Ante Ciliga

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ante Ciliga (born February 20, 1898 in Šegotići , Istria , Austria-Hungary , † October 21, 1992 in Zagreb ) was a Croatian politician , left communist and victim of Stalinism .

Life

Ciliga was born near Marčana as the child of Croatian farmers. His uncle, a veterinarian, enabled him to attend school in Mostar until 1914 . Radicalized during the Balkan Wars , he demonstrated against the Habsburg monarchy, was banned from all Bosnian schools after the assassination attempt in Sarajevo and returned to Istria. During the war with Italy on the peninsula he was sent to Moravia evacuated and studied in Brno in Czech . In 1917 he fought in the Austro-Hungarian army and was enthusiastic about the Russian October Revolution , but was disappointed that Lenin in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk , the Austrian Slavs gave himself up themselves.

At the end of January 1919 he appeared at the Zagreb Conference of the Croatian Socialist Party as a radical spokesman for the world revolution and soon formed an autonomous left-wing faction, which in 1920 became the Croatian section of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia of the SHS state . Because of police persecution he went to France, but was part of a Yugoslav volunteer force when the Hungarian government was overthrown by Béla Kun in the spring of 1919 . After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, now an Italian citizen, he agitated in Italy for the "Massimalisti", a splinter group of the local Communist Party . For this he spent the period from autumn 1919 to February 1921 in prisons in Trieste and Capodistria .

Because of the burning down of the trade union headquarters in Pula , he organized an armed force of 30 people, which wounded five black shirts and killed one in a confrontation ("Revolt of Prostina").

In 1922 he became party secretary of the Croatian Communist Party and head of the weekly magazine Borba (Der Kampf); a year later he was admitted to the Central Committee of the CP of Yugoslavia . As a member of the Politburo (since 1924) - now also with a doctorate in philosophy and history at the University of Zagreb - in the following year he advocated iron party discipline and advocated the cell system, which prevented political debates. In April d. J. arrested and later expelled, he emigrated to Vienna, where he wrote articles for the left-wing press.

Soviet Union

In October 1926, Ciliga was sent to Moscow to teach at the Yugoslav section of the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West and to work for the Yugoslav section of the Comintern . With the replacement of Zinoviev by Bukharin , the first Trotskyists had just been ousted here, as a result of which the Yugoslav party leadership also changed; u. a. was Tito sent a man Bukharin to Zagreb.

The persecution of anarcho-syndicalists for illegal publications disappointed him and he founded a Trotskyist group with Stanko Dragic, Mustafa Dedic, Tito's wife Pelagia Denisowa-Belusowa and others. a. who rejected state capitalism and the bureaucracy under Stalin . Consequently, he was arrested by the GPU on May 21, 1930 in Leningrad and imprisoned in Verkhneuralsk for three years . Here he turned away from Trotskyism and finally from Lenin and counted himself from then on as part of the workers' opposition , so that after serving his sentence he was exiled to Siberia ( Irkutsk , Jenisseisk , Krasnoyarsk ) for three years with the approval of the Yugoslav Communist Party . By stubbornly claiming his Italian citizenship, he managed to travel to Paris via Poland on December 3, 1935.

Western Europe

In France in 1936 Ciliga wrote an autobiography about his time in Russia, which he added in 1941 to include a second part about his Siberian exile. As a political journalist he wrote for Trotskyist and Menshevik newspapers and was monitored by the OVRA , which imprisoned him for three months during a trip to Istria in the summer of 1937 as a result of Stalinist denunciation. As a left communist, he associated with Arkadi Maslow and Ruth Fischer and fought a campaign against Trotsky, who had justified his role in the Kronstadt sailors' uprising in 1938. Trotsky then described him as a “completely demoralized element”.

Independent state of Croatia

After the end of the German Balkan campaign , Ciliga traveled to the NDH as a nationalist in autumn 1941 . On June 19, 1942, he was arrested by Pavelić people in Sisak as an “Italian spy” and taken to the Jasenovac concentration camp , from which he was released in January 1943 through the intervention of Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac . As a journalist, he has now become the Croatian section head of the Foreign Ministry in the Ustasha state. He wrote a number of articles, mostly with reference to the Soviet Union, in the Catholic Spremnost and in the Ustascha paper Hrvatski Narod ; In 1944 also about the Jasenovac concentration camp, in which the Jews claimed to have held privileged positions there, monitored selections by the Ustasha and participated in executions and tortures before they were themselves eliminated by the Gypsies. Ciliga has been appointed Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Zagreb . Thanks to the local Gestapo leader Konrad Klaser (code name of Kurt Koppel ), he received a visa for Vienna and Berlin and traveled with it from July 1944 to February 1945. The end of the Second World War reached him in Switzerland.

After 1945

After the war, Ciliga lived in Paris and Rome as an article and book author, editor of a bulletin and an opponent of Tito. His contributions were used in the Cold War . He supported the Croatian Spring and saw himself as a democrat. He was a member of Vladko Maček's Balkans Committee . When Yugoslavia fell apart, he warned of Greater Serbia and welcomed Croatia's war of independence .

Works

  • In the land of confusing lies: 10 years behind the Iron Curtain . German by Hansjürgen Wille u. Barbara Klau. Red white papers . Cologne: Verl. F. Politics and Wirtschaft (Kiepenheuer & Witsch), 1953. New edition: Berlin: Die Buchmacherei, 2010
  • State Crisis in Tito's Yugoslavia . Denoel. Paris. 1974
  • The Russian Enigma . London. Ink links. 1979
  • Les fous de Paris . Actes Sud. 1989

Web links

literature

  • Branimir Donat: CILIGA, Ante . In: Darko Stuparić (ed.): Tko je tko u NDH: Hrvatska 1941. – 1945 [Who is who in the NDH: Croatia 1941–1945] . Minerva, Zagreb 1997, p. 70 f . (Croatian).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the land of the great lie . French. Editions Gallimard. 1938
  2. ↑ Sibiria.Land of Exile and Industrialization . Editions des Iles d'Or. Paris. 1950
  3. ^ In Fourth International . August 1938
  4. ↑ Ciliga: '' Storice iz prostine ''. Matica Hrvatska. Zagreb. 1944; quoted in Franjo Tuđman : Wrong paths of historical reality. A treatise on the history and philosophy of violence . 1st edition, Zagreb, Skolska knjiga, 1993
  5. ↑ Uwe Stolzmann: Land of Lies. Ante Ciliga's early unmasking of Stalin , in: NZZ, 13 August 2011
  6. ↑ http://www.left-dis.nl/uk/cileng.htm
personal data
SURNAME Ciliga, ante
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cegala, Antonetich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Yugoslav politician
DATE OF BIRTH February 20, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Šegotići
DATE OF DEATH October 21, 1992
Place of death Zagreb