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Ante Ciliga papers as a source for the research of the contemporary history

Ante Ciliga (1898-1992), Croatian journalist, writer and communist dissident, most of his life was a political émigré on whose biography an exciting film script can be based. He survived Soviet penitentiaries and Siberia, the Ustasha Jasenovac camp as well as various prisons in Belgrade, Pazin, Zagreb and Trieste. Ciliga made a transition from a high- ranking member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia to an anticommunist and a critic of the totalitarian form of socialism. His writings touch upon almost all the major political events of the twentieth century. One of the stages of his exciting life brought him to Paris in early 1936, where he began to write down his experiences from the Soviet Union, which he published in 1938 in the book Au pays du grand mensonge (In the land of the big lie). In 1936, Leon Trotsky wrote about Ciliga and used his example to warn of Stalin's political confrontations with his dissidents. This paper aims to emphasize the fascinating biography of Ante Ciliga and to shed light on the history of his personal fund (papers) that was finally deposited at the National and University Library in Zagreb (Croatia) in 1999. In his will, Ciliga specified that his papers should be copied twice and that one set of copies should be deposited at the State Archives in Pazin and the other set in the National Library of France in Paris. Ciliga’s collection testifies to an exciting life of an eternal dissident and exile who was constantly striving to search and explain the causes and consequences of political events in 20th century Europe. This paper also gives the latest info on the usage of his papers in contemporary historiography. His collection was recently researched through the EU funded project on the cultural heritage of dissent in the former socialist countries (COURAGE).

Ante Ciliga ; archival fund ; National and University Library Zagreb ; COURAGE ; La Contemporaine

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