013 (photo), 12 March 2013 (photo, photo), and 9 May 2013 (photo).
The flag also has a variant with the emblem in white instead of gold. It was seen in Sarajevo in February 2014 (photo), where it was brought by the SKOJ members who joined the then country-wide unrest out of solidarity with local leftist groups. The two variants appeared together at the Second Anti-Fascist Summer Camp helf in Barajevo in August 2014 (photos).

Tomislav Todorović, 15 November 2014