Communism of the Balkans

Questions of federation

It seemed that, for the first time in many generations, the Balkans would be united, and once again it was an external force—this time Soviet communism—that was the dominant influence. The more optimistic of the communists hoped that this new, ideologically homogeneous Balkan region would also be one that was more clearly defined. In the north it would include Romania and the Roman Catholic areas of Yugoslavia but not Catholic Austria; in this way the old dividing lines between Catholic and Orthodox Europe, between the former Habsburg and Ottoman lands, would be discarded. There were still frontier disputes with Austria over Carinthia (Kärnten) and, more seriously, with Italy over Trieste, but the communist optimists—owing to the resoluteness of Tito—hoped to incorporate Trieste. They also hoped that communists would be successful in the Greek Civil War and thereby enable Greece to be integrated into the new Balkans.

These dreams were dashed, however, as were dreams that ideological conformity would produce political unity. Although a broad Balkan federation was more seriously discussed than at any previous time, it failed to materialize. The dominant internal force in the region was Tito’s Yugoslavia, which viewed Balkan federalization as a process in which new units would be added to the six republics that constituted the new, federal South Slav state. The Bulgarians refused to accept this, instead anticipating that such a federation would be the coming together of two equal partners, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria—or three partners, if Romania could be included. Most Albanians too had reservations about being absorbed into a Belgrade-dominated federation. Predictably, however, an external factor—Stalin—was decisive in the eventual outcome. By 1947 he had decided that Tito was becoming too powerful within the communist empire and that he should not be allowed too great an extension of his influence. Moscow vetoed Balkan federation, and in 1948 Yugoslavia was expelled from the Soviet communist camp.

Establishing the power of the party

Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Soviet bloc did not lead it to abandon communism. Initially, Tito held fast to his interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, and thus a unity of policy was preserved. All the Balkan states, except Greece, pushed down the path of agricultural collectivization, rapid urbanization, and industrialization. Also, despite doctrinal differences between Belgrade and the pro-Soviet leaders in the other capitals, there was a general uniformity of political and social practices. The communist takeovers had seen the elimination, usually by the most brutal of methods, of the communists’ political opponents. Once communist power had been established, party control was imposed over every aspect of life through the existing mechanisms of the political police, through a nomenklatura system that gave local party leaders a stranglehold on all important or rewarding jobs, and through mass social organizations such as trade unions, Soviet friendship societies, and women’s and youth groups—all of which were ultimately controlled by the communists. Within a brief period there were few adult citizens whose lives were not ultimately dependent on the goodwill of the party.

An integral part of the consolidation of communist authority was a series of purges that first affected the party itself and then spread to encompass the whole society in a mesh of terror and intimidation. In Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania those who suffered were likely to be dubbed “national deviationists” or “Titoists.” In Yugoslavia the targets of reaction were branded “Cominformists,” as those who wished to subordinate national sovereignty to the wider interests of the international communist movement run from Moscow were known, or “nationalists,” the label ascribed to those who opposed the subordination of Serbian, Croatian, or Macedonian nationalism to Tito’s ideal of “brotherhood and unity.” In all cases the purges served to intimidate both the party and the population at large into inactivity while collectivization and industrialization precipitated widespread social change and tension. Among those particularly at risk during the purges were individuals who had connections with organizations outside the communist bloc. Protestant churches suffered heavily, as did the Roman Catholic Church when it was not too entrenched an institution to tackle. Societies such as the Boy Scouts, the Rotarians, and even the Esperantists, which had maintained contact with similar organizations in the West, were condemned and disbanded, with their leading members usually imprisoned or placed in forced-labour camps. All this meant that the Balkans, again with the exception of Greece, were more isolated from the West than at any other time since the height of Ottoman power in the 16th century.

Pulling back from Moscow

Isolation from the West was coupled with increasing Soviet influence. The Soviet Union sent thousands of advisers to work on construction projects and in the armies, civil services, railways, parties, and—above all—secret police forces of the Balkan states in its sphere of influence. The Soviet model was copied in education, culture, the military, and all other aspects of public life. In Bulgaria two individual letters were dropped from the Bulgarian alphabet to make it appear more like Russian. In Romania there were furious though hardly convincing efforts to show that Romanian was a Slavic language, and in Bessarabia (which had been reincorporated into the Moldavian S.S.R.) the Romanian language was now printed in Cyrillic. The national economies were not only refashioned on the Soviet model but also subordinated to Soviet needs. This subordination was particularly true for Bulgaria and Romania, which, as defeated powers in World War II, were forced to sign disadvantageous trade agreements with the Soviet Union and had to agree to the creation of so-called joint-stock companies.

Despite such initial ideological unity, the Balkans rapidly reverted to their customary divisions. Even before the split of 1948, the Yugoslavs, though remaining rigidly loyal to Marxist-Leninist ideas, had balked at many aspects of the Soviets’ patronizing and domineering behaviour. They had successfully resisted attempts by Stalin to set up joint-stock companies, and they were perplexed by the Soviet demand to place its agents in a country and a party that had proved themselves loyal to Stalin, the Soviet Union, and socialism. Even after 1948 Tito continued to insist that he had broken with the Cominform but not with socialism. Although Yugoslavia soon accepted American aid, its Stalinist economic and police policies were not diluted until the early 1950s. After that, with his introduction of “socialist self-management” and his leadership in the nonaligned movement, Tito sought to plot a middle way between the two opposing poles of the Cold War—though his basic commitment to socialism was never in doubt.

Albania was next to leave the Soviet fold. Albanian nationalism had already reacted unfavourably to Yugoslav plans for union, and, after the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s rapprochement with Tito in 1955, the Albanian party leader Enver Hoxha became disillusioned with Moscow as well. Beginning in 1961, Albania found support from the Kremlin’s new rival, China.

Romania broke loose in the early 1960s. Soviet plans to introduce a division of labour in the socialist economies through the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (commonly known as Comecon) would have made good many of the faults of Stalinism, which had produced autarkic economies in each Balkan state, but they also would have required Romania’s economy to remain predominantly agricultural and thereby would have slowed social evolution and progress toward full communism. Romania therefore switched to a more nationally oriented policy that was well received by the majority of its skeptical population and provided the regime with much-needed legitimacy. Thereafter, Romania could not forgo its nationally oriented policies, but once again commitment to socialism was never in doubt. Unlike Albania, Romania remained a member (albeit a maverick one) of the Warsaw Pact, a Soviet-led military alliance formed in 1955.

These deviations from the Soviet line made Bulgaria the sole Balkan country to maintain loyalty to and conformity with Soviet policies. Yet the Soviets could tolerate this situation because the Balkan Peninsula was declining in strategic importance. The major land confrontation with the West would now take place, it was assumed, in Germany, while the delivery systems of modern long-range weapons diminished the significance of the Dardanelles as a naval asset.

After World War II, Greece followed a very different historical path from all of its Balkan neighbours. As a result of the 1944 understanding between Churchill and Stalin and the 1949 defeat of the communist forces in the Greek Civil War by the Greek government, which enjoyed significant support from Great Britain and later the United States, Greece was the only Balkan country that did not fall under communist control. With the exception of a seven-year military dictatorship (1967–74), Greece remained a capitalist and democratic state, an outpost of western Europe in the Balkans. It became a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1952 and joined the European Economic Community (later the European Union within the European Community) in 1981.