During World War II and the Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia regime which controlled the country, the paper served as the primary media publication of the Yugoslav Partisans movement.

The August 1941 edition of the paper featured the statement "Smrt fašizmu, sloboda narodu" (transl.

Death to fascism, freedom to the people) on the cover, which was afterwards accepted as the official slogan of the entire resistance movement and was often quoted in post-war Yugoslavia.

Its heyday was between 1952 and 1977 when its Wednesday edition (Vjesnik u srijedu or VUS) regularly achieved circulations of 100,000 and was widely read across Yugoslavia.

[5] Following Croatia's independence and the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s its circulation steadily began to dwindle, as Vjesnik came under the control of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), at the time the ruling conservative party.