League of Communists of Yugoslavia
유고슬라비아 공산주의자동맹
A party founded in 1919 in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and known from 1920 to 1952 as the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. An outlawed underground organisation under the monarchy, it led the Partisan struggle in the Second World War and ruled Yugoslavia as a one-party state from 1945 to 1990. Led by Josip Broz Tito from 1937 to 1980, it adopted workers' self-management after its expulsion from the Cominform in 1948 and broke up into republican parties in 1990.
In depth
At the unification congress held in Belgrade on 20–23 April 1919 the Serbian Social Democratic Party, the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina and others merged to form the Socialist Labour Party of Yugoslavia (Communists). At the Second Congress in Vukovar on 20–24 June 1920 the left prevailed, aligned the party entirely with the Comintern and renamed it the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ). In the 1920 Constitutional Assembly election it won 58 of 419 seats.
On 30 December 1920 the government outlawed the party by the Obznana decree, and after a party faction attempted to assassinate Regent Alexander and killed former Interior Minister Milorad Drašković in 1921, the Law on the Protection of the Realm made the ban statutory in August. The illegal party held four congresses up to 1928 but none for the following twenty years. Tito took control during the intra-party purges of 1937–1940 and completed his takeover at the Fifth Land Conference, held covertly in Zagreb in October 1940. On Tito's leadership the English source cites the Comintern mandate of 1939, the Serbo-Croatian source his appointment as general secretary in 1940. On membership, the English source gives 6,000 in 1939 and 8,000 in 1941, while the Serbo-Croatian source says 9,000 of the 12,000 pre-war members died in the war.
After the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 the party's military arm, the Partisans, fought a civil war and a resistance war and defeated the Axis and its local auxiliaries. In 1945 the party neutralised the opposition through the People's Front and established a one-party system. Its plans to integrate Albania, support for the Greek communist guerrillas and rapprochement with Bulgaria brought it into conflict with the USSR, and in 1948 the Tito–Stalin split led to its expulsion from the Cominform. In 1948–1951 more than 50,000 members were registered as opponents and expelled, and camps were built on Adriatic islands such as Goli Otok.
The party distinguished itself from the Soviet system by introducing workers' self-management legislation in 1950, and at the Sixth Congress in Zagreb on 2–7 November 1952 it criticised Stalinism and renamed itself the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ), a name inspired by the Communist League of 1847–1852 associated with Marx and Engels. It then went through the conflict with Milovan Đilas, the Ranković affair, and the Croatian Spring and the purge of reformists.
After Tito's death in 1980 the party adopted a collective leadership with an annually rotating presidency, and the republican branches gained power. Slobodan Milošević became President of the League of Communists of Serbia in 1987. At the 14th Congress in January 1990 the party renounced its monopoly of power, but rifts between Serbian and Slovenian communists broke it up into republican parties. The last federal organ abolished itself on 22 January 1991, and on 24 February the League of Communists of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the last branch, left.