History of the Socialist Revolution

Chapter 4: Resistance

Chapter 4: Resistance

The Yugoslavian Revolution was a breakthrough. Up until June 1948, it seemed that the global communist movement was doomed to follow the Soviet experience, where Joseph Stalin utilized communist dogma in order to legitimize his new imperialist dictatorship. When the Soviet-Yugoslav split occurred that month, there appeared a new independent sphere of influence that threatened to upset the uniformity of the communist bloc and overturn Stalin’s monopoly on the definition of socialism.

Leftist movements, particularly in America, have not done themselves any favors by largely ignoring the significance of the Yugoslav Revolution. Some possible reasons for this attitude were the tremendous difficulties scholars had in trying to piece together how the Yugoslav system actually worked (see Cole¹), echoes of Stalinist accusations that Yugoslavia represented either a ‘revisionist’ or ‘capitalist-roader tendency,’ and associations between the communist regime and the horrific genocidal attacks in 1992 and 1995 against Bosnian muslims. While it is perfectly valid to condemn the regime for ultimately allowing such rabid nationalism to break out, it is also worth asking how it was possible for Serbs, Croats, and Muslims to cooperate with one another under communist leadership for so long. It is worth recognizing, by the same token, the role played by Yugoslav communist partisans resisting Nazi occupation and ultimately their entire genocidal war effort.

That being said, while it is true that Yugoslav guerilla fighters ought to be memorialized for their heroism, caution must be exercised in how much this resistance movement is romanticized, or thought of as a “Bloody Fairy Tale,” in the words of one Serbian postwar poet.² We have seen from the history of North Korea how an excessive mythologizing of Kim Il Sung’s guerilla movement led to a kind of historical amnesia and helped to legitimize the unquestioned dominance of the Kim dynasty. Much of the ‘Legend of Kim Il Sung’ was built on extreme exaggeration of how effective the guerrilla fighters really were. As brave as the Yugoslav partisans were, it is too easy to exaggerate their effectiveness. They were not, after all, successful in stopping the Nazis from murdering nearly every single Jewish person in Serbia.

Nonetheless, the period leading up to the Yugoslavian Revolution (from the 1920s to 1950) should serve as an opportunity to reflect on the ramifications of resistance. While maintaining a sober evaluation of the Partisans’ contribution to the war effort, one can nonetheless clearly see that no political group was able to demonstrate any kind of credibility comparable to them. It was for this reason Josip Broz Tito was able to ride a wave of massive popular support into leadership of the Yugoslav Federation.

This period began with the formation of the first Yugoslav republic at the end of World War 1. This anti-communist republic was transformed into a dictatorship by King Aleksandar in 1929. Next followed a period of encroaching Nazi influence with the help of monarchist collaborators, culminating in a full-scale Nazi invasion in 1941. The revolutionary era should be book-ended, not with the retreat of the Nazis, but with the subsequent success of Yugoslav rural uprisings against Stalinist collectivization.

The formation of a united ‘Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes’ in 1918 occurred in the ominous shadow of seemingly irreconcilable differences between two of these nominally united groups, Serbs and Croats. During the Great War, Nikola Pasic of the Serbian Radical Party and Croat politician Ante Trumbic had both attempted to create a map of the new Yugoslav state with very divergent results. Trumbic worked to gain the support of France and Britain to pressure Serbia into granting more regional autonomy to Slovenes and Croats. Pasic, for his part, was single mindedly determined to maximize Serbia’s territory and influence in order to create a “Greater Serbia.”

The new nation was an attempt to unify several countries in a region known historically as ‘the Balkans.’ It was therefore highly heterogeneous in the composition of its population. National identity more often than not coincided with a specific religious affiliation. Croats and Slovenes were Catholic. Serbs and Macedonians were Orthodox Christians. And Bosnians and Kosovo-Metohians were Muslim, representing a minority. The only thing apparently tying the countries together was a common use of the Serbo-Croatian language.

Under a constitutional monarchist system, King Aleksandar did what he could to get the Croat Peasant Party and the Serbian Radical Party to negotiate with one another. In the short term he did succeed in bringing about a period of relative political stability. Cooperation in the government led to a relaxation of Serbian repression against the Croats in the 1920s. This allowed for a brief cultural renaissance which saw the potential for intermingling amongst Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Montenegrins leading to a genuine ‘Yugoslav’ identity.

At the same time that ‘the Kingdom’ was formed. Italy was jealously harboring ambitions to expand into Slovenia. At the end of World War 1, the former allied power immediately proceeded to try to bully Yugoslavia out of its territory as much as possible. With its eyes on the city of Fiume, the Italian government launched a campaign to prevent Yugoslavia from being recognized by the former Entente powers. The Italian prime minister Vittorio Orlando intended to gain a foothold in the Balkan peninsula which would allow his navy to dominate the Otrando Straits and therefore control all access to the Adriatic Sea.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson tried to get Italy to soften its territorial demands in April 1919. But a new spirit had taken hold of the Italian officer corps. Lieutenant Colonel Gabriele D’Annunzio led a column of 200 grenadiers towards the city of Fiume in September. News of his “warrior-poet’s” gesture spread, and his numbers soon increased to 2500. D’Annunzio took the city and proceeded to occupy the governor’s palace. There, from the balcony overlooking the Piazza Dante, he gave impassioned speeches about martyrs, blood and patriotism. This spectacle is widely seen as the birth-place of Italian fascism.³

The period of the first Yugoslav republic was not friendly towards communism. Minister of the Interior Milorad Draskovic personally oversaw the persecution of the communists from the beginning. In the first election to the Constituent Assembly in 1921, the Communists won 58 seats and became the third most popular party. But in protest of their treatment by the provisional government, they walked out of the assembly and refused to cast votes to ratify the new constitution. Then, the day after the constitution was officially proclaimed in June, the Communist Party unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Prince Aleksandar, but successfully assassinated Draskovic.⁴ In response to these acts, the new state passed a special protection law which expelled all communists from the parliament and outlawed the Communist Party.

This party was initially formed in April 1919, when various groups met at a conference in Belgrade and decided to merge into the United Workers Party. In June 1920, the organization renamed itself the Yugoslav Communist Party (the KPJ). Not unlike Yugoslavia itself, the Yugoslav Communists were highly divided over various political and national questions, including how to respond to the Communist International, whether to support illegal revolutionary methods, and which ethnic group ought to have leadership of the party. But active intra-party debate was an energizing force rather than a demoralizing one, and the party achieved a membership of 60,000 at the turn of the decade.

But after 1921, the Communists struggled to survive in an undemocratic situation, sometimes by fleeing to revolutionary Moscow. Party membership dropped by over 7000 per year. In August 1928, Josip Broz Tito was arrested for stockpiling grenades. This was in accordance with Comintern policy at the time, which approved of armed action by Communists against national authorities. Tito was sentenced to 5 years in gaol, and during his incarceration he would befriend a tough Jewish intellectual, Mosa Pijade. The upshot of the regime’s crackdown was that it forced the Communists to develop a highly disciplined underground network.

In June 1928, ill feelings between Croats and Serbs came to a head. During a particularly acrimonious session of the Skupstina (the Yugoslavian parliament), a Croat delegate stood up and accused a Serb member of slaughtering and “eating people.”⁵ Serbs responded by hurling death threats in the chamber, then one man actually acted on them. Serbian radical Punisa Racic pulled out a revolver and shot 5 Croatian delegates, including the Croat Peasant Party leader, Stjepan Radic, who died slowly of a bullet wound to the stomach.

Demonstrations by Croatian students broke out in response to the mass shooting. Then in January 1929, King Aleksandar announced that he was suspending the constitution and personally seizing power. Citing the reason for his action, the king explained that, “Blind political passions have started to abuse parliamentary democracy… to such a degree that has obstructed all fruitful endeavor in this state.”⁶ Upon seizing power, the prince also renamed the country to ‘the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.’

But King Aleksandar may have overestimated his political skills as the political stability of the state did not improve under his rule. Economic chaos compounded this instability, particularly after the stock market crash in October 1929. The German banking system buckled under this crash, along with the Balkan banks which were underwritten by the Germans. The value of exports from Yugoslavia dropped by over 50% as the country became hopelessly indebted. By 1931, 36% of export revenue had to be diverted to debt servicing.⁷ Many people in the regions of Hercegovina and Dalmatia began starving.

After Aleksandar imposed his royal dictatorship, several leading Croat members of parliament fled Yugoslavia to seek refuge in neighboring countries. Among these was a lawyer named Ante Pavelic, who was set on further escalating the situation. Visiting Bulgaria, he made public appearances with members of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and gave speeches calling for the violent overthrow of Yugoslavia. “We cannot fight against those forest bandits with a prayer book in our hands…” he proclaimed, “If we wish to see our homeland free, we must unbind our hands and go into battle.”⁸

Pavelic found an ally to his cause in the Italian fascists. Italy granted him refuge and financial assistance, so that he could construct training camps for his new organization, the Croatian Revolutionary Organization, or what came to be known as the Ustase. His recruitment of disgruntled Croats from inside Yugoslavia would have devastating consequences for the country’s future.

Of course extremist nationalism wasn’t the only revolutionary force that was brewing. Following Tito’s imprisonment, several leaders emerged to help reorganize and reinvigorate the Yugoslav Communist Party, no thanks, necessarily, to interference from the Communist International. In response to the royal-military coup of January 1929, the Comintern decreed that Yugoslav Party directors were to retreat from Yugoslavia and begin supporting Serb nationalism. The leftist faction of the KPJ living in Moscow was outraged. They voted by an overwhelming majority to condemn the party directors for complying. This caused them to fall afoul of Stalin and perhaps can be seen as the beginning of a souring in relations between the CPSU and the KPJ. The Comintern issued orders to “pacify” all Yugoslav leftists in Moscow who voted in favor of the resolution.⁹ This escalated to further round-ups of Yugoslavs who supported Trotsky instead of Stalin. By 1931, most of the Yugoslavs in Russia were arrested and imprisoned.

The Yugoslav leftists were offended by the ‘Serb nationalism’ line because during the 1920s the KPJ came under the leadership of a Croat secretary and shifted strongly towards a position favoring national emancipation for Croatia. This was not an unreasonable position since between Serb nationalism and Croat nationalism, it was clear that the Croats represented the ‘nationalism of the oppressed.’ Even as King Aleksandar was muddling through the national question, he fell prey to assumptions of Serbian superiority based on the mythology of military sacrifice.

Unfortunately, the Yugoslav Communists took the Croatian position too far. As the Croatian Ustase gained more fighters and political support from none other than Benito Mussolini, the Communists failed to see them for what they were, which was a threat. Instead, they convinced themselves that the Ustase movement was progressive and could be cultivated as a political ally.

Tito was lucky to be in a Yugoslav prison at the time as his position in the party often required him to travel to and from Moscow. After being released from gaol in 1933, he joined up with Eduard Kardelj and Boris Kidric in Slovenia to begin propounding a “popular front” policy. The fascist threat would have to be met by supporting a broad “bourgeois-democratic revolution.”

The threat was now encroaching on two fronts. Not only was Mussolini supporting the Ustase, in 1933 the newly appointed German chancellor Adolf Hitler began making overtures to King Aleksandar for closer economic ties. Aleksandar responded positively, inviting German agricultural experts to Yugoslavia to discuss the prospect of shifting production away from wheat to cash-crops more serviceable to German industry.

Aleksandar’s reign was then cut short. In October 1934, the Ustase collaborated with the Macedonian Revolutionaries to organize the assassination of the King. While he was on a state visit in Marseilles, an assassin murdered him as well as the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou. It was the most unsettling event that year in Europe. Aleksandar was succeeded by a Council of Regents under Prince Pavle.

The initial response by the Yugoslav Communists was to try to demand elections and lead workers to elect united opposition candidates against Pavle. But the Comintern had other ideas. They instructed the party to simply keep a “low profile.”¹⁰ Tito was summoned to Moscow for a job in the Comintern, and L. Gorkic was left in charge of the party in Yugoslavia.

But after a couple of years, Moscow became dissatisfied with Gorkic’s ability to keep the Yugoslav party united behind the shifting sands of Comintern policy. In October 1936, they sent Tito back to reorganize the party and summoned Gorkic to Moscow, where he was never heard from again. Tito again lucked out because by being far away from Kremlin palace intrigue between 1936 and 1939, he missed another one of Stalin’s purges. He would emerge as undisputed leader in early 1939 when he was officially appointed General Secretary of the Yugoslav Communist Party.

The Nazis had no trouble adjusting to the new political leadership. Hermann Goring and Alfred Rosenburg attended King Aleksandar’s funeral in Belgrade and commenced talks with Pavle. Together with his prime minister, Milan Stojadinovic, the prince ensured that the ties between Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany would grow yet stronger.

In practice, this deal meant that the Germans would make Yugoslavia economically dependent on them, using diplomatic pressure to get the Yugoslavians to rearrange their economy to suit the needs of Germany’s war industry. In exchange, the Nazis supplied Yugoslavia with rather poor quality weaponry along with advisors and instructors who would help facilitate the economic transition, or rather, subordination.

The Nazis also expected the Yugoslav government to cooperate with their evolving foreign policy. When Yugoslavia entered into an alliance with Romania and Czechoslovakia known as ‘the Little Entente,’ Hitler worked to undermine the pact. In March 1939, when Hitler ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia, neither member country came to its aid.

Originally, the Nazis had no intentions to invade the Balkan region. The strategy of persuading the Balkan states to submit to their vision of a new order purely through diplomatic and economic pressure suited Hitler just fine. By maintaining peace in the region, Germany could ensure supplies of war materials for its campaigns elsewhere. But Hitler’s problem in this regard was Italy. He actually did not approve of Mussolini’s support for the Ustase because this could have resulted in the breakup of Yugoslavia. Hitler met with Mussolini and persuaded him to direct his imperial urges away from the Balkans. This led to Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935.

But after some time, Mussolini became resentful that Hitler was calling the shots. In October 1940, the German Luftwaffe assumed control of the Ploesti oil fields in Romania without informing Mussolini prior to the event. Mussolini’s pride was wounded that Hitler was always facing him with a “fait accompli” and keeping him in the dark about his planned military operations. Thus it was out of his own feelings of rivalry and wounded vanity that Mussolini made the decision to invade Greece.

This would prove to be an embarrassing failure. In October, Italian troops tried to cross into Greece through the Epirus Mountains. They immediately became bogged down in the mountain passes as torrents of rain turned the path into mud. They had no visibility, and several thousand men simply got lost. The Greeks were given ample time to organize a robust defense. This fruitless invasion caused tens of thousands of Greek and Italian casualties.

If it were not for this failed invasion, it never would have occurred to Hitler to invade Yugoslavia. Mussolini’s action triggered the decision by the British government to begin landing soldiers in southern Greece in November 1940. Hitler at this time was already planning to invade the Soviet Union, so he could not afford to have his rear threatened by Allied forces. He would have to clean up “the Duce’s” mess.

Next came the worst violence this region of the world had ever seen. On March 1st 1941, the Germans moved several ‘Wehrmacht’ army divisions towards the Bulgarian-Greek border. At the same time, Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop demanded that Prince Pavle allow Yugoslavia to be used as a staging ground for the invasion of Greece.

U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt tried to dissuade him from accepting. He told Pavle through his messengers that, “any nation which tamely submits on the grounds of being quickly overrun would receive less sympathy from the world than a nation which resists, even if this resistance can be continued for only a few weeks.”¹¹ But the Prince’s ministers had already made up their mind to cooperate with the Nazis by signing on to Hitler’s ‘Tripartite Pact.’

This decision by the government angered many Yugoslavs, including the military officer class and communist activists who were involved in the ‘People’s Front’ organizations. On March 26th 1941, student protesters supported by the communists poured into the streets of Belgrade demanding resistance to the Nazis. They chanted the slogan, “Better the grave than a slave.”¹²

Many military officers seemed to agree with them and were willing to act on their demands. On the 27th of March, General Dusan Simovic led a chaotic coup d’etat against Pavle’s government, which was promptly overthrown. The move was received with glowing praise from the British party leader Winston Churchill, who said that the Yugoslavs were “a valiant and warlike race,” and that “the Yugoslav nation found its soul.”¹³

But the ordinary protesters turned out to be more valiant than the top brass. At the last minute, Simovic panicked when he realized that the Yugoslav Army had no chance against a German onslaught, and his government offered to sign on to the Tripartite agreement again. It was, however, too late. Hitler was enraged at the news of the coup and he immediately ordered the Wehrmacht to invade and destroy Yugoslavia.

What followed was one of the true horror shows of the 20th century. In April 1941, the Luftwaffe began a relentless 3 day bombardment of Belgrade that killed 17,000 to 20,000 people.¹⁴ The Germans took both Belgrade and Zagreb a week later, while Italian forces invaded Slovenia and Dalmatia. It was only a matter of days before the Axis completely smashed the Yugoslav Army and dismembered the nation.

Unfortunately, the fascist occupation would receive plenty of help from domestic collaborators. The Croatian Ustase made a deal with the Axis to form the so called “Independent State of Croatia,” which divided Croatia into German and Italian occupation zones and effectively made Ante Pavelic the head of a puppet government. Although Pavelic’s own wife was Jewish, he and his Ustase cooperated quite energetically with the Nazis’ plans to destroy the Jewry of the Balkans.¹⁵

Although the Allies were loath to admit it, the only political group at this time that truly exhibited the qualities of a “valiant race” were the communists. During the rapid collapse of the Royal Yugoslav Army, Tito ordered his operatives to spread out across the country so that they could activate their underground network and initiate a strategy of guerrilla warfare. The men and women fighting under the communist banner came to be known as the ‘Partisans.’ As resistance mounted, the Partisans recruited rather high numbers of Serbian and Croatian Jews to fight the Nazis.

They were not the only resistance faction. After the Yugoslav Army’s defeat, large numbers of royal army officers and soldiers evaded capture and withdrew into the mountains and forests. These men made up the core of the armed group known as the ‘Chetniks,’ led by Colonel Dragoljub Mihailovic. It wouldn’t take too long, however, for events to reveal which of the 2 resistance movements groups was actually effective.

By all available accounts, Tito showed resolute leadership which maintained active resistance and firm discipline throughout the war. The Partisans often succeeded in liberating broad swathes of territory and at least temporarily holding them under KPJ supervision. One reason for their success was their effective use of guerrilla tactics, which often entailed tactical retreats. Second, the KPJ took effective measures to alleviate the hardships ordinary people were suffering under occupation, building an administration that could ensure an adequate local economy and varied social life. Thirdly, in a nation historically riven by fratricidal ethnic conflict, communist internationalism was to a certain extent successful in overcoming the old hatreds. Often a single Partisan unit would include a Serb, a Bosnian Muslim, and a Croatian Jew. The Chetnik organization, on the other hand, contained strong undercurrents of “Greater Serbia” ideology.¹⁶

Overcoming this endemic nationalist squabbling was one of the keys to success, and one way the Partisans achieved this was by disciplining the Serbs within their ranks. About half of the communist fighters were Serbs, which gave some Croat and Muslim villages reason to fear, given the history of relations among these groups. The communists allayed these fears by imposing elaborate rules on their own soldiers whenever they entered Muslim and Croatian villages. If villagers fled their homes in fear, Partisan units were ordered to protect their houses against looting.¹⁷

One of the factors that made the Chetniks a lot less effective as a fighting force was their strong attachment to individual villages. This gave them a lot less flexibility of movement. In addition, their organization and discipline was not as strong as the communists. Many fighters did not feel obligated to obey the orders of their leaders. If they didn’t feel like going on a mission, they simply stayed home. Clearly, the communists took the situation more seriously, both as a military campaign and a revolutionary struggle.

This is not to say that the KPJ’s tactics were not controversial. The Partisans relied partly on conscription to fill their ranks.¹⁸ In addition, they were dealing with an enemy prone to highly disproportionate acts of retaliation. In autumn 1941, the German High Command responded to the spread of guerrilla activity by announcing, “Henceforth 100 prisoners or hostages are to be shot for every soldier killed and 50 for every one wounded.”¹⁹ Tito responded to this by approving guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in order to deliberately provoke the Germans to extreme acts of retaliation. He reasoned that the more brutal the Germans were, the easier it would be to recruit more Partisans. This unsentimental strategy prioritized the victory of the revolution of all costs.

The problem, of course, was that the Germans made good on their threats. In September, the Partisans launched an attack on the town of Gornjl Milanovac in the central Serbian valley in order to engage a small German detachment stationed inside the school building. The Chetnik commander Vuckovic feared the loss of prestige of they allowed the communists to have all the glory and rushed to join the operation at the last minute. The joint operation actually succeeded in capturing the entire garrison, and the Germans were held in captivity.

When German General Bohme heard of the attack, he ordered a bloody reprisal. Against whom, it evidently did not matter. In the town of Kragujevac, which was 37 kilometers east of Milanovac, the Nazis ordered the arrest of all suspected communists and male Jews. They were rounded up in the barracks and then shot. Wehrmacht units also massacred entire classes of school children, workers from the local factories, and priests and monks from the churches. In total, the Wehrmacht murdered 2324 men. 1000 for the 10 Germans killed by the Partisans in Milanovac and 1300 for the 26 soldiers who were wounded. And then 24 more, we can presume, because the Nazis did not need a reason to kill.

The Partisan struggles of World War 2 have prompted much philosophizing about the ethical ramifications of resistance. When it comes to guerrilla war tactics, not only in World War 2 Yugoslavia, but also later wars, resistance leaders have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of concern for civilian casualties and even a tendency to use them to their advantage as much as possible. Clearly the concept of “hit-and-run” is not compatible with defense of unarmed civilians. Even in the immediate aftermath of the Kragujevac massacre, there was finger pointing between Chetniks and Partisans over moral responsibility for the deaths.

Whatever moral gray areas there may have been, what’s clear is that Allied interference in the resistance struggle only made the situation worse because the British wanted to avoid a communist alliance at all costs. In October 1941, British Colonel Bill Hudson came to Mihailovic’s headquarters in Yugoslavia to officially recognize the Chetniks as the only legitimate resistance force. The British were ignorant, perhaps willfully, of the reality that the Partisans were doing most of the fighting against the Germans.

This was a truly appalling blunder. Not even 1 month after British recognition of the Chetniks, their commander Mihailovic extended an offer of collaboration to the Germans because he wanted to prevent a communist revolution. He told the Nazis that he would agree to a truce in exchange for arms, which he promised to use against the Partisans. The Germans rejected his offer.

Meanwhile, the Holocaust in Yugoslavia was escalating. In Croatia, the Ustase established concentration camps for Jews and political enemies. Kangeroo courts facilitated the summary execution of countless numbers of urban Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and communists. In Bosnia, joint Wehrmacht-Ustase units took control of cities. The Germans stormed synagogues with machine guns blazing, shooting down chandeliers and “hurling grenades at the altars.”²⁰ Any holy scripts they could find were set alight in the streets. The country was delivered into a state of absolute chaos and terror. The camps that were established by the Ustase included not only concentration camps and death camps, but also rape camps. At Loborgrad northwest of Zagreb, around 1500 Jewish women were held and subjected to routine rape at the hands of camp commanders and staff. Many of the victims were 14 year old girls.

Yugoslavia was one of the sites that experienced special technical innovation in the engineering of genocide. By 1942, the Germans began sending the ‘gas vans’ into Serbia, trucks with a capped exhaust pipe and modified T-bone joint which diverted the engine exhaust inside a sealed compartment in the back of the truck. These were used to murder thousands of more people.

The Nazis and their collaborators killed 1,706,000 people in Yugoslavia, 10% of the population and far more than the number killed in France, Britain, or the United States. Only a handful of Jewish people were able to remain in hiding or escape to join the Partisans. Before the end of the war, the German military authorities proclaimed that Serbia was “Judenfrei” or “free of Jews.”

In September 1943, Italy surrendered, and the Germans, Chetniks, and Partisans competed to take over the territory previously occupied by Italian forces. Germany took over the Italian zone of “Independent Croatia,” but the Partisans were able to liberate large sections of Montenegro, Novi Pazar, and Hercegovina. By this time, the monarchist Chetniks lost what was left of their popular support, and they were eventually eliminated from western Yugoslavia.

After the Soviets repelled the German invasion, Tito visited Stalin in September 1944, and they agreed on a joint operation between the Partisans and the Red Army to expel the Germans from Serbia. It was in February 1944 when the British finally withdrew their support from the Chetniks and gave sole backing to Tito. The USSR helped the Partisans liberate Belgrade, then the Partisans expanded the liberated territories and continued driving the Germans out of all Yugoslav lands. By May 1945, the last German and Ustase troops surrendered to the communists.

The Yugoslav communists lost little time in beginning to exact revenge on collaborators and national traitors. Collaborators who tried to flee the country were arrested by Allied troops and turned over to the Partisans. The British army nearly prevented Ante Pavelic from crossing into Austria, but he managed to disappear into the surrounding woods and escape. The Partisans then slaughtered 30,000 Ustase, 50,000 Croat soldiers, and 30,000 refugees. The traitor Mihailovic was captured in March 1946, tried for collaboration, and executed.

Part of the response to the ethical questions of resistance has to rest on an evaluation of how effective the Partisans really were against an army that was much better equipped and had superior numbers. Obviously they would not have been able to liberate Yugoslavia had the Soviets not been victorious at the Battle of Stalingrad. Some historians do maintain that the Partisans were not that effective since they spent most of the war fleeing and evading pitched battles. But this line of reasoning resembles the fallacy of those who thought the Viet Cong were not effective against American troops. The fact is that even if the Partisans did not kill as many enemy combatants as the Germans, they did manage to keep 13 Axis divisions busy, units which would otherwise have been sent elsewhere. The hit and run style of combat exacted a psychological toll on German troops, increasing the overall level of stress on the entire Nazi war machine which ultimately overextended itself and collapsed.

How the communists won the war against the fascists is, however, only part of the story of the Yugoslav Revolution. What remained to be decided was the shape this revolution would take. Had it truly been the case that communism was a monolithic ‘bloc,’ we could end this chapter much like those histories of Eastern Europe, in which Stalin simply installed his stooges at the head of a loyal government. But there were after all, truly divergent and independent communist revolutions, a failed one in Greece and a successful one in Yugoslavia. How is it that Stalin’s model didn’t ‘take’ in this country?

Relying partly on intimidation and partly on mass support, the KPJ decisively secured victory in elections and took office in 1945. Upon taking power, the Supreme General Staff of the Partisans became the Politburo of the Party, with executive and legislative control of the new government. Tito took the main leadership role, but he had close relationships with his top administrators, a kind of inner circle triumvirate consisting of Eduard Kardelj, whom he made chief of foreign affairs, Milovan Djilas, who became chief of propaganda, and Aleksander Rankovic, who would be chief of security.

In order to begin the construction of socialism, the party opted for Soviet-style rapid industrialization. They started by creating reconstruction gangs to rebuild broken capital stock. Next, they nationalized most of private productive capital, including industry, mining, transport, and banking. But as in any situation of nationalization, the immediate question becomes what is an effective means of managing these enterprises and how are they to be coordinated with one another? According to the thinking of the time, they should not simply be left alone to respond to market demand and operate on the basis of profit. The revolution had abolished commodity production. Therefore, like the other ‘bloc’ regimes, the Yugoslavs developed a highly centralized planning system in 1947, with a detailed bureaucracy and statistical service. This meant that the production of 13,000 different types of goods would be planned by the Belgrade based Federal Planning Commission. The state budget gained control of two-thirds of all national income. Control over all of these different goods was not only handled by a 5-year plan. There were also 1 year plans which had to be printed out on paper. According to the historian R. Bicanic, the annual plan was a book that weighed 3,300 pounds.²¹

It seemed at first the Yugoslavs would be loyal to Stalin. Along with implementing a Soviet-style economic system, one of the first measures taken by the KPJ upon seizing power was to create a secret police force called OZNa, very much modeled on the Soviet NKVD. Its purpose was to round up anyone suspected of being a collaborator or otherwise disloyal in any way. Hundreds of thousands of people would be interned in 1946 and 1947, signalling that what seemed to be in store for Yugoslavians was little different from the other Orwellian-style dictatorships that were now sprouting up all over Eastern Europe in a kind of perverse “socialist spring.” At one point, the militant zeal of the Yugoslavs even became concerning to Stalin, who feared it might undermine cooperation with the other Allies.

But there were cracks in relations between the KPJ and the CPSU. We have seen already how Yugoslav cadres were victimized by the Soviet regime as early as the 1930s. Tito was made frighteningly aware that being a ‘comrade’ in itself was no protection against Stalin’s wrathful purges. During World War 2, there were further cases of Soviet misbehavior while the Red Army was stationed on Yugoslav soil. Tito’s lieutenant Milovan Djilas protested to the Soviet military command that, “There were 1219 rapes including 111 murders and 1204 cases of looting… not so insignificant given that the Red Army only operated in the north-eastern part of Yugoslavia.”²² But instead of investigating and punishing the troops responsible, Stalin scolded Djilas for daring to question the honor of the Red Army.

A critical point of disagreement had to do with different ways in which the two governments envisioned future foreign policy. Stalin’s assumptions were based on a deal he made during a visit from Churchill in October 1944, in which Britain and the USSR would split political influence over Yugoslavia “fifty-fifty.”²³ As part of the new Soviet ‘sphere of influence,’ Yugoslavia was expected to subordinate their own foreign policy to Soviet interests.

What Stalin didn’t expect was that Yugoslavia was developing a ‘sphere of influence’ of its own. In January 1948, the Bulgarian leader Georgi Dimitrov announced an ambitious proposal for a Balkan-Danubian confederation, which would unite Greece, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria in an alliance. Stalin was annoyed that these countries were trying to organize independently of Moscow. He summoned Dimitrov to Moscow and demanded that he retract his idea. Then, when he demanded the same of Tito, he refused. From the Yugoslav’s point of view, they liberated their country without the Russians’ help. The Red Army participated for only a brief time. Why should they act as though they owe their existence to the Soviet Union?

Stalin flew into a rage. He accused Tito of heresy. Then all across Eastern Europe, government officials were ordered to remove Tito’s portrait from public places. At the next meeting of the Communist Information Bureau, the Soviets accused the Yugoslav Communist Party of having, “abandoned the Marxist theory of classes and the class struggle.”²⁴ The Cominform then expelled Yugoslavia.

Tito and the other Yugoslavian leaders were shocked by this decision. They believed they were trying to emulate Stalin and his Soviet model. How could they be accused of unorthodoxy? The immediate response was therefore to double down on Stalinist economic policy. They initiated an extremely hurried effort to collectivize Yugoslav agriculture.

But the Soviet-Yugoslav split had economic consequences. The Soviet Union deferred renewal of their trade agreement with Yugoslavia. In March 1948, the Soviets withdrew all their military advisors and economic specialists. At the end of the year, they imposed a full economic blockade on Yugoslavia in an attempt to deprive them of oil. This did cause a severe economic crisis in the short term. Exports and imports with East European trading partners dropped precipitously from 1948 to 1949.²⁵ The blockade succeeded in driving down national income. Even the Chinese sided with Stalin in this crisis, an action for which their Communist Party would later issue a formal apology.

But then American president Harry Truman realized that Tito could become an ally in a new global war against Soviet communism. He devised a policy to keep Tito afloat, including economic aid in the form of grants and loans. Britain and France also began sending aid. But interestingly, they established these trade links without any condition that Tito would convert to capitalism. This significantly eased the economic situation.

Thus the path ahead seemed clear. Once the KPJ had completed the collectivization of farms, the revolution would be complete. The state proceeded to force peasants to hand over their holdings to large agricultural conglomerates. Those who resisted were subject to extra requisitions of grain. In 1949, the number of collective farms rose from 1318 to nearly 7000.

But the KPJ did not have things worked out. The idea behind the economic plan was to create a structure of socialized investment that would divert political and economic resources from the rural sector into ambitious industrial projects, essentially making the peasant subordinate to a small working class. The reason why this wasn’t going to ‘take’ was because the peasant farmer class was still 75% of Yugoslavia’s population, and the countryside contributed the majority of recruits to Partisan resistance fighters. These were experienced guerrilla veterans who were still armed.

In this post-war situation where economic recovery was badly needed, collectivization failed to stimulate agricultural production, and in fact it led to a drop in output. The Party set grain requisitions to unrealistic levels, threatening to throw farmers into work camps if they failed to meet their quotas. Farmers who were unable to produce enough used their savings to buy grain on the black market so they could turn it over to the state. Some hoarded their produce or slaughtered their livestock so they wouldn’t have to hand it over to inspectors.

Now the KPJ was about to undergo a second lesson in resistance. In March 1950, two former Partisan fighters met in a private residence in northwestern Bosnia to begin planning an armed uprising against the communist state. One of these was a Serb farmer, Milan Bozic, and the other was a Bosnian Muslim, Ale Covic. They served in the same unit during World War 2. The confiscation drive in the Cazin district proved to be too much for the local population. The two leaders successfully attracted 100s of recruits from their own and neighboring communities, including some Croat districts. They set a specific date for the uprising, evading the notice of the secret police, and then attacked.

The rebels successfully cut phone lines between Cazin and the other major towns. Then they began raiding the collective farms, looting foodstuffs and tobacco so that they could distribute it amongst their families. Aleksandar Rankovic quickly caught wind of the trouble and ordered a counter-attack. Rebels got into a few shoot-outs with the army and police. But they didn’t last long. After a few weeks, the army rounded them all up and executed the leaders.

This could have been dismissed as an isolated incident, except that it was not. It was part of a larger pattern of rural uprisings against collectivization that broke out in 1949-1950 in Bosnia, Hercegovina, Croatia, and Macedonia. Some of these were instigated by unsavory elements like Chetnik and Ustase outlaws, but there were also many communists.

The Communist Party of Yugoslavia was forced to the realization that Stalin didn’t have all the answers after all. And in fact it might also be true that this artificial imposition of a collectivist structure on the peasant structure was not compatible with socialism, which was originally conceived to apply to advanced industrial societies. It was in 1950 that the Yugoslav leaders made collectivization voluntary.

The purpose of learning about social revolutions is neither to linger over their brutal details nor reminisce about the glorious moments of victory. It is to set the context for thinking about what comes after a social revolution. Ultimately the significance of the Yugoslav Revolution lies not in the revolution itself, but in the peculiar form of self-management socialism that it brought about. We can conclude from this period that though the radical versus reform debate continues, and the path to socialism may vary in countries with different pre-existing social and economic structures, at least in Yugoslavia it was certainly the case that the country could not have advanced to socialism without a revolution. This revolution proved to be just as hostile to Stalinism as it was to fascism.

Notes

1. Cole, G.D.H. Towards a Libertarian Socialism: Reflections on the British Labour Party and the European Working Class Movements. Chico: AK Press, 2021, p. 285.

2. Desanka Maksimovich, “A Bloody Fairy Tale,” Laban 1999, www.laban.rs/lib/Desanka_Maksimovich/A_Bloody_Fairytale.html

3. Glenny, Misha. The Balkans 1804-2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers. London: Granta Books, 2012, p. 376.

4. Gazi, Stephen. A History of Croatia. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973, p. 290.

5. Misha Glenny, op. Cit., p. 410

6. Quoted in Misha Glenny, The Balkans 1804-2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, p. 412.

7. Ibid., p. 426.

8. Ibid., p. 431.

9. McFarlane, Bruce. Yugoslavia: Politics, Economics, and Society. London: Pinter Publishers, 1988, p. 9.

10. Ibid., p. 9.

11. Quoted in Glenny, op. Cit., p. 473.

12. Ibid., p. 474.

13. Quoted in Glenny, op. Cit., p. 471.

14. Donia, Robert J. & Fine, Jr. John V. A. Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 134.

15. Gazi, op. Cit., 354.

16. Ibid., p. 354.

17. Donia, op. Cit., p. 153.

18. Ibid., p. 152.

19. Quoted in Glenny, op. Cit., p. 485.

20. Ibid., p. 498.

21. Quoted in McFarlane, op. Cit., p. 105.

22. Quoted in Glenny, op. Cit., p. 532.

23. Ibid., p. 522.

24. Quoted in Glenny, op. Cit., p. 535.

25. McFarlane, op. Cit., p. 111.