| Marshal Tito had taken power in Yugoslavia completely, and a little bit later, that Great Britain’s influence in Yugoslav affairs was reduced to less than 10 percent. However, it turned out in 1948–1949, that Tito’s Yugoslavia left Stalin’s community of people’s democratic countries and continued its existence with substantial western help to get out of the borderlands of the Pax Sovietica Commonwealth47. In fact, the Cold War started in Central and Southeastern Europe with Tito–Stalin split 1948–1949 and lasted till the disolution of the Soviet Union. I would conclude that the first serious “cleft” in the building of the Soviet international communist empire was made by Tito’s separation from the Pax Sovietica Commonwealth in 1948–1949, backed by the western material, political, financial and military support, that was followed later by similar attempts by Hungarian (in 1956), Czechoslovak (in 1968) and Polish (in 1956 and 1980–1981) national communist leaderships.
Conclusion
The Soviet Union had two types of relations with Yugoslavia during the Second World War. The first type comprised relations with the Yugoslav Royal government, which was in exile and located in London. These relations were officialy set up on the diplomatic level and carried out through legislation. The other type comprised relations with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the National Liberation Movement of Yugoslavia. These relations were secret and illegal, carried out at the beginning by radioapparatus and later by military missions.
The radioconnections between the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the Soviet government were carried out through the Comintern until its abolishment at the summer of 1943 and after that personally with G. Dimitrov. These relations were various but the most important was Soviet material support given to the National Liberation Movement of Yugoslavia. The turning point in these relations occurred in September 1944 when Tito made a deal with Stalin in Moscow about real military support by the Red Army in order to help Yugoslav partisans to take power in the country.
Approaching the question of the social revolution in Yugoslavia the Soviet government had a two-fold policy (or Soviet policy went through two stages). During the first half of the war (until the summer of 1943) Moscow basically supported the British position that both resistance movements (led by J. B. Tito and General D. Mihailović) should be united in Yugoslavia into one anti-fascist alliance. During this period the Comintern required from the Supreme Headquarters of the NLMY that it give up socialist propaganda and the revolutionary way of taking power. After the great victories of the Red Army (Stalingrad and Kursk) the behaviour of the Soviet government was radically changed. From the autumn of 1943 onward, Moscow supported the new (communist) government in Yugoslavia, and pointed its “Yugoslav” policy toward revolutionary (socialist) changes in the country. Evidently, the Yugoslav partisan resistance movement and the spread of the war of liberation in Yugoslavia by Tito’s NLMY were factors which in the eyes of Stalin, the Comintern and the Soviet government fitted with their own objectives, more in a political than in a military sence. In other words, Tito’s military efforts were used by Moscow for Soviet political purposes, for which they were often manipulated. The roots of this Moscow policy in Central and Southeastern Europe run deep, back
_______________________________________________
47 J. B. Tito. Jugoslavija u borbi za nezavisnost i nesvrstanost. Sarajevo, 1977. S. 13; J. Ridley. Tito. Biografija. Zagreb, 2000. S. 288–317. |
dizainas ir programavimas giriaus