Mirjana Markovic

Mirjana Markovic was Slobodan Milosevic's wife from their teens, a sociology professor, and the leader of a party that shared power with his, and she is usually described as the most influential person around him. She was born in a partisan camp during the war; her mother was executed as a collaborator by the partisans themselves, or by the Germans, depending on which account is followed, and the ambiguity followed her for life. She met Milosevic at school in Pozarevac and they were rarely apart afterwards. She taught Marxist sociology at Belgrade University, wrote a regular magazine column whose contents were read closely for signals about who was about to be dismissed, and founded the Yugoslav Left in 1994, a party of orthodox communists and businessmen that entered coalition with her husband's Socialists. Officials she criticised in print tended to lose their posts within weeks. She was widely blamed for the nationalist turn in the late 1980s and for the promotion of figures such as Radovan Karadzic, and she disliked the war and the sanctions while defending both. After Milosevic fell in 2000 she was charged in Serbia in connection with an apartment given to a family friend and, separately, was named in the investigation into the killing of the former president Ivan Stambolic, her husband's political patron whom he had removed and who was abducted and shot in 2000. She fled to Russia in 2003 and was granted asylum. Milosevic died in custody at The Hague in 2006. She died in Sochi in 2019, still under indictment.

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