The research project entitled »Basic orientations of the Communist Party in Slovenia during the rampant Bolshevik period«, has two main objectives. The first is to study the hitherto unexplored topics from the history of the Communist Party in Slovenia in the 1930's and 1940's. The second is to cover, substantially and chronologically, the basic traits of the Party ideology and politics, methods of operation and ideologically motivated violence, binding them into a coherent presentation of the politics carried out by the CP from its unification in the 1930's until the end of the 1940's. The latter is urgently required, given that, in Slovene historiography, the operation of the Communist Party in Slovenia has so far only been covered in fragments, with topically and chronologically limited texts, but never as a whole. Furthermore, no such work is written in a modern, non-ideological and historiographically precise way. It is a known fact, that, during the Second World War in Slovenia, the Communist Party led the resistance movement within the framework of the Liberation Front (LF), and, after the war, ruled the entire country. This topic is, therefore, of key importance for Slovene historiography, when speaking about the history of the twentieth century. It is also important for the wider Slovene public, where such issues are often only partially and inadequately addressed; the absence of such research can also be felt in the pedagogical process, especially at the Universities. Among the so far unexplored topics that the project intends to address are the internal Party organisation and discipline, the uniformity of the “Party line”, factionist struggle and their protagonists, as well as the influence of such struggle on the development of the Party’s politics during the Second World War, and the settling of accounts with those of different opinion within the Party and the opposition after the war. The second such topic concerns the attitude towards the national question in the 1930's, during the Second World War and immediately after it. It is, further, a question of the ideological and organisational attitude towards the Comintern and the execution of its directives, the question of the ideologically based violence by the Party in the crucial turning points – at the end of the 1930’s, during the Second World War and after it, and the question of building the so-called people’s democracy after the war, as well as the ideological similarity of the Stalinist systems in Europe at that time. The researchers who will participate in the project have already encountered individual issues, partially worked on them and found that what is lacking in the Slovene historiography is a presentation of these issues as a whole. They have established the basic hypothesis that Party politics and ideology, based on the model of the only successfully executed revolution in Europe – the Russian October Revolution – and the Comintern directives, were essentially the same all the time. It was only the Party tactics that was changing according to time and circumstances.
