Formation, Organisation, and Ideological Affiliation of The Membership
In both Slovene Partisans squads and in the "field committees" of the Liberation Front of the Slovene Nation the Communists were indeed in the minority. During the course of the war, the influence of the Communist Party of Slovenia started to grow. Nowhere else in Yugoslav territory did the Partisan movement have a plural political composition like it did have in Liberation Front of the Slovene Nation, so the Yugoslav Communist Party wanted that the Slovene partisans should be brought under more exclusive Communist control. This was not officially declared until the Dolomite Declaration of 1 March 1943.
The High Command of the Slovene Partisans (Supreme Command at first) was established by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovenia on 22 June 1941. The command members were the commander Franc Leskošek (a.k.a. Luka), the political commissar Boris Kidrič (succeeded by Miha Marinko), deputy commander Aleš Bebler (a.k.a. Primož), and members Stane Žagar, Oskar Kovačič, Miloš Zidanšek, Dušan Podgornik, and Marijan Brecelj. The decision to start armed resistance was passed at a meeting on 16 July 1941.
The first partisan shot in the Slovene Lands was fired by one Miha Novak on 22 July 1941 at a former Yugoslav policeman who was claimed to have collaborated with the Germans and to have betrayed to them local supporters of the Communist Party. The man was attacked by the Šmarna Gora Partisan group from an ambush at Pšatnik Forest near Tacen. The Germans arrested about 30 people and executed two of them.
In the latter Socialist Republic of Slovenia, 22 July was celebrated as the Day of the National Rising. The historian Jože Dežman stated in 2005 that this was a celebration of a day when a Slovene wounded another Slovene by shooting and that it symbolised the victory of the Communist Party over its own nation. In addition to the war against the occupying forces, there was a civilian war going on in the Slovene Lands and both the Communist and the anti-Communist side tried to cover it, according to Dežman.
At the very beginning the Partisan forces were small, poorly armed and without any infrastructure, but Spanish Civil War veterans amongst them had some experience with guerrilla warfare. Some of the members of Liberation Front and partisans were ex-members of the TIGR resistance movement.
Read more about this topic: Slovenian Partisans
Famous quotes containing the words ideological, affiliation and/or membership:
“There cannot be peaceful coexistence in the ideological realm. Peaceful coexistence corrupts.”
—Jiang Qing (1914–1991)
“Men seem more bound to the wheel of success than women do. That women are trained to get satisfaction from affiliation rather than achievement has tended to keep them from great achievement. But it has also freed them from unreasonable expectations about the satisfactions that professional achievement brings.”
—Phyllis Rose (b. 1942)
“The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)