Yugoslavia was unique among the Communist nations. While the rest of the eastern European Communist states were pliant puppets of the Soviet Union who supported Russian interests at every turn, Yugoslavia defied Moscow and became a major spokesman for the Non-Aligned nations during the Cold War. While other Eastern European nations were subject to harsh censorship and tight thought control, Yugoslavia--though it always remained a single party state with Josip Tito as its "Preident for Life"--was relatively open. While the Eastern European nations had an economic structure that was ruthlessly controlled by the central state planning apparatus, Yugoslav industry was managed by "workers councils" made up of factory representatives. While Moscow oversaw the foreign trade of all the other Eastern European economies, Yugoslavia traded freely with the West (during the 1980's, at the height of the Cold War, Yugoslavia even manufactured an economy car, called the "Yugo", for the American market.) From the beginning, Yugoslavia under Tito was determined to follow its own path.
Josip Tito on a state visit with President Jimmy Carter
The history of Yugoslav Communism began in April 1941, when the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was invaded by Nazi Germany. Two major resistance groups soon appeared--the Chetniks, commanded by Royalist military officers, and the People's Liberation Army, known as the Partisans, led by Yugoslav Communist Party official Josip Tito. As the war went on, the Chetniks became dominated by Serb nationalists, who increasingly began to collaborate with the Nazis in the suppression of other ethnic resistance groups, hoping to establish a Serbian state. Tito, on the other hand, freely welcomed everyone to his Partisans, and quickly came to control large areas of "liberated territory". At the Tehran Conference in 1943, Tito's Partisans were recognized by the Allies as the Provisional Government of Yugoslavia, and the Allies began dropping weapons and supplies into Partisan-controlled territory. In response, Tito drew up a plan for a post-war Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that would combine a number of different ethnic provinces, including Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Montenegro.
By 1944, the Partisans had driven the Nazis out of the province of Serbia, and by May 1945 they controlled the entire area of Yugoslavia. Tito was elected as President of the Republic.
At first, Tito seemed to be firmly in the Soviet orbit. The Constitution of the Socialist Federated Republic was a virtual copy of the Constitution of the USSR, and Yugoslavia promptly joined the Communist International ("Comintern"), the Soviet-dominated organization through which Stalin gave his marching orders to communist parties around the world (Stalin replied by moving the headquarters of the Communist Information Bureau, "Cominform", to Belgrade). As the postwar conflict began between the US and USSR, Tito launched a flurry of angry words at the "Western imperialists", and in August 1946 two American aircraft were shot down over Yugoslav territory--the first casualties of the Cold War.
Relations between Yugoslavia and the neighboring Communist nations of Bulgaria and Albania became so close that serious negotiations began towards incorporating them into the Yugoslav Federal Republic. Yugoslavia also began supporting the Soviet-approved Greek communist guerrillas, providing them with weapons and supplies.
A split between Belgrade and Moscow was, however, probably inevitable. Unlike all the other Eastern European nations, which had been "liberated" and occupied by the Soviet Red Army, Yugoslavia had liberated itself from the Nazis through its own efforts, and Tito's government was not dependent upon Moscow for its position or legitimacy. Stalin, meanwhile, made every effort to depict himself as the only shining light of Communism, and ruthlessly subordinated every other Communist Party to his sole authority.
The clash began when Stalin intervened in the Bulgaria-Yugoslavia unification negotiations (which had started without the USSR's knowledge or approval), bluntly informing Tito that any unified nation that resulted from these talks must be subordinated to Moscow. While Bulgaria dutifully complied, Tito rejected the demand, and the talks ended. At the same time, Tito began voting against the Soviet Union at the UN, cut off its supplies to the Greek Communists, and began accepting postwar Marshall Plan economic aid from the United States. In 1948, the Soviet Union expelled Yugoslavia from Comintern, and the split became final.
After the split, Tito announced that Yugoslavia would be "socialist, but independent". In the diplomatic sphere, Yugoslavia became a founding member of the Non-Aligned Nations movement, and, along with India, Algeria, Venezuela, Malaysia, and Indonesia, maintained neutrality in the Cold War and opposed militarism on both sides. In the military sphere, the Yugoslav Army maintained two defense plans--one against invasion by the Soviet Warsaw Pact, and another against invasion by NATO.
In the economic sphere, Tito, heavily influenced by his Vice President, Milovan Djilas, introduced in 1950 the strategy of samoupravlijanje ("self-management"), a form of market socialism in which factories were to be run by elected worker councils, and workers were to directly receive a share of the factory's profits.
Yugoslavia never became the repressive police state that the Stalinists did. Censorship was loose, writings from critics and dissidents were widely available, and travel and trade with the West was encouraged. Yugoslavia remained, however, a single-party state with a leader who had been "elected for life", and this produced criticism. In 1956, Vice President Djilas himself, the presumed heir-apparent to Tito who had formulated the policies of "self-management", began to call for greater democracy within the party, followed by a demand for multiple national parties and free elections. He was arrested and imprisoned twice over the next six years.
Under Tito's market socialism, however, Yugoslavia obtained a much higher standard of living than the rest of eastern Europe, and this, combined with Tito's genuine popularity as a national war hero, reduced the level of political opposition.
Under the surface, however, tensions were still present. Yugoslavia was a conglomeration of several different ethnic and national groups, each of which still had its own interests. In 1971, a nationalist revival in Croatia, known as "the Croatian Spring", won wide support among students and professionals. In response, the Federal Constitution was re-written in 1974 to give more autonomy to the federated national provinces. At this time, the Tito government also granted autonomy to the Serbian provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina--a move which angered Serb nationalists who wanted these areas for themselves.
When Tito died in 1980, power was passed to a "collective leadership", in which the presidents of the various federated provinces were to rotate control of the Yugoslav Republic. Without Tito, however, the glue that held the Federal republic together vanished, and ethnic nationalism began to tear Yugoslavia apart. In 1986, Serb nationalists published the "SANU Memorandum", which called for the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the incorporation of the ethnic Serbian areas of Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia and others into a "Greater Serbia". In 1987, former Yugoslav Communist Party official Slobodan Milosevic, preaching Serbian nationalism, became the leading figure in Serbia. When Yugoslavia finally broke up (Croatia and Slovenia both formally seceded in 1991), Milosevic led Serbia on a series of invasions and wars, seizing areas which contained ethnic Serbs and carrying out a genocidal policy of "ethnic cleansing", in which non-Serbs were systematically deported or exterminated. The Yugoslav Wars resulted in years of fighting, ending only with UN intervention and war crimes trials at the UN.