THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CREATION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CROATIA

This article is a very condensed and incomplete version of the author\u27s more comprehensive research into the historical development of the Communist Party of Croatia in the period from its founding in 1937 until the fali of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941. This problem has been relatively little treated in history and mostly as a part of integral reviews of the history of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and in some separate works. The author starts his article by establishing the fact that the idea of founding separate national Communist parties within the framework of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) developed as a result of increasingly frequent debates on the national question, which started taking place within the Communist movement at the beginning of the thirties. This idea posed a dilemma because it became actual at a decisive period in the development of the attitude of the CPY to the national question. At that time the conception was that Yugoslavia was a reactionary formation that must be destroyed and national republics created in her place. The certain amount of misunderstanding that met the decision of the Fourth Conference of the CPY in December 1934, at which the Communist Party of Croatia and the Communist Party of Slovenia were formed should be understood from this point of view. The decision had obviously not been completely thought through to the end during the discussions about the national question. In the first place the accent was put on the need for the organizational building up and strengthening of the Communist Party in Croatia and Slovenia. The aim was to create a realistic base for the training of national Party leaders. They were to become the only and indispensable bearers of Party policy and had to face the wide and heterogenous political front of the bourgeous forces. The logical consequence of such conditions was the need for a more complete explanation of the decision to found national Communist parties, and this explanation was given at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPY in Split in June, 1935. This was in fact a decisive step towards a more consistent presentation of the programme of the CPY as a revolutionary force. The founding of the Communist Party of Croatia and the Communist Party of Slovenia resulted from the need of the "working masses" of Croatia and Slovenia "to have their Party carry the name of their nationality". That meant that these Parties would stand at the head of the national liberation movements of these peoples, movements that "were not foreign to the proletariat and its Party". Objective factors in Croatia and Yugoslavia as a whole had a decisive influence on the realization of this decision (numerous arrests of Communists in 1935—36). Because of this the founding of the Communist Party of Croatia became linked to the most important event in the development of the CPY. In the autumn of 1936 J. Broz Tito, after many efforts, finally got the consent of the Comintern to return to his country and to start working as the organizational secretary of the CPY. The slow work on the founding of the Communist Party of Croatia suddenly turned into a matter of life and death for the movement in Croatia. The very act of the foundation of the Communist Party of Croatia, in August 1937, was one of the first concrete results of Tito\u27s political realism which gave priority to the founding of national Communist Parties in Croatia and Slovenia. In the following part of the text the author shows in a condensed form the basic characteristics of the further development of the Communist Party of Croatia. He mentions the most essential moments in the creation of its political base (the character of the leadership crisis of the Communist Party of Croatia, its work among the working class, the strengthening of its influence in the villages, its attraction for the intelligentsia). In conclusion the author points out that the Communist Party of Croatia developed into an influental political factor in Croatia, so that after the fall of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia it could take over with full responsibility and under the leadership of the CPY the historical task that had been given to it in the leadership of the national liberation struggle and the social revolution of the peoples of Yugoslavia from 1941—1945