The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito's Yugoslavia

From World War II to Non-Alignment

Vladimir Unkovski-Korica

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786720313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Here, Vladimir Unkovski-Korica re-assesses the key episodes of Tito's rule - from the joint Stalin-Tito offensive of 1944, through to the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, the market reforms of the 1950s and the 'turn to the West' which led to Yugoslavia's non-alignment policy. For the first time, Unkovski-Korica also outlines Tito's internal battle with the Workers' Councils - empowered union bodies which emerged with the 'withering away of the party' in the early 1950s.The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito's Yugoslavia draws out the impact of the period economically and politically, and its long-term effects. A comprehensive history based on new archival research, this book will appeal to scholars and students of European Studies, International Relations and Politics, as well as to historians of the Balkans.

CHAPTER 1

NATIONAL ROADS TO SOCIALISM AND THE TITO-STALIN SPLIT, 1944–8

Introduction

The failure of the Axis to destroy the main Communist-led Partisan force during Operation Schwarz in May and June 1943 marked the turning point of World War II in Yugoslavia. Thereafter, momentum shifted noticeably towards the Communist-led People's Liberation Movement (Narodnooslobodilački pokret, NOP). The NOP's pre-eminence in western Yugoslavia soon became clear, as it assumed wide-spread control of liberated areas following the collapse of Italy in September 1943. It also gained Allied recognition at the Teheran Conference later that same year. Crucially, Western Allied support came at the expense of the royalist and Serb-nationalist Chetnik movement, on account of the latter’s widespread collaboration with the Axis. Later, in autumn 1944, joint operations with the Red Army ensured the NOP's control of eastern Yugoslavia as well. The liberation by Yugoslav and Soviet troops of the country's capital, Belgrade, on 20 October 1944, marked an especially symbolic victory. By spring 1945, the NOP's army had grown to encompass 800,000 women and men under arms. It constituted the most sizeable military force in the country. When the official cessation of hostilities in Yugoslavia finally occurred, a full seven days after the unconditional surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunistička partija Jugoslavije, KPJ) appeared virtually assured of power.

This chapter focuses on the evolution of the Party's strategy of development between World War II and the Tito-Stalin split. The KPJ, being the first Communist Party outside the USSR to have taken absolute power, hoped to use the experience and support of the USSR to transform Yugoslavia from a backward and dependent state into a modern, industrial society and an independent country. It judged the moment to be propitious, since the country found itself in a new international setting. The Left, especially the Communist Parties, emerged from World War II greatly strengthened, largely on account of its staunch resistance to fascism. The role played in the anti-fascist victory by the USSR in particular greatly enhanced its own standing in the world, but also made its statist developmental model attractive to the anti-colonial elites of colonised countries, who yearned for their countries’ freedom and progress. Communists everywhere understood that advanced capitalism had been widely discredited by the Great Depression and that Europe itself was losing its pre-eminence in world politics to the United States and the USSR. Powerful Communist Parties shared power in France and Italy, while the USSR enabled Communist Parties across Eastern Europe to seize important positions within their own countries, often regardless of their wartime role. For the Yugoslav Communists, their own victory portended revolution in other countries, both European and non-European.¹ Though still fearful of provoking the Western powers into open intervention against their cause, and still contesting their north-eastern borders with Italy and Austria, the Yugoslav Communists hoped to rule in more favourable circumstances than their predecessors. They looked forward to closer regional co-operation and a less hostile environment than the pre-war states of the Balkans and Eastern Europe had had to face, precisely because of the comparative rise of the Left. This inevitably conditioned their domestic behaviour in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

The KPJ was therefore confident but had to be cautious and adaptable. Over the years following the end of wartime hostilities, but preceding the break with Stalin, development policy had to face different challenges, over a changing period. Three relatively distinct phases of policy resulted, and the KPJ proved to have only partially realistic expectations in relation to both international and domestic conditions.

The first phase lasted from the closing stages of World War II to the November 1945 elections in which the Communist-dominated Popular Front finally gained undivided power. Fearful that an inelegant drive to power could jeopardise economic recovery and destabilise the political situation, inviting foreign intervention, the KPJ in this period balanced between authoritarian behaviour and political compromise. It hoped to achieve both the painless elimination of opposition and the consent of people at the same time. The final result was successful in terms of domestic pre-eminence, but it came at the cost of increasing international tensions. In the second phase, starting with the electoral victory of late 1945 and ending with the launch of the first Five-Year Plan in the spring of 1947, the Party tried to balance between setting up a stable institutional framework for rapid, state-led development and relying on the mobilisation of the mass of the population for economic activity. Increasing international tensions robbed the KPJ of its much-desired external finances, but mass enthusiasm for economic reconstruction and the real achievement of economic targets encouraged unrealistic ambitions in the Party leadership. The third phase, from the beginning of the Five-Year Plan in spring 1947 to the open break with Stalin in the summer 1948, saw Yugoslav radicalism fail both in the domestic and international spheres. Mass enthusiasm began to wane and the state began to rely more and more on administrative measures and repression to achieve its goals, even before the quarrel with Stalin. When Yugoslav Communist foreign policy radicalism clashed with Soviet conservatism, leading to the exclusion of Yugoslavia from the emerging Eastern bloc, popular mobilisation again became a priority for the KPJ.

This chapter proceeds in two main parts. It discusses the first and second phases of policy making together, since they represented two phases of the same process of post-war economic reconstruction. The chapter then moves on to demonstrate why the apparent successes of reconstruction unravelled in the third or planned phase of development, in both the international and domestic contexts. In a unique contribution to the historiography, the chapter pays significant attention to the KPJ's relationship with the working class. This relationship was contradictory, in that the Party claimed to represent workers but, now that it was in power, also exhorted them to self-sacrifice for the sake of the country's development. Moreover, the Party's new balancing act was even more difficult because both the Party and the working class had undergone a transformation during World War II. Though the Party contained more workers or ex-workers as a percentage of its membership than they totalled in society as a whole, the Party's recently acquired mass base had been built through guerrilla struggle in the countryside, and was in fact beginning to merge with the state apparatus. The working class on the shop-floor, by contrast, had been depleted during the war. The new workers were a fragmented group, with their own views and interests, autonomous from the state. The struggle that resulted over control of the shop-floor between the Party and the emerging working class in the first and second phases of development contributed to the dysfunction of the Party's transmission belts in the third phase, and shaped the domestic terrain on which the Tito-Stalin split was fought.

The First and Second Phases: The Conquest of Power, Reconstruction and the Planned Economy

Leaning on the USSR: The International Situation and Development, October 1944–April 1947

The KPJ emerged as the most powerful political actor in Yugoslavia towards the end of World War II. Nevertheless, wartime had imposed important constraints as well as offering major opportunities to the Party. International recognition of the NOP, so prized by the Communist leadership in the struggle against the occupiers, but also against the royalist army, the Chetniks, had come at the price of coalition government with politicians loyal to King Petar Karađorđević. The latter was in exile in Cairo and London during World War II. His influence on public opinion in Yugoslavia was not negligible, and his inclusion in any post-war settlement ensured British and American say in the country's affairs. The United Kingdom and the United States had come to value Tito's Partisans militarily, and accepted that the Communists were the most likely winners of the struggle for power in Yugoslavia. The British government decided that the best way to retain a foothold in Yugoslav politics was to engineer a deal with Tito, which recognised the real balance of forces in Yugoslavia, but forced Tito to accept a higher level of pluralism than he would otherwise tolerate. Over the longer term, the Western powers hoped he would lean less on the USSR as a consequence, and that the opposition would be able to regroup. They offered Tito the recognition of the Communist-dominated wartime parallel state apparatus (the Anti-fascist People's Liberation Council of Yugoslavia, or Antifašističko veće narodnog oslobođenja Jugoslavije, AVNOJ) and, later, even the King's public support, in exchange for accepting royalist parties and politicians as junior coalition partners. The resulting June 1944 ‘Tito-Šubašić Agreement’, named after the heads of the two respective wings of the new government, also bound the KPJ to free elections for a constitutional assembly after the war, which would decide on the final state institutional arrangements, including the fate of the monarchy.²

That a Communist Party accepted these limitations not just during wartime but well into the post-war period requires some explanation. After all, the KPJ was a revolutionary party from its founding in 1919.³ It had, moreover, argued for much of the inter-war period in favour of an alliance between Yugoslavia and the USSR. Part of the reason for the Party's post-war moderation was down to the fact that Britain and the United States used negotiations relating to Allied Military Liaison Aid to strengthen the position of the king and his government-in-exile. They threatened to delay aid and obstruct the return of Yugoslav assets.⁴ The Party's moderation also had to do with the fact that the West had been able to materially help the NOP sooner and more effectively than the USSR during the course of the war. Moreover, the ‘Tito-Šubašić Agreement’ was signed just after the Royal Air Force had flown Tito out of German entrapment and to a safe location on the Adriatic Sea, in June 1944. While none of this had fundamentally ended suspicions between the Western Powers and the Yugoslav Communists, since these were of an ideological character, it had nonetheless proved that tactical alliances, in this case for the joint struggle against fascism, could be mutually beneficial.⁵ That logic had in any case been apparent in the Soviet Union's acceptance of the Versailles Peace Treaty and the League of Nations in the 1930s, following the accession of Adolf Hitler to power in Germany in 1933. It was also operative in the Wartime Grand Alliance between the USSR, the USA and the United Kingdom.⁶

Indeed, Soviet insistence on the Communist movement's prioritisation of the USSR's own foreign policy interests contributed to the KPJ's willingness to make domestic compromises that prolonged Western influence in Yugoslavia. The USSR had had a decisive impact on the history of the KPJ. The October Revolution of 1917 had inspired the very formation of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1919. The latter had adhered immediately to the Communist International. Throughout the interwar period, members of the KPJ had looked to the USSR for guidance and inspiration, since it was, at that time, the only country in the world ruled by a Communist Party. Moreover, Moscow had grown increasingly influential in the Communist movement through the offices of the Comintern and regularly intervened in the internal affairs of Communist Parties. This was certainly the case in relation to the KPJ, which had operated in illegality from the early 1920s, and suffered from both waves of external repression and frequent internal factional fights. Moscow had provided aid and safety to the Yugoslav Communists, and arbitrated in their disputes, thus extracting a high degree of obedience from the Party as a whole. Tito's own rise to the top of the KPJ in 1937 had owed much to Comintern sponsorship.⁷ The priority of the Communist movement at that time had been anti-fascism. Communist Parties had believed that the USSR was under threat from Hitler's Germany and had tended to subordinate their domestic politics to this consideration. Tito had shared this worldview, though he had appeared to disagree with points of detail in the Comintern's analysis, for which he had come under suspicion in Moscow. Though tension would remain evident throughout the war, Tito's loyalty to Moscow had never come into question.⁸

Tito was aware throughout that the USSR was committed to the wartime Grand Alliance with Britain and the USA, and that it was prepared to put its interests ahead of those of the KPJ. He nonetheless began to give domestic priorities greater weight than he had before the war. Consequently, he underwent criticism from Stalin and the Comintern for excessive radicalism and listened to exhortations about the need for greater caution. Early on, Stalin had hoped that the Yugoslav Communists would come to an agreement for a common resistance movement with the Royal Government in exile. Following the collapse of initial contacts between the Partisans and Chetniks in the autumn of 1941,⁹ Moscow continued to give little prominence to the Partisans and even rebuked Tito for overly overt Communist symbolism among the Partisans, decrying the use of the red star on Partisan caps and the formation of elite Proletarian Shock Brigades on Stalin's birthday. This policy would only change after Britain and the USA had openly backed the Partisans.¹⁰ Nevertheless, aware that the USSR was not able to directly help or challenge him, Tito often ignored Soviet protests or listened to them only in part. Perhaps most significantly, he avoided declaring AVNOJ the successor state to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1942, but he did do so in 1943, without informing the Soviets in advance, and faced predictable criticism after the fact.¹¹ None of this meant that Tito had planned any post-war break with Moscow, but it did suggest he was used to autonomous decision making and was building a genuine base in Yugoslavia.

This ensured increasing Soviet suspicion of Tito's leadership and made a post-war conflict more likely. Soviet policy in the region became as much about maintaining the Grand Alliance as ensuring a pliable set of regimes in the Balkans. After he had pledged to divide influence in Yugoslavia ‘fifty-fifty’ with Winston Churchill in the infamous Percentages Agreement of 1944, Stalin advised Tito to allow King Petar to return to Yugoslavia, as the return would be only temporary. Tito did not take Stalin's advice, but the two could agree on a temporary use of the Red Army on Yugoslav soil.¹² At the turn of 1945, though, there were further disagreements between Tito and Stalin relating to the post-war settlement in both foreign and domestic policy. In foreign policy, the divergence regarded differing visions of Balkan Federation. Both wanted a more compact regional structure to replace a patchwork of weak states but the Soviets wanted an initial two-state federation between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, while the Yugoslav Communists saw Balkan Federation as an extension of their own federation. The issue did not develop into a conflict because the British representative to the Bulgarian Allied Control Commission vetoed Bulgarian-Yugoslav Federation, stalling discussion of the plan.¹³ In domestic policy, though, the Soviets not only criticised the inclusion of a certain pre-war politician in the new coalition government instead of their own preferred candidate but also berated the KPJ for not highlighting the importance of the USSR to the new Yugoslavia in the declaration of the first government. Even though the Yugoslav Communists were bewildered by Soviet demands that the KPJ play up its pro-Soviet orientation, after having had to downplay it for most of the wartime period, they did not complain. The Politburo in fact apologised to Moscow and sent a delegation to sign a Friendship Treaty between Yugoslavia and the USSR even before the end of the war, in April 1945.¹⁴

In fact, while increasing frictions between the Western Allies and Yugoslavia had not led to an open break between them, they had probably helped to postpone the brewing clash between the Yugoslav and Soviet Communists. Already during the war, Tito had suspected that the US had hoped until mid-1944 that the Chetniks would mount serious resistance to the Partisans.¹⁵ When British influence in Greece culminated in a dramatic reversal for the Communist-led resistance in that countr...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. National Roads to Socialism and the Tito-Stalin Split, 1944–8
• 2. Tilting West: Self-Management in the Service of the Market, 1948–53
• 3. Self-Management and Non-Alignment, 1953–8
• 4. Unravelling Self-Management: Development, the National Question and the Cold War, 1958–64
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography