Ljubo Sirc

Ljubo Sirc CBE (April 19, 1920 – December 1, 2016) was a British-Slovene economist and prominent dissident from the former Yugoslavia.

Sirc was born in Kranj, then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, in a wealthy and renowned family of Slovene and Yugoslav patriots. His grandfather was a liberal and monarchist politician and mayor of Kranj, and his father was a local entrepreneur.

After the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, Sirc managed to escape to Switzerland, where he established contact with other Yugoslav emigrants. In summer 1944, after the Tito-Šubašić agreement, he joined the Yugoslav Resistance and served in the Yugoslav Army in Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slovenia until 1945. After the establishment of the Communist regime, he joined other liberals and social democrats, who tried to form a legal political opposition to the regime. In 1947, due to his political activity and friendship with Western diplomats, he was tried in the Nagode Trial and sentenced to death. His sentence was ultimately commuted to twenty years in prison, of which he served seven, much of it in solitary confinement. He spent his time in assiduous reading; he became an expert in Marxist political and economic thought, and he was also able to read the most up-to-date Western, especially English and American, economic literature, provided to him by the Slovenian communists in order to translate it for "internal security purposes."

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