In line with the provisions of the peace treaty with Italy, a large part of the Archdiocese of Gorizia became part of Yugoslavia on 15 September 1947; the same applies to the Diocese of Rijeka and ...part of the Diocese of Trieste-Koper. Franc Močnik became the apostolic administrator for the Yugoslav part of the dioceses of Gorizia and Trieste-Koper. Even before the annexation, activities of the Church in Zone B under Yugoslav administration had been under close surveillance; violence against priests had started and was further exacerbated after the annexation. Udba, the secret political police, launched an active “differentiation” of the clergy right after the annexation. It collected materials against undesirable priests, starting arrests and trials. Franc Močnik was driven out of the country twice by an incited mob; in 1948, he was succeeded by Mihael Toroš, who first held a different view of the authorities, collaborating with them and being a member of the Cyril-Methodius Society (CMD) at first. After four years, he changed his opinion radically, becoming a harsh critic.
After the establishment of communist rule in Yugoslavia and the elimination of all political opponents, the Catholic Church remained the only strong and well-organised institution in which the ...communists saw a possible opponent. This is why the communist authorities carried out a series of repressive and political measures in order to prevent its public activities and weaken its influence in society. Bishops and priests were assassinated or imprisoned, Church property was confiscated, religious publications and seminaries were banned, religious schools were closed and ordinands pressured to give up on studying for priestly vocations, a propaganda campaign was launched against the Church and its priests, priests were scrutinized (especially through clerical associations) and recruited as informants for the secret services, and a series of other measures was carried out with the goal of weakening the influence of the Church in society. The main operational role in the implementation of these measures was played by law enforcement services, primarily the State Security Administration and the other services of the Secretariat of the Interior as well as the Counterintelligence Service, which concerned itself mostly with ecclesiastical persons performing compulsory military service in the Yugoslav People’s Army. These services’ annual reports for Croatia from 1951 to 1965 and their analyses and studies, which only became available to the public in the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb in 2017, offer us insights into law enforcement’s views on the conditions in the Catholic Church, their assessments of its ‘hostile’ activities, and the ways in which they planned their activities and carried out certain anti-Church measures. In addition, this paper is the first to present the actual numerical indicators of priests and other Church officials or persons closely connected to the work of the Church who were in various ways employed as a part of the collaborator networks of communist secret services in their activities regarding the Catholic Church in the stated period. It is important to highlight that the vast majority of these persons agreed to collaborate due to pressure or blackmail, for the most part failed to produce the results that the State Security Administration had expected of them, and were therefore often removed from the collaborator network. The State Security Administration benefited little from this network, and the fact that it failed to achieve its goals in its struggle against the Catholic Church confirms this.
At the end of May 1950, the Gornja Radgona department of the State Security Administration (UDV Gornja Radgona) arrested Ivan Štrafela Don, and the Party’s district committee questioned him and ...accused him of overt action against the state as a Cominform member. He admitted almost all of the actions he was being accused of and was willing to present them before the workers and the members of the Party as well. At the end of October 1950, after being expelled from the Party, the District Court in Maribor sentenced him to eight years of imprisonment with forced labour and five years of loss of civil and political rights. The attempts of the convict’s wife to achieve a lower punishment were unsuccessful; however, Štrafela was nonetheless pardoned in 1955, and he returned home. He did less demanding and responsible work in the industry and local politics, but he remained under surveillance and was preventively detained during Tito’s visit in the Pomurje region (in 1966 and 1969). His wife’s attempts to achieve a revision of the procedure after his death (1986) were unsuccessful between 1999 and 2001.
Paper analyses political fall of Stanko Opačić Ćanica in year 1950, his arrest, interrogation, incarceration on Goli otok labor camp and subsequent surveillance after the release by the Yugoslav ...secret police. The paper is based on State security documents, scientific literature, published documents and oral history of former Goli otok inmates. The goal of this paper is contribution to the analysis of causes and consequences of Opačić’s political fall, closely tied to the fate of so called “ministerial troika“, group of Serbian ministers in the government of Peoples Republic of Croatia. This case is, of course, part of wider analysis on causes of purges of real alleged supporters to Soviet Union during the
Tito-Stalin split.
As with the other communist-governed states, socialist Yugoslavia had a broadly developed state and military security apparatus. The article describes the initial steps of the Department for the ...People’s Protection (locally known as the OZNA). Since May of 1944, its role was to purge the so-called “enemies of the people” in the last days of the war and set up interior affairs organizations in all the Yugoslav republics, following their liberation. This service included the Military Counterintelligence branch as its “Third Component”, until the constitutional changes in the spring of 1946. Then, the OZNA split into two services: the Department for the State Security (UDBA) and the Counterintelligence Service in the Yugoslav Army (KOS). In the period up to the summer of 1948, the UDBA – State Security, dealt with all kind of “enemies of the people” in the civilian life of Tito’s Yugoslavia. After the break with the Soviet Union and other Cominform countries, both services, the UDBA and the KOS combined their efforts in combating all the pro-Stalin or pro-Soviet activities. The Counterintelligence Service had the difficult task of controlling the numerous army members that had previously been trained in the Soviet Union. Both services developed mechanisms and widened their structure and organization in society. The Federal-level UDBA was responsible for conducting intelligence activities against the neighboring Communist countries, controlling any possible security threats against the Yugoslav state. It was also tasked with running the notorious camp for the Cominform supporters at the Goli otok (Desolate Island) in the Adriatic, established in 1949. The period between 1949 and 1953 was the high point of security activities of both services. After Stalin’s death in March of 1953 and Yugoslavia’s siding with the United States and NATO, the pressure from the East was eased. It led to changes in both services: important downsizing of personnel and a certain de-brutalization of the UDBA methods, which had been part of the fight against the Soviet supporters in the previous period. A new Intelligence Service was formed from the I Department of the UDBA, in the Foreign Affairs Ministry. In 1955, the Army Counterintelligence Service was transformed into the Military Security Service with the establishing of the Military Police. In the State Security apparatus, further changes occurred in 1966, after Tito ousted Aleksandar Ranković, the Yugoslav vice-president, who had established and controlled the Yugoslav state security services from the very beginning. Regardless of the changes, both services remained influential until the 1991/92 war and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The article was written based upon the partially revealed state security service archival sources in the Archives of Yugoslavia, different local archives, as well as in-depth research of the military security service sources in the Military Archives in Belgrade, still less known even among the domestic scientific public in Serbia and in the former Yugoslavia.
Ljubo Sirc was a member of the Stara pravda group. In 1943, he fled to Switzerland in order to explain the situation in Slovenia to the Yugoslav government and the British Allies, but they would not ...listen to him. After the Tito-Šubašič Agreement, he joined the Partisans. After the war, he was an interpreter and had contact with British, American and French representatives in Ljubljana. He also tried to organize a political opposition. Ljubo Sirc was accused of spying and treason and was sentenced to death in the so-called Nagode trial. His sentence was then commuted to twenty years of forced labour. After seven and a half years, he was set free in 1954. Because the secret police wanted him to collaborate and because he found no work, he illegally left Yugoslavia and went to Great Britain, where he was a professor of economics in Glasgow. After 34 years, he came back to Yugoslavia for the first time. His verdict was annulled, but he got only a small part of his and his family’s property restituted. In 1992, Sirc was the presidential candidate of the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia.
U početku svibnja 1941. skupina mladih ustaša pri Ustaškom stanu u
Karlovcu uhitila je i ubila trojicu Srba. Afera, poznata i kao slučaj Vujičić
(prema Milanu Vujičiću, najpoznatijoj žrtvi, ...odvjetniku i političaru)
svojedobno je zataškana, no u historiografiji i publicistici ostavila je
dubljega traga od nekih većih zlodjela. U proljeće 1947. Jugoslaviji je izručen
Vladimir Židovec, diplomat Nezavisne Države Hrvatske (NDH), koji je u doba
zločina bio tajnik karlovačkoga Ustaškog stana. On je podvrgnut intenzivnoj
istrazi u kojoj je ponudio i svoju suradnju. U poduljem i višestruko upitnom
svjedočenju on je kao inicijatora zločina teretio svojega lokalnog suparnika,
predsjednika Stana Antu Nikšića, koji je i sâm završio u diplomatskoj službi
NDH, ali je neko vrijeme bio i ministar unutarnjih poslova. Unatoč raznim
dvojbenim pojedinostima istrage, na tezi prema kojoj je Nikšić potaknuo
ubojstvo svojega osobnog prijatelja Vujičića ustraje se već desetljećima. Kao
navodno neprijeporna činjenica našla je put u leksikografsku literaturu, a i
poslužila u poopćenim kontekstualizacijama. U članku se stoga na osnovu nekih
novih saznanja nastoji ponovno razmotriti cijeli slučaj, ne radi konačnoga
odgovora, već kako bi se upozorilo na nužnost suzdržanijih interpretacija, kad
se one odnose na materijale koji su imali zadovoljiti potrebe tajnih službi.
In early May 1941, three Serbs were killed by a group of young Ustasha
militiamen assigned to the local headquarters of the Ustasha movement in the
Croatian city of Karlovac. The affair, known as »the Vujičić case« after its
best known victim, attorney and politician Milan Vujičić, was hushed up at that
time, but the case left a deeper imprint on historical studies than some of the
larger atrocities committed during the period. The case was reopened in early
1947, upon the extradition of Vladimir Židovec to Yugoslavia. Židovec was the
secretary of the local Ustaša HQ at the time of the crime, and afterwards a
diplomat in the Independent State of Croatia (ISC). Subjected to harsh
interrogation by the Yugoslav Udba secret police, Židovec offered to
collaborate and authored a lengthy but tainted testimony. He claimed that his
antagonist and formal local superior Ante Nikšić, afterwards an ISC diplomat
and minister of the interior, initiated the crime. In spite of various
important deficiencies of the inquiry, the thesis that Nikšić had instigated
the murder of his personal friend Vujičić has been reiterated over the years.
It has been incorporated into reference manuals as a proven fact, and has even
been contextualized on a larger scale. This article therefore strives to
reconsider the case on the basis of some new elements. While offering no final
answers, it points to various incongruences of the present interpretation.
Analizom narativa o arhivu i arhivskoj graði koji se pojavljuju u javnom prostoru, u ovom se radu otkriva politička i ideološka razina povezana s politikom identiteta nasuprot naizgled neutralne ...pozicije arhiva kao institucije. Fokus je na proizvodnji emocija putem tih narativa koje sudjeluju u kolektivnom identifikacijskom procesu i antagoniziranju društvenog polja. U radu se razmatra na koji način proizvodnjom emocija (boli, patnje, ljubavi i mržnje) dosjei UDBE kao objekt narativa unutar javnog i političkog prostora sudjeluju u (re)konstruiranju hrvatskog nacionalnog identiteta (kolektivnog tijela), odnosno uspostavljanju konstitutivne norme sjećanja i povijesti. Putem emocija vrijednosno se označavaju identifikacijske oznake "jugoslavenstva" i "hrvatstva" uspostavljajući ih kao binarnu opoziciju te (^artikulirajući Drugog ("neprijatelja") kao Jugoslavena ili komunjaru. Analiza pokazuje kako se u tom procesu konstruiraju i različite ideološke fantazme koje strukturiraju realnost.
The article provides a detailed overview of the Yugoslav intelligence and security services from their inception toward the latter part of World War II and the early stages of the Cold War. It is ...written based on the partially declassified documented sources of the state security service in the Archives of Yugoslavia and on the in-depth research of the Military Security service sources in the Military Archives in Belgrade, still less known in the domestic scientific public in Serbia and the Former Yugoslavia. The author used literature mostly written by contemporary witnesses from the security services and incorporated facts gathered in several interviews with senior security officials.
This study examines the circumstances which lead to the purge of Aleksandar Ranković, the longtime person “Number one” in the State Security’s apparatus. The study also analyses the impact it had on ...the future events in the history of Yugoslavia. The political fall of Aleksandar Ranković coincided with the beginning of the process of redefining relations between the member-states of the Federation sparkling suspicions that the two events were closely interlinked. Moreover, Aleksandar Ranković was posthumously proclaimed Serbian nationalist. In this study, we also analyse what affairs during the Ranković’s ouster can be linked to his name; how much truth there is in the accusations of his involvement in the wire-tapping of the Yugoslav top level political leaders’ affair and what were his ambitions to become one of them. What implications did these events have on the wider scope of the state’s political actions?
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