EXCEEDINGLY RARE UNDERGROUND SLOVENIAN TRANSLATION OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

MARX, KARL (+) FRIEDRICH ENGELS.

Komunistièni manifest.

[Slovenia], Agit-Prop komisija centralnega komiteta komunistiène partije Slovenije [Agitprop Commiss Small4to (110x145 mm). In the original black/red printed stapled wrappers. With a few occassional blue underlignings. 31, (1) pp.

Rare Slovenian translation of the Communist Manifesto, printed by an undergorund partisan press. The present edition of the Manifesto was printed and distributed by Agitprop, the Communist Party institution that controlled education, publishing, libraries and mass media from the end of World War II until 1952. Presumably the present publication was, if not the very first, then among the first publications made by Agitprop. Until the end of World War II Agitprop was essentially an underground movement whose goal was to pave the way for communism after the war.

After the resistance in Slovenia started in summer 1941, Italian violence against the Slovene civilian population escalated and to counter the Communist-led insurgence, the Italians sponsored local anti-guerrilla units, formed mostly by the local conservative Catholic Slovene population that resented the revolutionary violence of the partisans. After the Italian armistice of September 1943, the Germans took over both the Province of Ljubljana and the Slovenian Littoral. They united the Slovene anti-Communist counter-insurgence into the Slovene Home Guard and appointed a puppet regime in the Province of Ljubljana. The anti-Nazi resistance however expanded, creating its own administrative structures as the basis for Slovene statehood within a new, federal and socialist Yugoslavia.
In 1945, Yugoslavia was liberated by the underground resistance and soon became a socialist federation known as the People's Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Slovenia joined the federation as a constituent republic, led by its own pro-Communist leadership and Agitprop became the official mass media institution.

Order-nr.: 57759