Albin Prepeluh

Albin Prepeluh (22 February 1881 – 20 November 1937) was a Slovenian left wing politician, journalist, editor, political theorist and translator.

After the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the proclamation of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, he became employed in the Slovenian Commission for Social Welfare, where he worked under the supervision of the Christian Socialist thinker Andrej Gosar.

In 1902, he corresponded with the German Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky on the possibilities to activate the peasantry in favour of socialism.

The journal soon became the herald of young Slovene reformist Social Democrats, which included Anton Dermota, Dragotin Lončar, and Josip Ferfolja.

They both opposed the centralist program of the new unified Yugoslav Socialist party, and called for a territorial autonomy of Slovenia within Yugoslavia.

In 1921, he was one of the proponents of the influential Autonomist Declaration, in which the majority of the most important Slovene intellectuals voiced their support for Slovenian autonomy.

After the party was dissolved with the establishment of the dictatorship of king Alexander I of Yugoslavia in 1929, Prepeluh retrieved from public life.

Influenced by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, he wrote the essay Problemi malega naroda (Problems of a Small Nation).

In Pripombe k naši prevratni dobi (Observations on Our Revolutionary Era), written shortly before his death and published posthumously in 1938, he reflected on the significance of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the creation of Yugoslavia, reasserting his belief in the Yugoslav project.