FROM PEOPLE’S LIBERATION WAR AND REVOLUTION TO ANTIFASCIST STRUGGLE

The topic of this work is the treatment of antifascism in Croatian (and, up to 1990, Yugoslav) historiography. The term antifascism was inaugurated on the eve of the Second World War by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) based on guidelines from the Communist International. During the Second World War, the KPJ managed to seize power and restore Yugoslavia thanks to its practical application of antifascism. After the war, antifascism was entirely ignored, and the war was interpreted exclusively as a people’s liberation struggle and socialist revolution. Public use of the term antifascism returned during the collapse of communism and the disintegration of Yugoslavia from 1990 to 1992. Moving away from the structures associated with the former ruling communist elite (members of the Communist Party and Partisan war veterans), antifascism imposed itself as a component of democratic ideology that could not be subjected to scrutiny, rather it had to be unquestioningly accepted. Historical antifascism served the communists to exploit non-communists to then seize authority, while contemporary “antifascism” serves their direct and ideological heirs to prevent a re-examination of communist crimes and the undemocratic character of socialist Yugoslavia