Ante Ciliga

Exiled for his activism from Yugoslavia, he moved to Vienna in 1925 as the local representative of the KPJ, then settled in the Soviet Union, where he lived from October 1926 to December 1935. His first three years in the USSR were spent in Moscow, where he worked as a teacher at the party school for émigré Yugoslav Communists. He was a sympathizer of the Left Opposition. He wrote that one possible reason for the rise of Joseph Stalin was that many Soviet politicians, even committed communists, believed that the Soviet Union consists of backward, Asiatic peoples who need a dictatorship.

In 1930, Ciliga taught at the Communist University of Leningrad. Arrested by Stalin's political police, the GPU, because of his opposition to the policies of the Soviet government, he was deported to a labor camp in Siberia. Already expelled from the Yugoslav Communist Party in 1929, he later resigned from his position. In The Russian Enigma, his account of his time in the Soviet Union, originally published in France in 1938, Ciliga described his 5-year imprisonment in Soviet prisons and Siberian gulags, while extensively criticizing Stalin's totalitarian regime and repression.[2]

At the end of 1941 Ciliga returned to the then Independent State of Croatia, where he was arrested by the Ustaše and imprisoned for one year in the Jasenovac concentration camp.[4] Ciliga later described Jasenovac as a "huge machine" with the sole purpose, that "some be killed as soon as they enter - others, over time"..."Jasenovac resembled Auschwitz. In Jasenovac, too, the main thing was not forced labor, but extermination”, yet "the primitivistic cruelties of Jasenovac distinguished this Balkan Auschwitz.”[5] Having been imprisoned in Stalin’s Siberian gulags, Ciliga wrote that what he “experienced there did not even remotely reach the physical, material horrors of Jasenovac"[5]

Released from Jasenovac in December 1942, Ciliga contributed to the Ustaše ideological magazine Spremnost.[4][6] In 1944 he moved to Nazi Berlin, residing in the embassy of the Independent State of Croatia. [4][6]

As political émigré, Ciliga lived in Italy and France, where he edited anti-Communist and anti-Yugoslav publications.[4] Having abandoned communist politics, he become an "ardent nationalist".[1] He wrote books criticizing the Tito regime (State Crisis in Tito’s Yugoslavia), and against Serbs (Dokle ce hrvatski narod stenjati pod srpskim jarmom? - How long will the Croatian people groan under the Serbian yoke?). He also criticized Ante Pavelić in the following manner: "With one word, Pavelić [by his policies] disunited the Croats, united the Serbs, strengthened the Communist Partisans, and blindly tied the Croatian cause to those who were bound to lose the war. It is difficult to imagine a more suicidal policy."[7] Writing years later, Ciliga noted that, "I was for the ustasha (sic) state, I was for the Croatian state. And I defend that thesis. The ustasha (sic) state needed to be reformed, not destroyed."[8]

Ciliga was criticized for anti-Semitic remarks in his Jasenovac writings,[9] which were later repeated by Franjo Tudjman in his Jasenovac book,[10] and this too caused a storm of criticism. Following Croatia's independence, Ciliga returned to Croatia, where he died in 1992.