For Stalin, Yugoslavia was a thorn in his side, not only because it was a strategic part of Europe that he never managed to control militarily, but because Josip Broz Tito had led the liberation movement in this region and had achieved most of his gains without the help and control of the Soviet Union. This bothered Stalin because, as loyal to the Soviet Union as the Yugoslav communists professed themselves to be, they were never completely under his command, for they did not owe them their positions of power. Stalin initially refused to recognise the guerrilla movement and to help it materially. For some three years after the end of the war, the Soviet Union's attitude towards Yugoslavia strained the amity between the two countries because Moscow treated it as yet another ‘people's democracy,’ which was certainly not the way Yugoslavs saw their country.
When the first Soviet mission arrived in Yugoslavia after the war, the Soviet representatives began recruiting Yugoslav officers to work for the Soviet intelligence service. They could have obtained any information by directly asking any member of the National Committee, but the Soviets wanted to get information through their own covert means by having their own loyal men inside the Yugoslav Communist Party and state apparatus. In order to recruit these men, they took them back to the USSR, bribed them, or even blackmailed them by probing into any secrets of their personal lives. When they were not successful, they would tell the Yugoslav officers to keep the matter under absolute secrecy.
That was not the only reason why the Yugoslavs had a negative perception of the Soviets. After some of the soldiers of the Red Army had helped fight Nazi forces in the northeast part of Yugoslavia, they stayed for some time in that area and many civilians complained that these Soviet officers would “…rob, murder, and raped women, sometimes in front of their husbands.” The Yugoslav régime tried to downplay these incidents by saying that they were just “individual cases” but the reports grew in number and the image of the Soviets was very low. The chief of the Soviet military mission, General Korneyev added insult to injury by snapping with indignation that these accusations were all false.
Another problem that arose was the hounding of the Yugoslav press by Soviet representatives of the Soviet Information Bureau with hundreds of articles written in the Soviet Union, about Soviet life, Russian writers, composers, scientists, life in the collectives, etc, and they wanted all of them printed in the Yugoslav papers. The Yugoslav régime did not let this happen because it would not have left any space for local journalists. Besides, the Soviet press almost never published a Yugoslav article in their papers back at home. With regard to books, “by 1946 the Soviet press published two books from Yugoslavia, while the Yugoslav press published 1,850.”
The main cause of friction, however, was the creation of Soviet-Yugoslav joint-stock companies. The Yugoslavs realised that this was a means for the Soviets to gradually assume control of their economy. The Soviets wanted to create these joint-stock companies in such sectors of production as steel, iron, and non-ferrous metals. Their real intention was to prevent Yugoslavia's industrialisation by extracting raw materials from it through these companies. The Yugoslavs rejected all the proposals. The Soviets also proposed a plan for a joint-stock bank, which in reality would have been a Soviet agency on Yugoslav soil. The bank would have given the Soviets access to the Yugoslav central financing and credit allocations. Much to the Soviet's anger, the Yugoslav leadership also rejected this proposal.
The two sides only agreed upon the creation of a joint air transportation company and a joint river shipping company. The new airline called ‘Justa’ took over all the major air routes to and from Yugoslavia, relegating the state carrier JAT (Jugoslovenski AeroTransport) to a secondary role. The river shipping company ‘Juspad’ was equally as exploitative, because the Soviets appropriated Yugoslav vessels and used their shipyards without contributing a single ship. The Yugoslavs protested, but Stalin tried to assuage their complaints with the promise of a huge credit for capital goods, a promise that never saw itself come true.
Aside from economic issues, Stalin was very annoyed at Yugoslavia's efforts to establish good relations with other Balkan countries, especially with those that had fought alongside the Axis powers during World War Two. Not only did this independent foreign policy-making bother Stalin, but it also ruined his ‘divide and conquer’ plans. He planned to incite conflicts between nations by inflaming ancient differences, and then stepping in as the arbiter, thus controlling the affairs of the nations involved. Stalin's tactic in the Balkans was disguised by his insistence on the creation of a Balkan federation which would include Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, the two Balkan powers that for many years had fought for the dominance of the area.. “Since Stalin had a much better control over Bulgaria than over Yugoslavia, his intention was to join these two countries in a federation so as to manipulate its internal affairs through his loyal Bulgarian statesmen.” The Yugoslavs, however, were suspicious of Stalin's insistence. They discussed the formation of a joint federation with Bulgarians but they thought that it was too early for that. However, they did not want to contradict Stalin, and proposed a plan in accordance with which Bulgaria would become one of the six constituent republics of Yugoslavia. The Bulgarians did not like this idea, for they wanted to be equal partners in a dual federation, instead of being one of seven members. Stalin gave his lukewarm support to the Yugoslav proposal, because what mattered to him most was to get control over Yugoslavia." But this issue was postponed for a later date, but that date never arrived. By the end of the decade Yugoslavia was not willing to submit itself to Stalin's demands, as we shall see later, and this idea died out.
On February 10, 1948, Edvard Kardelj, Tito's ‘right arm.’ was summoned to Moscow by Stalin. He and his Yugoslav comrades were criticised by Stalin for Yugoslavia's independent foreign policy vis-À-vis the other Balkan countries. When he was in Moscow, Molotov, unexpectedly called Kardelj to his office and put a document before Kardelj's eyes and ordered him to sign it. It was a document demanding that Yugoslavia cease taking independent action in foreign policy without prior Soviet consent on the issue. He signed the document and returned to Belgrade with the news. On March 1, 1948, Tito called a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) and told his comrades that Yugoslavia's independence was under threat, an assessment to which everyone agreed with. The Yugoslav Central Committee wrote a cautious letter to Stalin, complaining about the abuses of the Red Army in Yugoslavia, the unfairness of the joint-stock companies, and the effects of the delays in trade agreements between the USSR and Yugoslavia that was hurting their 5-Year Plan. They also pointed to the attempts by Soviet officers to recruit Yugoslav officers into the Soviet intelligence service and complained about the treatment of the Yugoslav delegates in Moscow.
On March 19, a telegram from Moscow informed the Yugoslav Central Committee that Russian civilian specialists were ordered to leave Yugoslavia without any apparent explanation. Eight days later, the Yugoslav leaders received an insulting letter signed by Stalin and Molotov. It charged, among many things, that Yugoslav policies were contrary to Soviet goals. The letter asked why his civilian specialists could not freely obtain the necessary information from the Yugoslav ministries, and why they had been placed under surveillance. It accused the Yugoslav leadership of ‘slandering’ the Soviet Union. These points were accompanied by harsh criticism of Tito's policies during the early years of his rule and accused him of not following the Marxist-Leninist doctrine.
On April 12, 1948, Tito convened the Central Committee. It was at that session that all the members of the Central Committee, except Sreten Zhujovich, agreed to write a letter to Stalin in which they criticised the Soviet leader's actions and insisted on their independence. Upon receiving this impertinent letter, Stalin ordered all of his satellite régimes to turn against Yugoslavia. Tito received critical letters from each and every one of the Soviet bloc countries. The Soviets then began to publicly belittle the partisan movement's achievements in liberating the country, something that infuriated the Yugoslav people for they knew well that they had freed their land entirely on their own, without Soviet help. Stalin responded with a letter to Tito asking him to attend the next Cominform session which was to discuss Yugoslavia's case. Tito politely declined the invitation, which set off Stalin's rage
Finally, on June 28, 1948, the Central Committee received the well-known Cominform resolution stating that the policy of the Yugoslav leadership was against the goals of the socialist community. The letter also included an appeal to the people of Yugoslavia, calling upon them to force their government to submit to the Soviet Union or to overthrow it. The Yugoslav leaders published the Cominform resolution along with the Yugoslav government's response in Borba, the official state newspaper. “This bold move showed that Tito was not intimidated and was confident about his support in Yugoslavia” From July 21 to 27, the Fifth Party Congress convened in Belgrade and approved the current régime's position towards the Cominform by re-electing the erstwhile Yugoslav leaders for another term. On July 24, an editorial in Pravda, a Soviet newspaper, stated that the Yugoslav congress had been a fraud, and that the régime forced the people to stand by their government. For the next six months, Tito still hoped that he could mend relations with the Soviet Union. For example, the Yugoslav delegation to the Danube River conference that took place in Belgrade on July 30, 1948 supported all the Soviet proposals for legalising Soviet control over the river, even though some of these proposals went against Yugoslavia's interests. In January 1949, Yugoslavia even applied to join the Council for Mutual Economic Aid (CMEA). Stalin turned Yugoslavia's application down.
The Soviet Union directed its satellite countries to take part in an economic blockade of Yugoslavia. On July 1, 1948, Albania already terminated economic relations with its northern neighbour. By the autumn, all the Soviet bloc countries removed their trade agreements with Yugoslavia. In January 1949 Moscow told Belgrade that its capital goods agreement was no longer valid because “conditions had changed.” This gravely affected the Yugoslav economy because the 5-Year Plan was in progress, and the sudden stop of the deliveries of machinery and fertilisers from the Soviet Union hampered the attempts for a successful collectivisation of agriculture.
“In sum, a raw struggle for political power in Yugoslavia lay at the bottom of the Tito – Stalin split.” However, According to Yugoslav testimony, ideological differences “played no significant role.” From the evidence, it seems that they have a case, from the issue of Soviet interference to the coercion of the Yugoslav press and the economic factors including the wish to break away from economic deals with Russia. However, this could be a great disguise; a method by which Tito can pursue his ideology, one which Stalin did not approve of or trusted. Tito himself led this ideological attack against Stalin because he had lived the interwar years when the Soviet Union was the only socialist state in the world, and all eyes looked towards Moscow for guidance and support. When Tito came to power in Yugoslavia, and Stalin refused to treat his socialist government as an equal, Tito “rejected the Moscow thesis, that imitation of the Russian icon [was] the only correct and possible road to socialism”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dedijer, Tito Speaks (London, 1953)
Ivo Banac, ‘Tito, Josip Broz,’ in The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World (Oxford University Press, 1993)
George W. Hoffman and Fred Warner Neal, Yugoslavia and the New Communism (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1962)
Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1995)
Fred Warner Neal, Titoism in Action (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California, 1959)
J Lampe, Yugoslavia in History (Cambridge, 1996)
M Glenny, The Balkans (London, 1999)
Kosta Cavoski in Glenny, The Balkans
I Banac – With Stalin Against Tito
Lampe – Yugoslavia in History
Hoffman in Yugoslavia and the New Communism
Dedijer in Lampe – Yugoslavia as History
