Historical Events
Yugoslavia · Events 4
The Yugoslav Partisan War
The Yugoslav Partisan War was the Communist-led armed struggle fought from the Axis invasion and partition of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941 until 1945. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia organized a nationwide rising against the occupiers and their collaborationist regimes. Led by Josip Broz Tito, the Partisans grew from guerrilla detachments into a regular army while competing with the royalist Chetniks and fighting a civil war inside the wider anti-Axis conflict. They survived major Axis offensives, especially the battles of the Neretva and Sutjeska, won Allied support and recognition in 1943, and liberated Belgrade with Soviet forces in 1944. In March 1945 the army was reorganized as the Yugoslav Army, and the Partisan victory made possible a socialist federal state in place of the monarchy.
The People's Democracies of Eastern Europe
From the summer of 1944, coalition governments with communist participation were formed in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary as the Red Army arrived, in the Soviet zone of Germany, and in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Albania, which had been liberated largely by their own forces. Each country passed through land reform and the nationalisation of major industry. The elections of 1945–46 produced divided results in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, while in Poland and Romania the official counts diverge from records published later. In 1947 the other coalition parties were pushed out through dissolution, splits and trials, and between 1946 and 1948 the social democratic parties were merged into the communist parties. Over the same years "people's democracy" was explained first as a "new road" distinct from the Soviet system and then, in December 1948, redefined as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. By 1949 constitutions and single-list elections had fixed the new order in every country, and trials and purges had begun inside the parties themselves.
Bulgaria: From the Fatherland Front to the Kostov Trial
After the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria on 5 September 1944 and crossed the frontier on the 8th, the Fatherland Front of Communists, Agrarians, Zveno and Social Democrats took power in Sofia in the early hours of the 9th. The People's Court executed the regents and ministers on 1 February 1945, and the Bulgarian army fought alongside the Red Army in Yugoslavia and Hungary. The Agrarian Union split in 1945 between Petkov's opposition and those who stayed in the Front; after the referendum of 1946 abolished the monarchy, the Grand National Assembly election of October gave the Communists a majority and the opposition 28 per cent. In 1947 Petkov was arrested in parliament and executed in September, and in December the Dimitrov constitution and the nationalisation law were passed. The Social Democrats were merged into the Communist Party in 1948, and at the Fifth Congress in December Dimitrov defined people's democracy as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1949 Dimitrov died and the deputy prime minister Kostov was tried and executed.
The Tito-Stalin Split
The Tito-Stalin split was the first open fracture in the socialist camp: in June 1948 the Cominform expelled the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had won its liberation and its revolution with its own partisan army rather than the Red Army, and was correspondingly less bound to Moscow's instructions. Friction over the Balkan federation project and support for the Greek civil war, and resentment of the Soviet advisers and intelligence networks inside Yugoslavia, accumulated until Stalin demanded submission through an exchange of letters and a Cominform resolution. The resolution pronounced the Yugoslav party to have left Marxism-Leninism for the road of nationalism; against expectation, the party closed ranks around its leadership and held out. Under economic blockade by the Soviet bloc, border provocations and reported invasion planning, Yugoslavia accepted Western aid and began building its own model of workers' self-management.