“WE HAVE TO MOVE FORWARD!” THE SLOVAK MINORITY IN THE KINGDOM OF YUGOSLAVIA IN 1935–1939

The paper “We Have to Move Forward!” focuses on presenting the organisation and position of the Slovak minority in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, placing emphasis on the period between the elections for the National Assembly in 1935 and the establishment of the Banat of Croatia in 1939. Special attention was paid to the minority’s viewpoints on the Kingdom’s internal politics, as well as, externally, the conditions in the mother country, that is, Czechoslovakia and Slovakia after the first half of March 1939. The research required the use of archived materials from the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb and the Slovak National Archives in Bratislava, the Slovak minority newspapers, which, among other things, helped reconstruct the zeitgeist, and also the published sources and relevant literature. Although the Slovaks inhabited the entire territory of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, it is important to mention that the representative area used for this research was the Danube Banat (mostly the area of the present day Vojvodina and Baranja), which was most densely populated by the Slovak minority.