ii. Translator's Note - This statement is slightly misleading. It's true that the Italian ultra-left, specifically Bilan, according to Bourrinet's own pamphlet on the subject, did oppose Trotsky's plan for a Fourth International. The German "left communists", who had already become "council communists", did not feel obliged to take a stand on Trotsky's organisational plans. Unlike Bilan they unequivocally opposed the regime and mode of production which existed in the USSR. Moreover, some of them had attempted to set up their own Fourth International in 1921 when the working class and its revolutionary fractions were much stronger.(return to text)
iii. Translator's Note - As should not be surprising, the actual number of dead Serbs is much disputed. Immediately after the Second World War the Titoist authorities proclaimed that 1 million people (overwhelmingly Serbs) had died at Jasenovac alone. This is certainly a wild exaggeration, and one which is popular with Serb nationalists to this day. Croatian nationalists, of course, take the opposite view. Franjo Tudjman (the late President of Croatia), who was a historian before becoming a politician, made a name for himself in the '60s as a sort of Croatian David Irving - claiming that the NDH had murdered tens rather than hundreds of thousands. When he became a successful politician his estimates fell even lower. The real figure will never be known but less partisan (or Partizan) sources seem to agree that it was certainly several hundred thousand.(return to text)
iv. Translator's Note - Here Bourrinet seems to avoid
the issue of whether Ciliga really had links with the intelligence service of
one or more Western states. In view of his later involvement with Croatian
nationalist organisations, such as the HNV (see below), which certainly
were funded by Western intelligence agencies it is not unlikely that he
was recruited at some point. The idea that he had already been "turned" by 1942
is not so fanciful. All this raises the possibility that when he associated with
the Parisian ultra-left milieu in the 1980s, being accepted despite his known
nationalist inclinations, he was doing so as a spy. Whatever else Ciliga was, he
was not a fool. He would have been perfectly capable of talking his way into any
scene which he was ordered to infiltrate.(return to
text)
Technical Aspects of this Translation
The translation and presentation of this text was not a trivial matter. Despite being primarily an exercise in translating from French to English it also involved lengthy detours into Russian and Serbo-Croat.
Russian personal names, place names and pieces of Russian text, such as the names of publications, were transliterated to the French Latin alphabet in Bourrinet's text. Here they have been transliterated into the English Latin alphabet using the standard convention for this. The only exceptions are well-known personal names whose transliterations are so well established that it would be silly to mess about with them. For example, Trotsky should really be Trotskii, but it isn't.
In The Russian Enigma Yugoslav names are transliterated in various, and not always consistent, ways. For example, Dragić is written as "Draguitch". Here the Yugoslav personal names and names of publications have been written exactly as they are in Serbo-Croat. This seems reasonable because this is the convention for other foreign languages which are written using some form of the Latin alphabet. Often this doesn't happen with Serbo-Croat because publishers, particularly of newspapers, are too lazy to look for fonts which can represent the characters: š, ć, ž, Š, š, d, Ð. In this HTML file we have used the Unicode standard to represent all non-ASCII characters - this is the only way to combine words from Serbo-Croat, French and German in the same text!
The spelling and grammatical mistakes in the Serbo-Croat in Bourrinet's text
have been corrected.(return to
text)