Stane Dolanc

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Stane Dolanc (November 16, 1925 - December 12, 1999) was a Yugoslav Communist politician and one of Tito's closest men.

Dolanc was born to a worker family in the Slovenian town of Hrastnik, then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. After finishing elementary school in his home town, he was sent to the prestigious Bežigrad High School in Ljubljana. In April 1941, northern Slovenia was occupied by Nazi Germany. Dolanc continued his schooling in Graz and was even drafted in the Hitlerjugend. In 1944, he joined the Yugoslav Partisans and started his military career.

He became involved with politics relatively late, in 1969, when he was already forty-three year old. Nevertheless, his unexpectedly quickly rose to one of the most important members of the Communist Party of Slovenia. In 1969 he was appointed as a member of the Presidium of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, which he remained until 1982. In the early 1970s, he helped the Yugoslav dictator Tito to crush the liberal reforms in Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia. He became famous for a statement he made in a Communist rally in Split in 1972: "Let be clear to everybody that here, in Yugoslavia, we Communists are in power. If we were not in power, someone else would be, and this is not so. It will never be so." His phrase is generally regarded as a preludium of the authoritarian turn in Yugoslav Communist polcy in the mid 1970s, especially after the crushing of the Croatian spring.

In the late seventies, Dolanc became one of Tito's closest collaborators. After the death of Edvard Kardelj in 1979, Dolanc became one of the most influentual figures in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, together with Mitja Ribičič. By mid 1980s, the two lost influence in the Slovenian Communist Party to the autonomist current represented by Ivan Maček Matija and Milan Kučan. Dolanc nevertheless retained his influence in the federal politics. Between 1982 and 1984 he was minister of the interior in the Yugoslav government. While in office, he carried out the police repression following the crush of Albanian protests in Kosovo who had demanded greater autonomy for their province.

Between 1984 and 1989, he served as the Slovenian representative in the Presidency of the SFRY. After 1989, he held some minor positions on the federal level and soon recluded to a private life. One of his last public interventions was an interview with the liberal opposition magazine Mladina, published in May 1989, in which he described himself as the "last titoist".

After the democratization of Slovenia in 1988-1990 and the breakup of Yugoslavia, he rarely appeared in public. He died in Ljubljana on December 12, 1999 of cerebral stroke.

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Bojan Balkovec et al., Slovenska kronika XX. stoletja (Ljubljana: Nova revija, 1997).
Miran Lesjak & Bernard Nežmah, "Poslednji titoist" (interview with Stane Dolanc) in Mladina, n. 18 (May 19, 1989).
Božo Repe, Rdeča Slovenija: tokovi in obrazi iz obdobja socializma (Ljubljana: Sophia, 2003).
Bernard Nežmah, "Stane Dolanc (1926-1999): najtrša pest slovenskih komunistov" in Mladina, n. 51 (December 20, 1999).
Božo Repe, "Vojak partije, veliki gobar iz Martuljka, naš čovik: smrt Staneta Dolanca" in Delo, y. 41, n. 294 (December 18, 1999).