that Yugoslavia is a multi-national country and that since the day Yugoslavia was created, the national question was the most heated issue in the country, out of which the Croatian question is the most important. He concluded that the struggle of the oppressed people largely influenced the crisis of fascism. Nevertheless, he said that the great success of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia lies in its successful assurance of the oppressed peoples that the communists are on their side and that those people can count on the working class. After that, the Communist Party issued a directive to the Croatian communists to enter the Croatian Peasant Party, a leading Croat party in Yugoslavia at the time, and to take over leading position within it. As part of its national policy established by Gorkić, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1937 founded the Communist Party of Croatia and Communist Party of Slovenia. It was a tactical move of the Yugoslav Communist Party conditioned by the escalation of the inter-national relations in Yugoslavia. This was part of the reorganisation of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia based on the national criterion that reflected "national-political character of Yugoslavia". The Great Purge The first mass arrests in the Soviet Union occurred in summer 1936, during the Great Purge. The Old bolsheviks, Grigory Zinoviev, Mikhail Tomsky, Ivan Smirnov, Alexei Rykov, Lev Kamenev, Grigori Sokolnikov and Gorkić's mentor Bukharin were victims. Rykov and Bukharin were, however, trialed on the second process. During their process, the official statement of the Central Committee of the KPJ called Bukharin and Rykov "Trotskyst-Zinovievist fascist bandits" who were "discarded by workers' masses for their criminal fight against realisation of the ingenious Stalin's plans." Both of them were executed by a firing squad. Moreover, in the official statement, two members of the KPJ, dr. Ante Ciliga and Voja Vujović, were accused for cooperation with the arrested old bolsheviks and were also proclaimed to be Benito Mussolini's spies. The KPJ under Gorkić's leadership thus completely supported the Stalin's Great Purge and the official statement was, at the same time, an invitation for purges within the KPJ itself as well. In 1936 the seat of the KPJ was transferred from Vienna to Paris, so Gorkić was commuting between the French capital and Moscow. At the beginning of 1937 he was in Paris and for the last time in his life, he met his wife, in