The Slovenians saw the extremes of the totalitarian drama of the 20th century. On one side they experienced an extraordinary national rise from in the beginning of the century a community connected by a language and cultural peculiarities, to the start of national formation in First Yugoslavia to limited statehood in the socialist republic in Second Yugoslavia. In 1991, the democratic and independent state was created. The leadership of the communist party of Yugoslavia became extremely Stalinistic before the World War II. The communist party of Slovenia was created in 1937. The German attack on The Soviet Union in June 1941, provoked Slovenian communists to start fighting against the occupation and to enact the Bolshevik revolution. The first goal of the communists was to win the civil war, which was achieved with mass murders of Slovenians. At the end of the World War II, the communist partisan movement was a part of the victorious anti-fascist coalition and it won the civil war against the Slovenian anticommunists. The basic goal of the victorious communists was to execute the Bolshevik revolution. In the period from 1945 to 1955, the worst offensives in the party’s civil war against Slovenia and its inhabitants take place, it is the time of the implementation of the Leninist – Stalinist revolutionary model. Many core turning points are reached. In the second half of the 1950s, the hard revolutionary model could no longer sustain its development, characteristic Yugoslav crises began and the centre of the development/disintegration of Yugoslavia in the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties was moved to the deterioration of relations among Yugoslav nations and economic crises.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 33099821Communism in Yugoslavia, particularly in Slovenia, in contrast to Communism in others eastern countries, came to power by its own power, without the intervention of the Soviet army. The first period of tough repression after the revolutionary victory in 1945 indicates an obvious suppression of human's rights. According to the constitutional concept of a people's democracy, which was defined by Communist ideology between 1945–1953, authority in the State should belong to the people or to a representative body elected from among them. Direct and severe mass violations of human rights were typical and also essential freedoms were violated, often with brutal force. This was a period of revolutionary violence and terror needed for the Party to take power and gain strength. The main characteristics are: installment of a single party system/autocracy from 1944 onwards and absence of independent legislative, government and judicial branches; early enforcement of a soviet modeled legal system that implied a number of violations of civil rights in legal actions (i. e. arrests and interrogations by secret police, nighttime interrogations and other means of coercion, absence of counsel, absence of defense witnesses in court, coercion into becoming a secret police agent or informant); mass killings in summer 1945; concentration camps and forced labor; resettlement of border line population; dissolution of societies, political parties, newspapers; persecution and prosecution of clergy, catholic and other religious organizations and societies; csorship; control over economy, nationalization, confiscation, state ownership and planning; compulsory membership in state cooperatives, control of machinery and other agricultural means, persecution of wealthy peasants and prosecution of ‘saboteurs’.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 33221677In 2008, the Study Centre for National Reconciliation began working on a large–scale research project entitled Revolutionary Violence in Slovenia 1941–1945. The goal of the research is to comprehensively display revolutionary violence during the Second World War in individual Slovenian regions. The Study Centre will prepare and issue several monographs which, along with introductory studies, will feature documents and testimonies on this research topic; they will be issued in a series entitled Revolutionary Violence. The authors will present the different forms of violence inflicted upon the civilian population during the Second World War by Partisan units, members of the Security and Intelligence Service, the Department for the Protection of the People, the Army of State, Corps of National Liberation of Yugoslavia, National Guard and field operatives. They will also present the actions of military courts and expose the death sentences they imposed and the violence against members of Partisan fighter units. They will illustrate, using concrete examples, the most typical examples of revolutionary violence, among which are the torture and executions of so–called enemies of the state, for which members of the Partisan movement used the terms “liquidation” and “justification”; the expulsion of the families of so–called enemies of the state from their places of residence; the burning of villages and individual homesteads of so–called enemies of the state; the implementation of violent requisitions and rape and various other forms of intimidation of the people.
C.07 Other editorial board
COBISS.SI-ID: 33257517