79
strain (»heroes of the struggle should be followed by heroes of labor«), the people
became more and more disappointed.
Especially in the case of political emigration the anti-myth immediately began to arise,
and was based on the view that socialism (communism) in Yugoslavia and Slovenia was
merely a copy of the Soviet system and that the »Iron Curtain« reached all the way to
Trieste, as had been said in the speech by the then former British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill in Fulton in March 1946. The emigrant politicians at that time began
to generate ideas of two Slovenias: the communist one within Yugoslavia and a
democratic one, which was to originate from the part of Slovene territory that belonged
under the ally military and Yugoslav military administration (for this purpose the
Rapallo border was to be preserved).
83
Also within the leading class – particularly with
the former strongest allies of the communists, i.e. the Christian Socialists – doubts began
to appear, as well as harsh criticism of the new system. Doubts were openly expressed
mostly by Edvard Kocbek, who was still convinced in the first few months of the war
that European socialism will occur with a greater acknowledgement of the European
democratic tradition and with a more intense connection of theory and practice as the
Russian example, »with a new relation towards myth and criticism«.
84
After the war he
completely changed his view. At a meeting of the CK of the KPS in October 1946,
which had been convened at his request, he said among other things: »The Communist
Party holds all state authority, both legislative and executive, has a decisive influence
over courts, and the army; it controls the secret political police; it runs the official
political organization; it appoints the secretaries of all the LF committees, who do all the
actual decision-making in all the towns, districts and counties. The Party controls all the
mass organizations, the LF, Women's Anti-Fascist Front and the Youth Alliance of
Slovenia. It controls all the press there exists. It regulates the unions, the physical
education. It focuses on the school system and education with a special zeal. The Party
members control all the key economic posts that were passed over to state property.
Outside of the Party there is not a single autonomous and from it independent
organization. The Party's authority is therefore total.«
85
In the journal, Kocbek wrote that
83
More on the topic: Janko Pleterski: Predlog za ohranitev rapalske meje in delitev Slovenije, Acta Histirae VI,
Koper 1998).
84
Edvard Kocbek, Pred viharjem, Ljubljana 1980, p. 44.
85
Edvard Kocbek, speech at the CK of the KPS on October 4, 1946, published in the magazine 2000, no. 50-51,
1990, p. 215.
80
»the Party has forgotten that we are in Europe; that we should respect the plurality of life
and spirit more than in Russia; that our revolution was something specific; that it is
behaving immorally; that it is forgetting the help received from the Allies; that it is
sinking in an ever greater brutality and vulgarity of the greatest boors; that it is creating a
feeling of demoralization and sterility among the educated persons; that it is causing the
growth of unbridled passions in the countryside (hatred, violence, lies, excesses)«.
86
The conflict with the Information Bureau (1948) brought two new myths. The first was
derived from a thesis that the Yugoslav Communist Party had already begun to develop
self-management during the war (in the form of a people's authority) and that the conflict
with the Information Bureau was merely a logical consequence of the different views
between the Soviet and Yugoslav communist parties. Self-management was supposedly,
according to the theses of the time, »as old as the idea of humanism itself«,
87
which was
also collaborated by historiography until the middle of the eighties.
88
In historiography
there are known examples of misunderstandings that had occurred already during the
war and immediately after it between both parties (and later on also in the Soviet-
Yugoslav relations). These had occurred during the war because the SU subordinated its
conduct to the relations with the Allies and demanded the same from the liberation
movement in Yugoslavia. For that reason it rejected all »premature« revolutionary
measures and also measures directed towards the government in exile and King Peter
(this is referred to by e.g. the issue of the proletarian brigades or their designations – the
sickle and hammer; the issue of the execution of the so-called second phase of the
revolution; the issue of establishing AVNOJ at Bihač as a political and not an
86
Edvard Kocbek, Dnevnik 1946, Ljubljana 1991.
87
Edvard Kardelj, Sistem socialističkog samoupravljanja u Jugoslaviji, Privredni pregled, year XXVI, 1977, p.
9.
88
Such a view was advocated as late as 1969 e.g. by Vladimir Dedijer in the book Izgubljeni boj J. V. Stalina
[The Battle Stalin Lost]. Critical evaluation then gradually strengthened, with the period after Tito's death being
a more prominent turning point, even though in the first half of the eighties in Yugoslavia and Slovenia certain
historians still argued that self-management had not begun after the conflict with the Information Bureau and as
an alternative to the Soviet model, but (as had been claimed by Edvard Kardelj) already during the war (see e.g.
Jerca Vodušek - Starič, Začetki samoupravljanja v Sloveniji: 1949-53, Maribor 1983). Among the more
reverberating books that had (in addition to a number of articles in scientific newspapers) in the second half of
the eighties established a critical distance were Pirjevec's Tito, Stalin in zahod [Tito, Stalin and the West] (1985
Italian and 1987 Slovene edition), Bilandžič's Istorija SFRJ [History of the SFRY] (1985) and Bekič's
Jugoslavija u hladnom ratu [Yugoslavia in the Cold War] (1988). At the end of the eighties also the then most
prominent expert on contemporary Yugoslav history Branko Petranovič wrote that »even after 1948 Yugoslavia
remained a communist state« (Istorija Jugoslavije 1918-1988 [The History of Yugoslavia 1918-1988], Beograd
1989, p. 240) and that the Yugoslav theoretical thought (»until that time paralyzed by Stalinist ideological
totalitarianism«) had only after the conflict with the Information Bureau directed itself towards »the discovery of
new paths of the revolution« (ibidem, p. 288).
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