At the end of the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath, Joseph V. Stalin discussed the issue of Slovenian intellectuals with Edvard Kardelj (1944) and Boris Kidrič (1946); he saw them as a homogeneous social group as the intelligentsia in Russia had been before the formation of the Soviet regime and believed them to be problematic as well as useful to communists, particularly while fighting for patriotic aims. It seems that he detected this as a problem mostly due to the situation in Italy, with which Yugoslavia was in dispute over a border issue. In spite of criticising J. V. Stalin, Kardelj later thought that the problem highlighted by the Soviet leader indeed existed.