One of the results of greater access to archive sources after the fall of Yugoslavia is the ongoing debate as to whether Tito’s Yugoslavia was either “totalitarian” or “socialist”, and it came to a point where the two interpretations are seen as two periods in Tito’s terms of power: they relate to each other as linear sequences or two stages of development. In that respect, the following analysis reflects on certain recent developments within latest research from both phases, by first focusing on details around the end of the revolution and establishment of Tito’s Yugoslavia and then focusing on details around the making of socialism and some of its important aspects.
What makes the period of transition from revolution into totalitarianism worth re-examining is the fact that amongst other things it uncovers that the plan to have a single party rule over the new state was there all along. It was the practical political finalising of the original plan only, which took place between 1944 and 1948 because it was important to ensure, before the war was over, that there were no alternative candidates to the throne in the new Yugoslavia. Let us not forget that the final political reckoning with the Fifth Column members was a reality in other European countries, after their liberation from the Nazi occupation and the terror of the local collaborators. However, Tito’s Yugoslavia was exceptional because of two particular aspects:
1.
This final political stage in its revolutionary project or, one could say, the process of redefinition of the premises for setting up the new state, was unprecedented in Europe, due to the intensity of violence and the number victims it had claimed. The systematically induced violence was happening on a general plan, across Tito’s Yugoslavia with Department for the Protection of the People (Odjeljenje zaštite naroda, Odjeljenje za zaštitu naroda [OZNA]) named Directorate for State Security (Uprava državne bezbjednosti [UDBA]), after the war as practical enforcers of this political cleanup.1 Even though in this present volume the detailed analysis of this process of introducing the totalitarian or one-party political rule is based on a case study of Croatia, its effects can be seen as a blueprint for a description for what was going on across former Yugoslavia from 1944 until 1953. The final reckoning with its potential enemies (including anti-Communist guerrillas) and retaliation against their supporters was also a reality in Serbia as well as in all other former republics. For example a recent exhibition in Belgrade (“In the name of the people! Political oppression in Serbia 1944–1953” by Srđan Cvetković)2 documented that around 50,000 individuals, either Četniks, their supporters or civilians only suspected of collaboration with the Axis were killed on the Serbian territory between 1944 and 1953.
2.
An unexpected exception to the blueprint, which was uncovered only recently, reflected the difference between how the same historic period (1944–1953) and events that took place in that period were not only perceived differently by the different sides of Tito’s Yugoslavia, but were also denoted by two different categories. In addition, as it turns out, this exception, based in difference in understanding of a historic period, was vital to the total perception of who took part in the liberation of the country from the Axis forces and their collaborators. They were the two very different explanatory approaches towards an understanding of the period, depending on from where one was looking at the same period of the common Yugoslav historic World War II narrative. This difference in categorising the same event (1944–1953) nevertheless was also vital for a general perception of the wars during the 1990s, despite research resources that had been invested in attempting to understand the sad course of events which had taken place so long ago. We were surprised to discover that the terms used (referring to the same period) did not even resemble one another: what had been referred to as the “final cleanup” or “the final countdown”, between Tito’s Partisans and Fifth Column members on the territory of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the very same historic period, was and is referred to in Serbia as a civil war (Bratoubilački rat).3 How come?
Even though the general immunity that Tito offered to Fifth Column members in 1944 and 1945 resulted in a number of desertions from the various collaborators, whereby they changed sides and joined Tito’s Partisans, these numbers were not even close to the numbers of Četniks who after the King’s order in 1944 changed sides and joined Tito’s Partisans. The order from the King was clear: Četniks were to abandon Dražo Mihajlović and join Tito’s Partisans in order to finalise the liberation of the country from the Axis and its collaborators. From that point on, the battles between Tito’s Partisans and Četniks that lasted until 1953 in Serbia were referred to as a civil war.
Accordingly, one of the main side effects of this shift was systematic blurring of the political picture of who was who once the war was over. This “shifting sides” was so politically loaded that it managed to suppress for a very long time the fact that Serbia was the only former Yugoslav republic where the German’s had strong collaboration partners even before the occupation of Yugoslavia by the Axis in April 1941.4 Consequently, this was also why the War Crimes Commission, after the war was over, carried out only a selective analysis as to who were the victims of the war crimes across the country. Thousands of victims of Partisan and Četnik crimes were simply not registered because by the time the crimes commission came to register these crimes, the individuals who had committed these crimes were already highly positioned in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) and Yugoslav Army. They were protected and therefore any possibility of investigations being carried out and people being tried for their crimes was blocked. For example the victims’ fear of losing even more members of the family to the “new” administration5 resulted in the “culture of silence”, around the civil Bošnjak victims in Eastern Bosnia.6
In the case of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, this “difference in categorising” in the after-war period was combined with a sense of collective responsibility assigned to Croats and Bošnjaks for the genocide carried out by the Ustaša separatist rule of the Independent State of Croatia towards Orthodox population (1941–1945). This collective responsibility was primarily based on the fact of the existence of the Independent State of Croatia, and on ignorance of the fact that the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH) was a marionette state, as well as ignorance of the fact that Ustaša were not democratically elected but appointed by the Axis as a system of terror over the entire population on its territory. Whoever was not directly involved with the NOP (National Liberation Movement) or NOB (National Liberation Struggle Front) was guilty as charged and by this general condemnation of the vast numbers of civilian population, another historiographic distinction was conveniently erased, together with all of its political and moral consequences. One should also keep in mind that during this horrific period of revolutionary totalitarianism (1944–1953), a factor of the “privatization of politics”7 where private scores were getting settled in an opportunistic manner by accusing the first neighbours of cooperation with Nazis just to settle a private score, was not a rare occurrence. In addition, a very frequent occurrence was plundering of the property, for example in Syrmia where the well-off families not associated with any of the sides during the war became victims of vicious Partisan crimes overnight, while the rest of the country was celebrating the end of the war. One should mention that the dealings with the Croat and Bošnjak civilian population and assigning to them a collective responsibility did not get out of hand as much as did dealing with the German minority (Volkedeutsche). They were assigned the group responsibility, placed in camps and expelled from the country and their property was confiscated by the new state. In the case of Croats and Bošnjaks, the retribution target was clear and the project of punishment without trial, in the form of physical abuse, killings and rape of civilians, lasted in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, right up to 1948.
Parallel to these events, another violation was being carried out. The redefinition of the relationships between the ethnic groups, which supposedly ended up on the opposite sides of the war, claimed the differential treatment of their civilian victims as well as the civilian non-associated organised help carried out by individuals politically or military non-aligned. One of these civilian or humane actions, which resulted in saving thousands of children (victims of the Ustasa genocide), as in the case of Diana Budisavljević, was condemned with the rest of them.8 While Oscar Schindler received a postmortem recognition of being “Righteous amongst men” for saving 1200 people, thanks to the political sabotage carried out by the administration of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Diana’s bravery, which resulted in saving 12,000 children from Stara Gradiška Ustaša concentration camp, has only recently begun to claim the recognition it deserved.
An explanation for how all these unaccounted civilian victims and civilian heroes never gained recognition for their bravery was to be found in another historic category: the Union of Fighters of the People’s Liberation War, known as SUBNOR (Savez udruženja boraca Narodnooslobodilačkog rata), created by the Communist regime (1947). A powerful organization of Partisan veterans, which sought to cultivate and protect the memory of those who were killed fighting for the Partisan cause,9 defined a category of “Fallen fighters” or “Victims of Fascist Terror”. “Fallen fighters” were those killed while fighting as Partisans during 1941–1945, while “Victims of Fascist Terror” were those killed during the war as non-combatants, either at the hands of the foreign armies or the various factions the Communist authorities grouped under the heading “domestic traitors”, meaning the Fifth Column, the Četniks, Ustaša, and others.10 The Union of Fighters of the People’s Liberation War decided who was to be classified into which category, and it issued certificates to the families of those killed. The certificate entitled them to benefits and special treatment as regarded schooling, housing, and employment.11
Only recently, information concerning another group of civilian victims, whose faith was politicized in a reverse manner by SUBNOR, came to the fore in connection with the forced labour prisoners from Yugoslavia in camps in Norway (1942–1945): the internees, civilians who were deported from Jasenovac are still today listed in the memorial system as Tito’s Partisans. On the other hand, this newly discovery information proves that treatment of the civilian victims was pragmatic since it did not always have an ethnic background: the memory of these civilian victims with various ethnic backgrounds, a mixture of Orthodox population, as genocide victims, members of resistance movement and other chance victims of Ustaša terror, remains an error.12 This is an especially intense politically loaded error, since there is no guarantee that internees would have appreciated being categorised as Tito’s Partisans after all the political manipulation of the Jasenovac tragedy, for which Tito’s rule of Yugoslavia was responsible.
Leaving the USSR in 1948 meant having to find one’s own way to survive. This eventually opened up a whole new set of possibilities for a country as small as Tito’s Yugoslavia. It meant having to cash in everything related to the country’s position in a world divided between two political blocs. The final ideological divorce from the Soviet model was introduced by a law on self-management,13 where the means of production belong to the workers so that the workers control the means of production and the distribution of the final products. Even though businesses were still subject to state ownership, this reform gave intense and immediate results by cutting through a lot of unnecessary red tape. As a result, the massive use of the term “socialism” starts, as a sign that socialism had come to stay in Tito’s Yugoslavia. From 1954, peasants’ unions, as group owners of the land, did not exist any more. In 1954 the law for health insurance of workers and bureaucrats (preventive health protection) was introduced. Special laws for the regulation of pension funds (1957) and invalidity pensions (1958) played a huge role in pleasing the crowds and legitimising the socialist system. The realization of the first five-year plan (petoljetka) and the intense industrialization of the country, by the development of natural resources a...