Partisan leader

An opportunity for armed insurgency presented itself after the Axis powers, led by Germany and Italy, occupied and partitioned Yugoslavia in April 1941. The CPY remained the only organized political group ready and capable of contending with the occupiers and their collaborators throughout the territory of the defunct Yugoslav state. This meant that the communist-dominated Partisan units were not simply auxiliaries of the Allied war effort but an offensive force in their own right. Their ultimate aim, carefully concealed in the rhetoric of “national liberation struggle,” was the seizure of power. To this end, in Partisan-held territories they established “liberation committees,” communist-dominated administrative organs that prefigured the future federal republics. As a result, Tito’s Partisans became a threat not only to the occupiers and collaborators but also to the royal government-in-exile and its domestic exponents, the Serbian Chetniks of Dragoljub Mihailović. In time, Communist pressure drove the Chetniks into tactical alliances with the Axis, thereby precipitating their isolation and defeat.

In 1943, after Tito’s headquarters survived bruising Axis operations from January to June (particularly in the battles of Neretva and Sutjeska), the Western Allies recognized him as the leader of the Yugoslav resistance and obliged the London government-in-exile to come to terms with him. In June 1944 the royal premier, Ivan Šubašić, met Tito on the island of Vis and agreed to coordinate the activities of the exiled government with Tito. The Soviet army, aided by Tito’s Partisans, liberated Serbia in October 1944, thereby sealing the fate of the Yugoslav dynasty, which had the strongest following in this largest of the Yugoslav lands. There ensued a series of mop-up operations that strengthened Communist control of the whole of Yugoslavia by May 1945. In the process the Yugoslav frontiers extended to take in Istria and portions of the Julian Alps, where reprisals against fleeing Croat and Slovene collaborationists were especially brutal.

The conflict with Stalin

Tito consolidated his power in the summer and fall of 1945 by purging his government of noncommunists and by holding fraudulent elections that legitimated the jettisoning of the monarchy. The Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was proclaimed under a new constitution in November 1945. Trials of captured collaborationists, Catholic prelates, opposition figures, and even distrusted communists were conducted in order to fashion Yugoslavia in the Soviet mold. Tito’s excesses in imitation eventually became as irritating to Moscow as did his independent manner—especially in foreign policy, where Tito pursued risky aims in Albania and Greece at a time when Stalin advised caution. In the spring of 1948, Stalin initiated a series of moves to purge the Yugoslav leadership. This effort was unsuccessful, as Tito maintained his control over the CPY, the Yugoslav army, and the secret police. Stalin then opted for a public condemnation of Tito and for the expulsion of the CPY from the Cominform, the European organization of mainly ruling communist parties. In the ensuing war of words, economic boycotts, and occasional armed provocations (during which Stalin briefly considered military intervention), Yugoslavia was cut off from the Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites and steadily drew closer to the West.

The policy of nonalignment

The West smoothed Yugoslavia’s course by offering aid and military assistance. By 1953 military aid had evolved into an informal association with NATO via a tripartite pact with Greece and Turkey that included a provision for mutual defense. After the changes in the Soviet Union following Stalin’s death in 1953, Tito was faced with a choice: either continue the Westward course and give up one-party dictatorship (an idea promoted by Milovan Djilas but rejected by Tito in January 1954) or seek reconciliation with a somewhat reformed new Soviet leadership. The latter course became increasingly possible after a conciliatory state visit by Nikita Khrushchev to Belgrade in May 1955. The Belgrade declaration, adopted at that time, committed Soviet leaders to equality in relations with the communist-ruled countries—at least in the case of Yugoslavia. However, the limits of reconciliation became obvious after the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956; this was followed by a new Soviet campaign against Tito, aimed at blaming the Yugoslavs for inspiring the Hungarian insurgents. Yugoslav-Soviet relations went through similar cool periods in the 1960s (following the invasion of Czechoslovakia) and thereafter.

Nevertheless, Stalin’s departure lessened the pressures for greater integration with the West, and Tito came to conceive of his internal and foreign policy as being equidistant from both blocs. Seeking like-minded statesmen elsewhere, he found them in the leaders of the developing countries. Negotiations with Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Jawaharlal Nehru of India in June 1956 led to a closer cooperation among states that were “nonengaged” in the East-West confrontation. From nonengagement evolved the concept of “active nonalignment”—that is, the promotion of alternatives to bloc politics, as opposed to mere neutrality. The first meeting of nonaligned states took place in Belgrade under Tito’s sponsorship in 1961. The movement continued thereafter, but by the end of his life Tito had been eclipsed by new member states, such as Cuba, that conceived of nonalignment as anti-Westernism.

Self-management and decentralization

The break with the Soviet Union also inspired a search for a new model of socialism in Yugoslavia. In this area Tito, never a theoretician, depended on the ideological formulations of his lieutenants, notably Edvard Kardelj. But he supported the notion of workers’ management of production, embodied in the formation of the first workers’ councils in 1950. In the process, Soviet-style central planning was abandoned and central agencies were trimmed.

Workers’ self-management had important consequences for internal relations in multinational Yugoslavia. As power steadily shifted from the federation to the republics, conservative centralist forces fought back, opening cleavages within the communist elite between 1963 and 1972. During this period Tito purged first the Serbian centralists (notably, Alexander Ranković in 1966) and then the leaders of the decentralizing and liberal forces in Croatia (1971) and Serbia (1972). The Croatian purge had a further effect of destabilizing Tito’s rule in Yugoslavia’s most industrially advanced republic.