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The Background of the Soviet-Yugoslav Dispute
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Extract
The conflict between Stalin's Russia and Tito's Yugoslavia is reminiscent of a quarrel between two old friends whose long intimacy serves only to make their dispute all the more violent and ultimately irreconcilable. Certainly the reaction of the Yugoslavs has followed a familiar pattern: at first, complete incredulity that their old friends and protectors should take a minor dispute centered around a few personalities and a few administrative problems as the opening of a great campaign to proclaim Tito and his collaborators traitors and to call for the destruction of their regime. Then, as the hope of reconciliation vanished (this hope was evident, at least on the Yugoslav side, during the first few months of the dispute), both sides began to recall those moments of strain which at the time of mutual admiration had appeared as only minor dissonances, but now upon reflection, were seen as the first clear signs of the other side's brutality or treachery.
The Partisans fought during the war for their own country but they also fought with a fanatical devotion to the Soviet Union. Apart from the Communist persuasion of their leaders the fact that the Soviet Union was meeting the main fury of German attacks and that it stood as the main defender of the Slavic nations, against Germany's aggression, created an atmosphere in which the slightest criticism of Yugoslavia's great ally would have been inconceivable. Even a few months after July 1948, Tito in his speech to the 5th Congress of the C.P.Y.
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- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1951
References
* The writer wants to acknowledge his debt to the Russian Research Center at Harvard, which has enabled him to pursue a study of which this article is a part. With the exception of various journalistic ventures there is little in English by way of systematic study of Tito's Yugoslavia and its antecedents. Stephen Clissold's Whirlwind is a very informative but somewhat fictionalized account of the Partisan Movement during the war. There is Fitzroy Maclean's account of his mission in Yugoslavia. Various political and economic reports by Tito and other Yugoslav leaders (like the ones delivered at the Fifth Party Congress of the C.P.Y.) have been published in English. After this article was written I had an opportunity to look at Hoptner's, Jacob B. The Foreign Policy of the National Liberation Movement of Yugoslavia (unpublished M.A. thesis, Columbia) which is extremely informative and well documented.Google Scholar
1 Tito, Josip Broz, Political Report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Belgrade, 1948), p. 77.Google Scholar
2 Excerpts from Dedijer's diary in Tridecet Dana (Thirty Days) for February–March 1950.
3 In 1941, for example, the Macedonian section of the C.P.Y. “seceded” from its present organization and joined the Communist Party of Bulgaria. The C.P.Y. intervened and purged the leadership of the Macedonian Party, restoring “order” in Macedonia. There is no mention in the official account of the crisis, on whose initiative the party leader in Macedonia, “Sharlo” (who subsequently vanished from the scene), had taken diose steps; nor is there even an allusion as to what was Moscow's position on an issue so important to the whole development of Balkan politics. See Tito's Political Report of the C.C. of the C.P.Y. (Belgrade), pp. 105–107.Google Scholar
4 Ibid., p. 107.
5 Pijade, Mosa, The Story of Soviet Help in the Yugoslav Uprising, Pricha o sovyetskoy pomochy za dyzanye ustanka u Yugoslavyj (Belgrade, 1950).Google Scholar
6 Ibid., pp. 11–12.
7 Code name for the U.S.S.R.
8 Ibid., p. 12.
9 Soviet diplomatic efforts on behalf of the Partisans began actually but cautiously in the middle of 1942. See Vukmanovich's, chapter in Yugoslavia (Univ. of California Press, 1949), especially pp. 373–4.Google Scholar
10 Tridecet Dana (Thirty Days), 02–03 1950Google Scholar
11 Pijade, , op. cit., p. 27.Google Scholar
12 A French newspaperman, M. Louis Dalme, asked the Marshal, in the course of an interview: “In the light of the trials of Rajk and Kostov, do you consider the (purge) trials in the Soviet Union in 1936 and 1937 as having been ‘produced’ in the same way?” Tito, whose accession to the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party in 1937 was largely a by-product of the purge period, refused to answer the question. Borba Dec. 28, 1949Google Scholar. One example will perhaps be sufficient to illustrate the nature and reliability of the evidence presented in the trials. According to the Hungarian prosecutor and Rajk's own “confession,” Rajk and several Yugoslav Communists currently important figures in Tito's regime were working for the Gestapo while in Vichy concentration camp in the Fall of 1940. There have been several testimonies to the effect that the Yugoslavs mentioned in the trial like Alesh Beblef and “Tempo” Vukmanovich were at that time in Yugoslavia. MrPollak, Stephen W. in a letter to The New Statesman and Nation of April 8, 1950, writes: “… Bebler, an old friend of mine from the days of the Spanish (Civil) War, was released from prison in Ljubljana in September 1940, after serving a one year sentence … and after his release, until my departure from Yugoslavia in March 1941, I was a frequent guest in Bebler's house. …”Google Scholar
13 Quoted in Tito, , op. cit., p. 81 and ff.Google Scholar
14 Lieutenant-GeneralKreacic, Otmar in Politika, Dec. 22, 1949.Google Scholar
15 Ibid.
16 An account of the trial is found in Borba, for the 3d, 4th and 5th of June, 1950.Google Scholar
17 Ibid.
* The Russians, as seen below, insist on the former version.
18 “Since all other means were exhausted the Soviet Union had only one other method left for gaining Trieste—to start war with Anglo-Americans over Trieste and take it by force. The Yugoslav comrades could not fail to realize that after such a hard war the U.S.S.R. could not enter another. However, this fact caused dissatisfaction among the Yugoslav leaders. …” Letter of the C.P.S.U. to the C.P.Y. quoted in in The Soviet Yugoslav Dispute, p. 36.Google Scholar
19 A bare recital of a few facts involved in this incident was given by Tito and Rankovich at die Fifth Party Congress of the C.P.Y. See Tito, , Political Report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Belgrade, 1948), pp. 105–107Google Scholar; also the same in Croat, in V Kongres Komunisticke Partije Yugoslavije pp. 129–130Google Scholar; also Rankovich, ibid., pp. 199–200.
20 In his speech before the 8th session of the National Assembly of Yugoslavia, Borba, December 29, 1949.
21 The story of Dimitrov's friendship towards Yugoslavia and Tito's regime, the friendship, which survived the break between Moscow and Belgrade and the Cominform revolution of 1948, has been consistently pursued by the Yugoslav press. There have even been hints that Dimitrov may have been forcibly removed to Russia in April 1949 and that his death there leaves much to be explained. See Borba, December 12, 1949Google Scholar. On the other hand, there are those public appearances and utterances of Dimitrov in which, following the Cominform declaration of June 28, 1948, he attacks Tito and the Yugoslav regime. At the Fifth Party Congress of the Bulgarian Workers' (Communist) Party held Dec. 18–25, 1948, Dimitrov lashed out against Tito accusing him of being a “nationalist,” and “Serbian chauvinist,” and of having designs on Bulgarian Macedonia! For a Lasting Peace … 01. 1, 1949.Google Scholar
22 Pijade's, speech, Borba, December 29, 1949.Google Scholar
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Article in Borba, Dec. 11, 1949: The Trial in Sofia, and the South-Slav Federation. The Yugoslavs at the same time were to make minor territorial concessions in return to Bulgaria.Google Scholar
26 The speeches of Dimitrov lead to the theory, discussed above, that the veteran Communist leader had attempted to form a federation of Eastern Communist states in order to free them from the influence of Moscow. Whatever the merit of such theorizing, it must be obvious that Dimitrov's speeches could not have been made, and publicized in the Soviet press, unless at the time when they were given they expressed the viewpoint of the U.S.S.R.
27 See Gyorgy, Andrew, Governments of Danubian EuropeGoogle Scholar, Ch. VIII: “Alliances and Federation Projects in Danubian Europe,” and Sharp, Samuel: “Federation in Eastern Europe,” in The American Perspective, March 1948.Google Scholar