Parliamentary Practices of Socialist Yugoslavia: sodni procesi na slovenskem v dveh Jugoslavijah

The comparison between the main types of political trials in two exceedingly authoritarian periods of the 20th century Slovenian history – the period between the introduction of King Alexander's Dictatorship on 6 January 1929 and the beginning of World War II in the Slovenian territory and the period between the end of the war and the relaxation of the political repression in the first half of the 1950s – supports the fundamental thesis of judicial processes as the strongest tools of the ruling political elites for the retaliation against imaginary or actual political opponents. Furthermore, this comparison provides a number of interesting results. The often overlooked necessity that the events in the Slovenian and Yugoslav space should be placed into and understood in the wider European spatial and temporal context turned out to be of key importance in order to understand the complexity of the issue of political repression and political trials in both periods. Thus it was possible for me to establish that the political repression in the Kingdom of SHS/ Yugoslavia took place in the contexts of global economic and political crises. In the interwar period the majority of European countries, as they sought the ways of overcoming the internal and external political crises, were abandoning the liberal models of parliamentary democracies and implementing the more authoritarian forms of government. This process culminated especially in the totalitarian systems of the fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and communist Soviet Union. In the increasingly tense domestic and foreign political circumstances, the Kingdom of SHS/Yugoslavia started introducing the more authoritarian forms of government as well. Consequently it also began to implement increasingly stringent political repression against the most prominent political opponents, especially the communists, but also the extreme right wing groups and anti centralist bourgeois opposition. It nevertheless failed to successfully address the fundamental domestic political issues, especially the pressing social and national problems, which ultimately pushed it into the second global conflict.