RADIĆ, STJEPAN. - Croatian politician, brother of Ante, b. at Trebarjevo Desno on 11 June 1871, d. at Zagreb on 8 Aug. 1928. While still a student he was repeatedly arrested and finally expelled from the University of Zagreb (1895) for political reasons.
He subsequently studied at Prague, and then from 1897 to 1899 at Paris, where he graduated in political science, defending a thesis on La Croatie actuelle et les Slaves du Sud (Paris 1899). He repeatedly visited the principal European centres (Paris, London, Vienna, Prague, and Moscow), as well as countless Croatian villages, always propagating his social and political ideas. With his brother Ante he founded the Croatian Popular Peasant Party (1904), which soon became the strongest political movement. In 1919 he sent a memorandum to the Peace Conference at Versailles, requesting for the Croats also the right of self-determination. Although a believer, in his relations with the Church he was unable to show himself free of strong secularist tendencies. First in the struggle against the Hungarians and then, after 1918, against Serbian hegemony and centralism, R. established himself as a formidable political adversary, so that on 20 June 1928 he was mortally wounded in the Belgrade Parliament by the Serbian deputy Puniša Račić. He was also a prolific social and political writer.