Vlado Gotovac, the father of modern Croatian liberalism and a tireless fighter for an independent, democratic, anti-nationalist died on December 7th aged 70.
A seminal figure, he was jailed by the Tito regime and marginalised by the nationalism and bloodshed that followed the collapse of communism in Yugoslavia. But his last year saw a glorious vindication of his life's work, with proteges and colleagues taking power in Zagreb and embarking on a radical reversal of a decade of the corruption, bigotry and despotism of the late President Franjo Tudjman.
Contemporaries and rivals, Vlado Gotovac and Tudjman represented the two poles of modern Croatian politics. They both came of age politically in the Croatian Spring of the late 1960s, when an intoxicating revival of culture, arts and politics was snuffed out by Tito. Both were jailed by the communists.
But by 1989, with communism collapsing and Yugoslavia disintegrating, Tudjman formed his nationalist Croatian Democratic Union, while Vlado Gotovac founded the Croatian Social Liberal Union, which is now in coalition government with the social democrats of Prime Minister Ivica Racan.
A warm and inspirational man, Vlado Gotovac was a workaholic - a poet, essayist, broadcaster, journalist, party leader, MP and presidential candidate. He was one of the finest public speakers in Croatia, but as party and opposition leader, his lack of organisational flair was his biggest weakness.
He was born in the poor mountain town of Imotski, in the Dalmatian hinterland. His father, a policeman in pre-war royal Yugoslavia, was jailed for three years by the communists at the end of the second World War; his wife joined him in prison.
In the 1950s, Vlado Gotovac studied philosophy and Italian in Zagreb, but, in 1972, he too was incarcerated in the same jail at Stara Gradiska after leading the Matica Hrvatska, the Croatian cultural organisation that was one of the engines of the Croatian Spring.
Released in 1974, he resumed his political activism, and was jailed again in 1977 after giving an interview to Swedish television which upset the Belgrade regime.
By the 1990s, Vlado Gotovac had become a father figure to a younger generation of Zagreb democrats and intellectuals.
On a rainy Zagreb evening in the summer of 1991, as Slobodan Milosevic's paramilitaries and the Yugoslav army launched their land grab in Yugoslavia, Vlado Gotovac transfixed a large crowd outside the Yugoslav military headquarters with an emotional address that was one of his finest moments. Hundreds wept openly as he provided a moral compass, just as ethnic cleansing and pogroms were being instigated.
"I love you," he told the crowd. "And if I have to choose between dying with you and living with the terrorist generals, I choose death. If we don't have weapons, we still have the power of our love, the power of our dignity, the power of our readiness to die if we can't live as human beings."
In 1997, Vlado Gotovac and Tudjman squared off in the race for the presidency, which Tudjman won comfortably, though not before one of his bodyguards had made an abortive assassination attempt on Vlado Gotovac while he was campaigning in the port of Pula.
Endless infighting among the opposition saw Vlado Gotovac quit the party he founded after a row with its leader, Drazen Budisa, in 1998. He established the smaller LS, or liberal party. He was an LS MP when he died. After his first wife, Vlasta, died, he married Simona Sandric in 1993. He leaves a daughter, Ana, from his first marriage.