The Battle Stalin Lost [antikvár]

Foreword This book grew from a series of articles published in the Slovenian newspaper Delo in the winter of 1968-1969. I was moved to write these articles—and eventually the book—by the armed aggression of the Soviet Union and four other East European countries against Czechoslovakia. In August 1968, while that aggression was in progress and it appeared that Yugoslavia might suffer the same fate, I talked with some young friends on the editorial board of the Ljubljana student newspaper Tribuna about Stalin's attempts to destroy Yugoslavia in 1948-1953. I realized that they did not know very much about those earlier events, which were remote history for them, so I left off what I was doing at the time and started on the articles. My intention was to make available to them materials that would, among other things, enable them to perceive more clearly and in depth the new dangers hovering over not only Czechoslovakia but other countries as well, including their own. Although Stalin is dead, neo-Stalinism is gaining ground in the U.S.S.R. This is not a history of the events between 1948 and 1953 but rather the story of my own personal experiences during that period. I also wanted to show how the struggle against Stalin affected my own thinking about social development. In writing this book I used documents 1 had collected for my projected history of the Yugoslav revolution and my own unpublished diaries from that period. The book first appeared in Delo and was also serialized in several other papers and journals in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. (The serialization m Czechoslovakia was stopped after Dubcek's fall in April 1969-)