| with Mihailović’s četniks. General Mihailović was officially appointed to the position of Minister of Defence by the Yugoslav Royal government in London in the winter of 1941. The reason for this Soviet policy at that time was Moscow’s wish to cooperate with the British and the Yugoslav governments in consideration of the difficult position of the Red Army right near the Soviet capital. As the position of the Red Army was much better in the summer and autumn of 1942, Moscow started to change its policy toward Yugoslavia by publishing “information” about collaboration between the četniks and the occupiers in Yugoslavia. This “information” was sent by Tito’s partisans to the Comintern. Such kinds of “information” the Soviet government continued to receive from the Supreme Headquarters of partisan units in Yugoslavia and after the abolishment of the Comintern in the summer of 1943. During the whole war the Soviet government was very well informed about the military situation in Yugoslavia, particularly about the balance of power between the two domestic but ideologically and politically antagonistic resistant movements: Mihailović’s četniks and Tito’s partisans. After the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, when the USSR won two crucial victories in the war and became the supreme partner in relationships with the USA and the UK, Moscow gradually improved its relations with Tito. Officially, Moscow supported the British policy of compromise in Yugoslavia. It was a great encouragement for Churchill to force the Yugoslav government-in-exile to find a modus vivendi with Tito, but only under the condition that General Mihailović would be dismissed and that the Yugoslav Royal government would recognise all decisions issued by the ACNLY in Jajce.
The British government was well aware that supporting Tito its relations with the Yugoslav government-in-exile would be deteriorated tremendously. The British vision of the political and military situation in Yugoslavia was expressed in the Memorandum from the British Foreign Office submitted by Anthony Eden to the cabinet on June 7th, 1944. In this document Tito was seen as the victor in the Yugoslav civil war but quite surprisingly a leader who would pursue an independent policy after the war! According to the authors of the Memorandum Great Britain should support Tito in order to benefit later from his policy of independence from Stalin. At the same time, the Soviet Union was trying to exploit its ideological bonds with the CPY and its national liberation movement. Surely, in the summer of 1944 London saw in its joint Yugoslav policy with Moscow the best means to reduce Stalin’s influence on the Yugoslav partisan leader. This, in my opinion, can be confirmed by the above mentioned British Memorandum where full support to the Yugoslav communist-led movement was proposed in order to influence Tito “to follow a line which would suit us, thus taking the wind off the Russian sails”. It was necessary if Great Britain was planning to play an active role in Yugoslav (and Greek) internal affairs. The new British policy regarding Yugoslavia was verified by Churchill who proposed to Tito during their meeting in Naples in the summer of the same year that allied (Anglo-American) military forces, in cooperation with the NLAY would enter Istria.
This common Soviet-British policy of compromise in Yugoslavia achieved a full success when the Tito-Šubašić agreement was signed in the island of Vis on June 16th, 1944 which Tito negotiated in the name of the NCLY and Ivan Šubašić in the name of the Yugoslav government-in-exile as its Prime Minister. This agreement was a great victory for Tito’s partisans, supported by the Soviet government which announced the conditions of the agreement on radio Free Yugoslavia. The “Tito- |
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