Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

54 THE TURNING POINT: 1986–87
several locations, meeting the same fate as that awaiting Croatian soldiers and
Ustaša militias sent back by the British. 56
The communists had been less numerous in pre-war Slovenia and had had
little influence even in intellectual circles. When they decided on action after the
German attack on the Soviet Union, they had to attract people to their Liberation
Front. They had some success recruiting from a circle of left-oriented Christian
Socialists associated with novelist Edvard Kocbek, a left-oriented wing of the
earlier Sokol, a group of left-wing writers and artists associated with Josip
Vidmar, as well as some people from the then Italian coast, who identified with
the Liberation Front, either out of feelings of national repression or from direct
sympathy with the communists. This did not amount to a very broad base, but it
was in any event broader than what the communist-sponsored liberation fronts
elsewhere in Yugoslavia could boast.
The communist organizations, led by physician Boris Kidrič and former trade
union functionary Franc Leškovšek, set about their work very ably. Edvard
Kardelj joined them later, coming out of his exile in Moscow via Belgrade. In the
German zone, the communists used people’s opposition to national repression
and deportation; in the Italian zone they fought above all against domestic and
political rivals and amply exploited the greater maneuvering room they enjoyed
under the Italians. Within the Liberation Front the communists grabbed the
organizational initiative everywhere, reserved the key functions, including
control of political propaganda, for themselves, removed people who contested
their leadership, and deftly shifted emphasis between national and social factors,
according to each region and its specific relationships. They led the Partisan
struggle in Slovenia as a Slovenian, but also pro-Yugoslav, affair. The
Domobranci drove them to desperate straits on several occasions. What finally
gave them the upper hand was the general course of the war and abandonment of
the idea of a Balkan landing by Allied troops. With their entry into Trieste and
southern Carinthia in May 1945, the Partisans were able to pose as champions of
long-cherished Slovenian territorial goals.
Communist rule in Slovenia was by no means any milder or more moderate
than elsewhere. There may have been communists who regretted the end of the
Slovenian Partisan war in centralized Yugoslav post-war communism, but there
was no real resistance against those tendencies for centralization. Certainly,
neither Trieste nor Carinthia became Slovenian, but most of the hitherto Italian
districts inhabited entirely or in part by Slovenes were transferred to Yugoslavia,
and thus to Slovenia. The so-called Zone B of the never realized Free Territory
of Trieste remained under Yugoslav administration and brought Slovenia a port—
Koper (Capodistria). In 1954, this zone was provisionally assigned to Yugoslavia
in the Trieste Memorandum; in 1975, the Osimo Accords confirmed this
assignment, to Slovenia’s benefit.
From the standpoint of domestic politics, however, the picture was sadder. The
Five-Year Plan introduced in 1947, which according to the famous SANU
Memorandum of 1986 had allegedly wronged Serbia, actually discriminated