Dr. sc. Mihael Sobolevski (Sobolewski) was born on September 4, 1938 in Dombrava near Bosanski Novi. His mother Jozefina Woloszyn was a housewife, and his father Stanislav was a miner. The town of Dombrava was founded at the end of the 19th century by Polish colonists from the area of ​​southern Poland, which was then part of the Habsburg Monarchy. In the autumn of 1941, M. Sobolevski’s family, like the rest of the Polish population, fled from that area, his family in Slavonia, to the town of Dragovce in the municipality of Nova Kapela, near Nova Gradiška. After primary school, he attended a real gymnasium in Slavonska Požega, and graduated in history in January 1963 at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. In April 1982, he defended his doctoral dissertation The Workers’ Movement in Gorski Kotar and the Croatian Littoral 1919-1929. at the Department of History, Faculty of Philosophy in Zadar, University of Split.
He worked at the Institute for the History of the Croatian Workers’ Movement (1962-1966) in positions ranging from archival assistant to research assistant in the Department of the National Liberation War (NOR); at the Homeland Museum in Ogulin (1967-1974) as a curator, and from 1974 as acting museum director and at the Museum of the National Revolution in Rijeka (1975-1976) as a curator. In his ten-year career in museum activities, he founded the Homeland Museum in Ogulin and established all of its museum collections (historical, archaeological, ethnographic, memorial room
Ivana Brlić Mažuranić and Josip Broz Tito), and developed a publishing activity. In Rijeka, he worked with a group of museum workers in the newly built building of the Museum of the People’s Revolution (today the Museum of the City of Rijeka) on the permanent museum exhibition. Since he wanted to engage exclusively in scientific work on the research of contemporary Croatian history, he was employed at the Center for the History of the Workers’ Movement and the Homeland War of Istria, the Croatian Littoral and Gorski Kotar in Rijeka (1967-1989), working in various positions: senior professional associate, professional advisor, senior scientific associate and director (1983-1988). During that period, the focus of his scientific and research activities was on the history of that part of Western Europe.
Croatia from 1918 to 1945. From the end of 1989 he worked as a senior research associate at the Institute for the History of the Croatian Workers’ Movement in Zagreb, soon renamed the Institute for Contemporary History, and then the current Croatian Institute of History. There, on 28 June 1991, he was elected acting executive body of the Basic Organization of Associated Labor for Scientific Research, performing this duty until the reorganization of the Institute the following year. At the same time, from 1991 until his retirement at the end of 1998, he was the project leader: “Human Losses of Croatia in the Second World War”. Now, as an external associate, he participates in the work on the institute project led by Dr. Marin Manin “History of Istria: Systems, Institutions, Society and Identity in the 19th and 20th Centuries”.