FUNCTIONING OF WORK OF THE SLOVENIAN STATE SECURITY SERVICE IN THE 1980S

On the basis of documents from the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia (ARS), especially annual reports on the operation and reports on program task implementation of the Slovenian State Security Service (SDV) this paper presents the organizational structure, methods, and fields of work of the Slovenian secret police in the 1980s. The SDV was organized in accordance with accepted secret regulations as well as federal secret legislation. According to the provisions of the State Security Service Rules, which state that it should perform its work based on the Union of Communists of Yugoslavia's (ZKJ) positions and policies, its focus was on preserving the existing political system. From the early 1980s to 1989, the State Security Service's work was divided into external and internal areas, with the present article focusing on the latter. The internal field was divided into "hostile structures," which included groups such as "anarcholiberalism," "bourgeois pluralism," "bureaucratic-dogmatic structures," and "clergy," "bourgeois right," economic liberalism, and nationalism. In doing so, they observed that criticism was increasingly directed at the ability of the then-political leadership and the oneparty system. The SDV employed repressive methods of control to keep an eye on these structures, including territorial preventive work, intelligence work, person surveillance, verification, informative and operational interviews, secret tracking, secret investigation, secret control of mail, secret control of telegraph and telephone traffic, and secret sounding spaces. Precisely from the field of internal action, i.e., monitoring of the "internal enemy", we can conclude that SDV also acted as political police in the 1980s.