The Education of a Slovene Marxist: Edvard Kardelj, 1924-1934

Young Kardelj's ideological schooling began in Ljubljana while he was preparing for accreditation as a school teacher. I It was not at the teacher training institute, but rather in the company of young men and older spiritual mentors that he learned his Marxism. 2 The Strajzl circle is where Kardelj began his leftist intellectual apprenticeship. It was organized in 1924 by Vlado Kozak, the son of a tavern keeper of substantial means whose politics were known to be liberal and progressive. 3 Those who frequented the Kozak tavern, which was called "Pri Strajzlnu," were liberals of the left, leftist craftsmen and workers. The committed Marxist revolutionaries met secretly upstairs above the main tavern. Since the Communist party in Yugoslavia had been outlawed in 1921, from time to time one or another of the Strajzl group was detained by the police. Legend has it that "Mama Kozak" regularly intervened on behalf of the young intelligent by paying off the authorities. Indeed "Strajzlnova's" bribes seem to have kept the Ljubljana police in pocket money, while keeping the Slovene revolution alive in its early years. From about 1923 Vlado Kozak used to frequent the Delavski dom where Marxist and revolutionary lectures were given. Among the inspiring speakers was a law student named Dusan Kermavner,4 who in 1922 and 1923 had studied in Berlin, where he had become involved with the Spartacists. He had translated into Slovene the works of Mathiez, the French social historian, and of Marx and Engels, among others. The Radical leftist youth and workers and craftsmen of a militant bent attended these talks. From the Delavski dom, which came to be known as the "Red University,"S some regulars were recruited into the Strajzl Circle. Others, like Boris Kidrie, the son of an eminent professor of Slavic literature, were tapped by Vlado personally. 6 Edo Kardelj was brought to the Strajzl tavern in 1924 by a school chum of Kozak's who had been told to find engage youth for party work. Young Kardelj, whose parents had strong Socialist Party commitments, was at first a reluctant participant. By 1926, however, at age 16, he had become a convert and was soon initiated into SKOJ (The Union of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia), the youth branch of the underground Communist Party of Yugoslavia. It was Kardelj and Kidrie who named the circle which met clandestinely above the Kozak tavern. A significant number of the post-World War II leaders of Yugoslavia would come from that group. In the mid-1920s, while Kardelj was becoming a Communist revolutionary, the world of the Slovene intellectuals was in ferment. The issue debated by all with most intensity was the Slovene national question. A continuation of the dialogue which had begun in the early nineteenth century, it centered on how a small nation and its culture might survive the assimilating pressures of modernization. The venue for the debate had changed from the Habsburg Empire to the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, but the issues remained essentially the same. The most heated and sophisticated exchanges, many fully recorded in prominent literary journals, would come in the thirties. Kardelj would engage in these with ardor, assurance and the innocence of one who has embraced a new faith in his case Marxism-Leninism. It should be noted, however, that schooling in the doctrine would come first, beginning about 1926, for this son of unlearned, working-class, Socialist parents. Sparring with the intellectual elite in whose midst Kardelj had found himself