Stjepan Radić was a politician and author dedicated to the political and cultural enlightenment of Croatian peasantry. With his brother Antun Radić, he launched the Dom newspaper and founded the Croatian (People’s) Peasant Party, in order to enable peasants, who comprised the majority of the Croatian population, to participate in Croatian politics.

He gained a reputation for his political activities already in his youth, as a student of law in Zagreb, Prague and Budapest. Throughout his life, he frequently faced prosecution and imprisonment because of his political views. He participated in the constitution of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. In 1918, his warning to the Croatian Parliament, “Do not rush headlong into this like geese into fog!”, was a harbinger of the political fate that would befall the Croatian people after unification with the Kingdom of Serbia. In the early 1920s, his party became the biggest Croatian political party and the strongest opponent to Greater-Serbian policy.

His life was violently extinguished in the aftermath of the 1928 shooting in the National Assembly in Belgrade, when a representative from the Serbian Radical Party fired at a group of Croatian representatives from the Croatian Peasant Party. The assassination, which had been planned by the country’s political leadership, resulted in the deaths of Pavle Radić and Đuro Basariček, while Stjepan Radić was fatally wounded. His fight for democracy and the Croatian national interests united the Croatian people and left a deep imprint on its historical memory.