Part 2
How did Tito carve out Yugoslav independence after World War II?
After the Allied victory, at a stroke Tito and his comrades found themselves in charge of only the second ever incarnation in history of a country called Yugoslavia. It comprised a federation of six previously independent countries: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. Although earlier there had been movements aiming to unite the Southern Slavs (the ‘Jugo’ Slavs), it was only after World War I that these states were pulled together under one ‘Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’.
Although Serbia had found itself in charge of all territory, apart from Bulgaria, containing Southern Slavs in November 1918, and some senior Serbs were reluctant to live in a single state with the Croats and Slovenes – people who had mostly fought for Austria-Hungary in the war – Serbian Crown Prince Aleksandar Karađorđević agreed to the creation of the new kingdom after representations from the Southern Slavs formerly in Austria-Hungary. The Croats and Slovenes took what might have seemed a counter-intuitive step largely out of fear of Italy, which they suspected would try to seize prime parts of Dalmatia and Slovenia, if their states were not part of a larger entity.
If the Croats and Slovenes had hoped for a decentralised or federal union, they were to be disappointed when the dominant Serbs introduced a centralising, legislative framework to the kingdom’s constitutional monarchy. But it was a kind of democracy that lasted only till 1929, due to the poisonous factions it set against one another, culminating in shots being fired in the Parliament and two leading political figures perishing.
King Aleksandar announced he was seizing power, suspending the constitution, creating a dictatorship, and re-naming the kingdom the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. His Law on the Protection of the State added strength to an already powerful police force and prompted vigorous attempts to crush political opponents.
Before his assassination by Macedonian revolutionaries in 1934, the King had begun to engage first with Mussolini and then with Hitler, looking for support in curbing his opponents.
Yugoslavia was to enjoy a gentle start to the war, Hitler not envisaging it as part of German Lebensraum, promising to protect its integrity, and, only in March 1941, seeking to draw it into the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan.
The students who protested in the streets of Belgrade against the Pact awoke the following day to radio broadcasts from Crown Prince Petar, announcing that the head of the Yugoslav Air Force, Gen Dušan Simović, was now leading the resistance to the Germany-led Axis. The Prince himself had been astonished. Unable to locate him, Simović had ordered one of his lieutenants to imitate him and make the broadcast.
The resistance by an unprepared Yugoslavia in the face of the strongest military power in the world was described by BBC journalist and translator, Lovett Edwards, as “one of the most magnificent gestures of this age”.
Cue Tito and his improbably successful four-year campaign.
Having won his post-war landslide, Tito’s secret police, OZNA, were let loose to purge thousands of collaborators and counter-revolutionaries. These included the Četnik leader, Mihailović, who was captured, tried and shot in a period of just over four months in 1946, his body disposed of and never recovered.
The election-rigging and the killings led Churchill, now in opposition, to describe his assessment that he could trust Tito as “one of my biggest mistakes of the war” and Fitzroy Maclean would observe on a return visit to Yugoslavia in 1947 that, in the space of just two years, Tito seemed to have become detached from the everyday people he had inspired and would tolerate no attempts to share with him any unpleasant truths.
Tito was helped in his attempt to remain out of the clutches of the Soviet Union and to resist being corralled into the Warsaw Pact by Stalin’s fear of triggering a Third World War – particularly after the US had demonstrated its willingness to use nuclear weapons.
Tito’s relationship with Stalin had been chilly from the off and, in the years following the war, Tito continued to irritate Stalin with independent statements and foreign policy actions, even being accused of committing the worst deviations from Bolshevik doctrine, including Trotskyism.
The situation came to a head in 1948, when Tito refused to send a delegation to Bucharest for the Comintern – the gathering of international Communist Parties, founded by Lenin, but which became, under Stalin, a USSR-dominated, controlling organisation.
The Communist Party of Yugoslavia’s subsequent expulsion from the Comintern in effect sealed the country’s independence and Tito would spend the following decades skilfully playing off those on both sides of the Iron Curtain, garnering significant economic and military aid first from one side, then the other, before repeating the trick time and again.
Again Tito gambled, opening Yugoslavia’s borders, letting its people work abroad, and allowing tourists into the Federation. The remittances from Gastarbeiter and tourist income, he judged, outweighed the risk of any significant brain-drain. If the market socialism that he espoused was hated by the Soviets, it led to rapid industrialisation of parts of Yugoslavia and relatively steady increases in the standard of living of many citizens. One of the problems of the Tito legacy was that, by allowing the six republics freedom to borrow from overseas, the Yugoslav Federation built up a crippling level of debt that would cause its economy to crater in the decade after his death.
Tito had been conscious of the trouble to which the ship he was piloting was heading, as he approached his final years. One American intelligence analyst wrote: “Though Tito is not blind to the problems his departure will create, this is one area of political dissension in which his genius for compromise and innovation cannot be brought fully to bear. It is possible for a man to arrange his own funeral, but it is difficult for him to play a very active part in it.”
Having happily encouraged a cult of personality – his photo was in shop windows and homes the length and breadth of Yugoslavia, films were screened, and schoolchildren were bombarded with the stories of his war-time glories – there was always likely to be a vacuum that would prove impossible to fill after his death. His lifelong political colleague, the Slovene Edvard Kardelj, whose preference was for a looser federation and a self-managed society rather than one dominated by the Communist Party, said shortly before his death: “Surely, in the future, we will not seek another Tito, since there is no-one like him, nor will there be for a long time.”
And Tito himself had foreseen the chaos that would ensue. As early as 1967, Tito had told a Communist colleague from a Warsaw Pact country: “They all hate each other: every session of our CC (Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia) is a general massacre.” In 1971, he confided: “If you knew how I see the future of Yugoslavia, you would be horrified.” Shortly before his death, he told a Comrade who asked what was happening to Yugoslavia: “Yugoslavia doesn’t exist anymore… The (Communist) Party does not exist anymore.”
Purges of liberals in both Croatia and Serbia in the early ‘70s also sowed some of the seeds that would produce conflict 10 years after Tito’s death.
In Croatia, the desire to secede from the Federation grew stronger as a result of the purges. In fact, the man who would lead Croatia to independence and play a significant role in sparking war in 1991, Communist-turned-Croatian-nationalist Franjo Tuđman, was jailed in these purges and only spared decades in jail because of an intervention by Tito, who respected his Partisan record after the war.
In Serbia, the removal of key progressive thinkers created a space for nationalists to fill. As Tito’s biographer Pirjevec put it “the defeat of the most educated part of Serb society opened the floodgates to the Levantine school of thought, xenophobic and closed in its myths, unable to pull the nation from its economic and civil backwardness, the consequences of five centuries of Ottoman rule”.
Phil Murphy – August 2024
Reading List
- Tito and His Comrades, Jože Pirjevec, The University of Wisconsin Press
- Tito’s Secret Empire, How the Maharaja of the Balkans Fooled the World, William Klinger and Denis Kuljiš, C.Hurst and Co (Publishers Ltd)
- The Fall of Yugoslavia, by Misha Glenny, Penguin Books
- The War is Dead, Long Live the War - Bosnia: The Reckoning, by Ed Vulliamy, The Bodley Head, London
- Serpent in the Bosom - The Rise and Fall of Slobadan Milošević, by Lenard J. Cohen, Westview Press, Perseus Books Group
- Eastern Approaches, Fitzroy Maclean, Penguin World War II Collection
- They Would Never Hurt a Fly, War Criminals on Trial in The Hague, Slavenka Drakulić, Abacus
- Bosnian Chronicle, Ivo Andrić, Apollo, Head of Zeus