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The Liberation Front of the Slovene Nation (Slovene: Osvobodilna fronta slovenskega naroda), or simply Liberation Front (Osvobodilna fronta, acronym OF), originally called the Anti-Imperialist Front (Slovene: Protiimperialistična fronta, PIF), was the main anti-fascist Slovene civil resistance and political organization. It was active in the Slovene Lands during World War II. Its military arm were the Slovene Partisans. The organisation was established in the Province of Ljubljana on 26 April 1941 in the house of the literary critic Josip Vidmar. Its leaders were Boris Kidrič and Edvard Kardelj.
Contents
Programme
The programme of the Fronta was outlined by the following fundamental points:
Internal political situation
Although the Front originally consisted of multiple political groups of left-wing orientation, including some Christian Socialists, a dissident group of Slovene Sokols (also known as "National Democrats"), and a group of intellectuals around the journals Sodobnost and Ljubljanski zvon, during the course of the war, the influence of the Communist Party of Slovenia started to grow, until the founding groups signed the so-called Dolomite Declaration (Dolomitska izjava), giving the exclusive right to organize themselves as a political party only to the communists, on 1 March 1943.
On 3 October 1943, on the session, known as Assembly of the Delegates of the Slovene Nation, which was held in Kočevje by the 572 directly elected and 78 indirectly elected members, the 120-member plenum was constituted as the highest civil governing organ of anti-fascist movement in Slovenia during the World War II.
After the war, the Liberation Front was transformed into the Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Slovenia.
Slovene Partisans
The Slovene Partisans were the armed wing of the Liberation Front, which fought in the beginning as a guerilla and later as an army. It was mostly ethnically homogenous and primarily communicated in Slovene. These two features have been considered vital for its success. It was the first Slovene military force. Its most characteristic symbol was the Triglav cap. Contrary to elsewhere in Yugoslavia, where on the freed territories the political life was organized by the military itself, the Slovene Partisans were subordinated to the civil political authority of the Front. The partisan activities in Slovenia were initially independent of Tito's Partisans in the south. The merger of the Slovene Partisans with Tito's forces happened in 1944.
The Front's name
It has been traditionally claimed by Slovene historians that the term Anti-Imperialist Front was the first to occur. This may be read for example in a work by Peter Vodopivec from 2006. In 2008, the historian Bojan Godeša published a peer-reviewed discussion about the name. He mentions a leaflet from the end of April 1941 with liberation front (non-capitalised) written on it, two months before the first known mention of the anti-imperialist front (non-capitalised) on 22 June 1941. He also mentions that Josip Rus, who represented the Slovene Sokol Society in the founding meeting of the OF, always claimed they had only discussed the organisation as the Liberation Front. That's contrary to the opinion by Josip Vidmar, also a founding member, who stated that the organisation was renamed as Liberation Front only on 30 June 1941. The claims by Godeša have been cited in a seminar by Božo Repe, another eminent historian, who added that the name Anti-Imperialist Front, written with capital letters, was used particularly in the communication with the Communists of the Soviet Union. He attributed this to the desire of the Slovene Communists to demonstrate that their work corresponded to the aims of the Comintern.