Ante Ciliga

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Ante Ciliga
Born	February 20, 1898 Šegotiči
Died	1991

Ante Ciliga (1898-1991) was one of the founders of the Yugoslav Communist Party (KPJ).

Ciliga became a member of its Central Committee and Politbureau, as well as chief editor of Borba and Regional Secretary for Croatia. After moving to Vienna in 1925 as the local representative of the KPJ, he 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 Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union consists of backward, asiatic peoples who need a dictatorship.

In 1930, he taught at the Communist University of Leningrad. Arrested by the GPU because of his opposition to the policies of the Soviet government, he was deported to a concentration camp in Siberia. Five years later, he finally succeeded in having his sentence commuted to expulsion from Soviet territory.

For the rest of his life, Ciliga lived in France and Italy. Already 'expelled' from the Yugoslav Communist Party in 1929, he later resigned from his position. He continued siding with Socialist and democratic positions, but without being part of a particular political group.

Little of Ciliga's extensive writings have appeared in an English-language translation. His pamphlet, The Kronstadt Revolt, was published by the Freedom Press in 1942. The first part of his account of his time in the Soviet Union, The Russian Enigma, was distributed by the Labour Book Service in 1940, and the complete text was published under the same title by Ink Links in 1979.