Lev Centrih: On the Significance of the Communist Party of Slovenia during The Second World War and its Aftermath

For the last two decades we have been witnessing an immense debate on the character of the Second World War in Slovenia which usually gets even more intensified each time when there are media reports on fresh discoveries of (mass) graves containing the remains of anti–partisan fighters. Every time these new discoveries mobilize all spheres in or out of the establishment, from journalists to political parties, artists, war veterans, survived victims and their relatives, clerics and theologians, philosophers, professional historians etc. Consequently we face polyphony, a wide range of interpretations, in many cases connected with moral–juridical problem about the accountability of mass killings. They include discourses on class racism, genocide and also demands of contextualization of atrocities with all–European inter/after war (political–military) situation. The vast majority of these interpretations share the same point of departure for their claims, no matter how different they may appear otherwise. This point of departure is the Slovenian nation and its historical journey to freedom, which had recently resulted in an establishment of an independent state.

It is obvious that Slovene historiography – as a network of scientific institutions – has no publicly recognized monopoly on the subject in question, yet it is possible to see its existing efforts to win distinguished unbiased position beyond sphere of politics and ideology. I argue, for example, that such an endeavour might be detected from a two volume book, written by a group of historians, entitled Slovenska novejša zgodovina 1848 – 1992 [Slovenian Contemporary History 1848 – 1992], especially concerning the relation between the National Liberation Struggle and socialist revolution in Slovenia during the Second World War. Relying on pure narrative approach, with no critical epistemological background whatsoever, the authors reach an apparently simple and neutral conclusion that the Communist Party of Slovenia won the hegemony over the National Liberation Movement and used Slovene partisan army as its most important instrument of power to realize its strategic political goal, a socialist revolution. I argue that this limited perception of the socialist revolution - as the solo project of the Communist Party of Slovenia - implicitly attempts to establish ideological distance towards a similar synthesis of the past historiography, which was, at least partly, influenced by proto-theoretical enterprise of Edvard Kardelj. In his materialist point of departure Kardelj challenges – although contradictorily – the very ideological essence of the nation as a natural category on which current official history of the Slovenian nation is being built.

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