Informbiro period

Name and periodisation

The Informbiro period is the Yugoslav term for the era that followed the Tito-Stalin split of mid-1948. The name derives from 'Informbiro', the Serbo-Croatian form of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), which became current in Yugoslavia in place of the Russian or English 'Cominform'. The period is conventionally dated from the June 1948 split to the Belgrade declaration of 1955; some accounts limit the Soviet-Yugoslav conflict itself to 1948-1953.

The split and the purges

The Cominform, formed by the Soviet Union in September 1947, expelled the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in June 1948, confirmed at its third meeting in Romania on 28 June. The Yugoslav party leadership faced uncertainty over loyalty, and interior minister Aleksandar Rankovic established a special anti-Cominform staff in the State Security Administration (UDB) to direct the purge. In 1948-51 alone 55,663 party members, 19.52 per cent of the 1948 membership, were registered as Cominformists, with the incidence highest in Serbia proper in absolute terms and in Montenegro relative to population. Party membership nonetheless grew by more than half a million in the same period, so the percentage refers to the 1948 organisation.

Arrest and punishment figures differ by source. Radovan Radonjic (1983) stated that 16,288 were arrested and convicted, including 2,616 at various levels of the party leadership, while Rankovic himself claimed that 51,000 people were killed, imprisoned or sent to forced labour. A majority were sentenced without trial. A special-purpose camp for real or alleged Stalin supporters was built in 1949 on the uninhabited islands of Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, and prisoners were also held at Stara Gradiska and at Jasenovac, the repurposed Ustase camp. Until the Korean War began, a threat of military intervention by Soviet and allied forces was considered real.

Goli Otok

Goli Otok operated as a top-secret political prison and labour camp from 1949 to 1956, with a similar camp for women on Sveti Grgur. Inmates performed forced labour in a stone quarry and in pottery and joinery workshops under extreme heat and bora winds, and the camp's internal hierarchy forced prisoners to beat, humiliate, denounce and shun one another, while cooperators could rise in the hierarchy for better treatment. Roughly 16,000 political prisoners are generally said to have served there, with deaths put at between 400 and 600 in some accounts and at almost 4,000 in others. The subject remained taboo for so long that the first testimony by a former female prisoner appeared only in 1990.

Party, army and security apparatus

Named cases alone indicate the scope of the purge. Sreten Zujovic was the only central committee member openly supporting Stalin in the internal discussion and, with former industry minister Andrija Hebrang, was apprehended within a week. Rankovic fabricated the charge that Hebrang became an Ustase spy during his 1942 captivity and was then blackmailed by the Soviets, and Hebrang died in Belgrade on 11 June 1949. 1,722 UDB servicemen and officers were convicted, and particularly wide-ranging purges followed the declaration of support for the Cominform by the entire personnel of Sarajevo's second UDB district. Military arrests are estimated at 4,153 officers and soldiers by Radonjic and at 7,000 officers by Djilas. Forty-nine graduates of Soviet military academies were classed as potential Soviet supporters.

Opposition and resistance

At least one Soviet-supported military coup attempt followed the split. It was headed by Colonel General Arso Jovanovic, Tito's wartime chief of the Supreme Headquarters and later chief of the Yugoslav General Staff, with Major General Branko Petricevic and Colonel Vladimir Dapcevic. Jovanovic was killed by border guards while fleeing to Romania and the other two were arrested. Domestic opposition also took armed form. In summer and autumn 1948 an entire UDB division was deployed to Montenegro to suppress an insurrection led by Ilija Bulatovic, former secretary of the KPJ organisation there, and in 1949 Komnen Cerovic's force destroyed insurgent strongholds in the Montenegrin part of Sandzak. The 1950 risings in Kordun, Lika, Banovina and around Cazin were led by ethnic Serb Partisan veterans and former officers, with Muslim peasants forming the bulk of the insurgents around Cazin, and the authorities ascribed them to Cominformism. A smaller unsuccessful rebellion took place in Slovenia at the same time.

Abroad, by late 1949 Pero Popivoda led the exiled opposition, which named itself the League of Yugoslav Patriots for the Liberation of the Peoples of Yugoslavia from the Yoke of the Tito-Rankovic Clique and Imperialist Slavery - a name that shows how that opposition framed the question of imperialism. The Soviet side maintained pressure on Yugoslavia until the end of the Korean War through show trials, the training of international brigades and broadcast propaganda. The specific content of the Eastern Bloc trials directed against alleged 'Titoists', however, is not documented in the sources cited for this entry and is therefore not described here.

Economy and foreign relations

Before 1948 the Yugoslav economy relied on exporting agricultural products and raw materials to the USSR and the Eastern Bloc in exchange for machinery and equipment. The Eastern Bloc trade blockade took effect gradually and was complete only by 1949; Yugoslavia responded by pursuing self-sufficiency and military capability, introducing third shifts in factories and mobilising the unemployed and peasants for coal and ore mines and construction sites. In June 1948 it reached an agreement giving it access to its gold reserves held in the United States and announced it would trade with the West. In February 1949 the United States decided to give Tito economic assistance, the Export-Import Bank approved its first loan late in 1949, and the IMF and World Bank followed. In December 1950 President Truman signed the Yugoslav Emergency Assistance Act granting $50 million of food. In 1950 compulsory employment contracts and workers' councils balancing goods, cash and labour began the system later known as self-management, whose drive for efficiency brought lay-offs of workers deemed less productive, including women, the elderly and maintenance crews, and a sharp rise in unemployment. In 1952 the party renamed itself the League of Communists of Yugoslavia at its sixth congress in Zagreb, and the constitutional amendments of 13 January 1953 added a legislative chamber of socially-owned economic operators and adjusted republic representation.

In foreign relations, the United States National Security Council pledged in November 1949 to help defend Yugoslavia, which joined the Mutual Defense Assistance Program in 1951 and received about half a billion dollars in US military aid by the mid-1950s. Treaties with Greece and Turkey followed in Ankara in February 1953 and at Bled in August 1954, without attaching Yugoslavia to NATO, which allowed it to retain an independent line.

End and historiography

Soviet pressure eased after Stalin's death in March 1953, and Yugoslavia and the USSR exchanged ambassadors and restored economic relations late that year. On 1 July 1954 Khrushchev conveyed to Tito an urgent desire to restore relations, and after Khrushchev and Bulganin visited Yugoslavia the Belgrade declaration was signed on 2 June 1955. It guaranteed non-interference in internal affairs and recognised the right of countries to practise different forms of socialist development, and it is conventionally taken to close the Informbiro period, although relations cooled again after the events in Hungary in 1956 and the Cominform was dissolved that year.

The period also left a mark on contemporary Yugoslav art and popular culture: artists were at first encouraged to treat the wartime Partisan struggle and the construction of new infrastructure, a line replaced in the early 1950s by Modernism and proclaimed artistic freedom. Substantial treatment of the purges began with Dragoslav Mihailovic's novel of 1968 and was concentrated especially in the 1980s. The Belgrade declaration of 1955 is presented as the event that closes the period.