History, Tito's Yugoslavia (1943-1991)

In November 1942 the Partisans, temporarily in control of a large part of Bosnia, convened an Antifascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia (often known by its Serbo-Croatian acronym, AVNOJ) in the Bosnian town of Bihac. AVNOJ became, in effect, a provisional legislative body. A year later AVNOJ met again in Jajce, Bosnia, and proclaimed a provisional government for a federal state it promised to create. The federation would consist of equal federal units for each of the Yugoslav ethnic groups that the Partisans had recognized as separate nations. In June 1944 the British pressured King Petar II into appointing Ivan Subasic, who had been governor of the Croatian banovina from 1939 to 1941, as prime minister. Subasic was given a mandate to negotiate a union between the royal government in exile and AVNOJ. In March 1945 the absent king, represented by a regency council, appointed Tito as prime minister with a cabinet including only three members of the government in exile.

By the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945, the Partisans had recreated Yugoslavia as a federal state under firm Communist rule. The new state consisted of six republics and two autonomous provinces. The six republics—Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia—constituted semiautonomous "homelands" for each of the South Slav nations officially recognized by Tito’s regime. The two autonomous provinces, both within Serbia, were Kosovo, with its large Albanian majority, and multiethnic Vojvodina. Abolition of the monarchy and establishment of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia were confirmed by a constituent assembly elected in November. The participation of non-Communist parties in the elections was severely restricted. A new constitution, modeled on the Soviet constitution of 1936, was adopted in January 1946.

The Italian peace treaty of 1947 added most of Istria and the Julian March, Rijeka, and Zadar to Yugoslavia. It also established the Free Territory of Trieste (Trst in Slovenian) in and around that strategic and disputed port city, which the Partisans had occupied for 45 days at the end of the war. The Free Territory was divided into two zones. Zone A, which included Trieste city, was administered by the British and the Americans; Zone B, to the south, remained under Yugoslav occupation. The existence of the Free Territory was an irritant in international relations until 1954, when Yugoslavia, Italy, Britain, and the United States agreed to Italian administration of Zone A and permanent Yugoslav administration of Zone B.

In its first years, Tito’s Yugoslavia was a virtual copy of the USSR under Joseph Stalin, with its centrally planned economy under state control, rapid industrialization, and brutal suppression of any opposition to the Communist dictatorship. The government began an attempt to collectivize agriculture in 1947 and intensified it in 1949. In the foreign policy arena, Yugoslavia appeared to be the USSR’s most loyal ally. In 1947 the Yugoslav Communist Party joined other Communist parties in establishing the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), the successor organization to the Third International (Comintern), which had dissolved in 1943. Headquarters of the new organization was in Belgrade. Early in 1948, however, Stalin’s growing suspicion of Tito’s loyalty and independent ambitions led him to maneuver against Tito using the Cominform. The Cominform held a meeting in Bucharest, Romania, in June 1948, which the Yugoslavs boycotted. At the meeting, the Cominform denounced Tito and the Yugoslav Communist Party, accusing them of major deviations from orthodox Communist policy. A Yugoslav party congress reaffirmed its loyalty to the USSR but reelected Tito, whom the Soviet leaders had hoped to overthrow. An economic blockade and ominous troop movements by the other Communist nations followed. But Tito’s regime survived, by rallying the support of patriotic non-Communist as well as most Communist Yugoslavs, and by accepting economic and military assistance from the West.

Soon afterward, the Yugoslav government began a gradual process of relaxing state controls, abandoning strict Communist ideology, and decentralizing the government. By 1952 it had abandoned its attempts to collectivize agriculture. In 1950 and 1951 state ownership of all enterprises was abolished in favor of social ownership and workers’ self-management, which theoretically turned over control of enterprises to the workers who labored in them. The Communist Party, renamed the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) in 1952, withdrew its close economic and political management.

Stalin died in 1953. His eventual successor, Nikita Khrushchev, apologized for Stalin’s "errors" in a dramatic speech in Belgrade in May 1955. This speech initiated the first of several periods of improvement in Soviet-Yugoslav relations. Tito thereafter struck a Cold War balance between the USSR and its allies and the United States and its allies. This balance led to his role in helping to found and lead a worldwide group of nonaligned nations in the 1960s. As a result,Tito won a major role on the world stage, greater than his country’s size and importance warranted.

A more liberal and genuinely federal constitution was introduced in 1963. It changed the official name of the country from the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Further economic reforms, known as market socialism, created semifree markets for goods, services, and investments. Among countries under Communist rule, Yugoslavia became the least repressive at home and the most open to the West. While the LCY continued to control key appointments and political processes, it transformed itself into semiautonomous leagues in each of the republics. A collective presidency was established, with representatives from each republic and autonomous province and Tito at its head. These Yugoslav experiments attracted international interest as an apparently hopeful compromise between Soviet-style socialism and capitalism and way of managing conflicts in a multinational society. In 1971 and 1972 Tito clamped down on republic leaders and trends he considered dangerously nationalist or liberal, but the reforms were only partly and temporarily reversed.

A new constitution in 1974 and the Associated Labor Act of 1976 codified previous reforms and carried them to extremes. Yugoslavia became a virtual confederation with the central government having only limited powers. The Associated Labor Act in effect abandoned market socialism for a negotiated economy based on contracts among firms, contracts that protected the firms from market risks.