Drama at the Brewery

Sincere faith and sincere idealism rarely bring anything good to the person who believes in them and adheres strictly to their principles. The best indicator of this is a case from Skopje that has long since succumbed to the ravages of time to the extent that even Google remains deaf and mute when searching for it.

Tome Stojanovski, a 34-year-old electrician from the village of Gorno Konjari, was a poster-boy for Yugoslav socialism and workers' self-government. After finishing primary school, he went to Skopje to learn a trade at the Kuzman Josifovski factory, from where he went to serve in the Yugoslav National Army to return and get a job at the Ministry of Labor. From there, he found his way to the Skopje Brewery in early 1965. Hardworking, hardworking and honest to the point of naivety, Tome was a member of all possible youth and `senior` communist organizations, a member of the workers` council of the enterprises in which he worked and in the Brewery he quickly became the president of the union branch. Maybe he was on a sure path to becoming the Macedonian Alija Sirotanović, who knows?

And everything would have been phenomenal and the road to Marx`s paradise open if Tome, due to his character, had not come into conflict with the reality in which the factory management was prone to malfeasance. Although ridiculous from today`s point of view, the irregularities in the work of the directors expressed in the protection of `suitable` employees, the employment of relatives and their placement in less demanding jobs as well as the promotion of the position that logically belonged to Tome - led to an unexpected climax...

Tome, as a union member, often criticized and called to account the managers of the Brewery who were city powerhouses at that time. Tome was probably a true supporter of self-management, but what did that matter to him when he was fired from his job in January 1966? Tome believed in the system and raised the issue of his dismissal before the municipal party committee...a move that not only did not help him but also led to his expulsion from the party!

Tome had planned to go to court to prove that he was right - when rumors spread by several factory snitches reached his ears that he had allegedly slept on the job, peeked into the women's toilets, was mentally ill, and many other similar stories that deeply offended the honest Tome. The bottom was reached in the last days of his employment, when he did not find support from his colleagues who privately supported him but kept quiet in public so as not to resent the management.

And what should Tome do now?

All he had left was a lot of anger and a Zbrojevka pistol in the popular 7.65mm caliber. And so, on February 10, 1966, Tome returned to the brewery for the last time under the pretext of having to pay off a debt about the tools. In the tool room, he expected to find the two informants he had learned had slandered him, engineer Vlado Hristovski, whom he killed immediately with a single shot to the head, and technician Božo Dapcevski, who was killed in an identical manner. From there, Tome continued his march to the administrative building, where he found director Kiro Vaninski, who had come out to see what was happening - and received three bullets from point blank range. The fourth victim was secretary Ljubo Dodevski, into whom he fired the remaining three bullets in the office.

Tome went outside, left his gun on the ground and said something like ``I finished my job, I did what had to be done. Call the police.'' He waited for the police and went into custody without any resistance.

The liquidation of four people was something unheard of at that time, poor in serious crimes and serial killers, phenomena that would appear much later, with the transition. Even more shocking was that Tome was not a delinquent or in any way connected to crime and violence - on the contrary, he was a hardworking and respected member of society. At the trial, he said that he wanted to fight with weapons against the bureaucracy and officials who made the life of every honest person miserable, claims that did not help him at all.

He was sentenced to death by shooting, later, after many appeals, the case reached the Supreme Court of Yugoslavia, which unexpectedly replaced his death sentence with life imprisonment. With the closed door of the cell in Idrizovo, the story of Tome Stojanovski, who was a Vigilante slightly before Harry Roberts was cool, also closed. The further fate of Tome is unknown; if he was 34 then, he would be 93 today, so it is not inconceivable that he would still be alive. How long he spent in prison, whether he was pardoned, whether he experienced the collapse of the system and what happened remains a mystery.

Some would say that this type of justice is suspicious and morally `dubious`, but from the current perspective there is no reason to condemn Tome... one can only regret that there are no more such characters nowadays.

(Roger Mortis, 077)