While in Vienna, where the CPY's Central Committee was based for a time, he was arrested by Austrian police in 1936 following an increase in pressure on communists by Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg.

[6] Kidrič attended negotiations in Moscow following the end of the war, and then noted that the Soviet government under Joseph Stalin perceived Yugoslavia not as an equal socialist state, but as a part of its own sphere of influence.

Alongside Edvard Kardelj, Vladimir Bakarić, Milovan Djilas, and Moša Pijade, he took part in the drafting of the 1950 "Basic Law on the Management of State Economic Enterprises", which laid the foundations for the Yugoslav system of workers' self-management.

These and other reforms were meant to win popular support, and involve the working people more intimately in government and economy, in contrast to the then-prevailing Stalinist form of socialism.

In particular, he was also concerned with the economic disparities between the various Yugoslav republics, a chronic issue that would haunt Yugoslavia for the entirety of its history; in connection to this, Kidrič said that the foundational privilege brotherhood and unity "categorically demands elimination of this unevenness.

In 1959, a large monument was erected in his honour in front of the Slovenian Government Office in Ljubljana, where it still stands despite some protests by anti-Communist groups and victims of Communist persecution.