Cominform 1948 Bucharest Conference

The second Cominform conference, held in Bucharest in June 1948, was convened to take up the situation of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. The Cominform had invited the Yugoslav party to the meeting on 19 May 1948, and the Yugoslav leadership refused the invitation the following day. Eight parties attended, those of the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, France and Italy; no Yugoslav representative was present. By the Cominform's own sequence of meetings this gathering is counted as the third. Other accounts date the conference to 19-23 June 1948, so the entry places it within June 1948 rather than fixing a single day.

The resolution adopted on 28 June held that the Yugoslav leadership had pursued an unfriendly policy toward the Soviet Union, violated Marxist theory and practice, lacked internal democracy and could not accept criticism. It placed the Communist Party of Yugoslavia outside the Cominform while asserting that 'healthy' members existed within it, and it measured their loyalty by readiness to overthrow Tito. The expulsion was unanimous among the eight parties. The Yugoslav party rejected the criticism in a statement on 29 June; Yugoslavs first learned of the split on 28 June 1948, when the Prague newspaper Rudé právo published the resolution. Radio Belgrade issued its official response on 30 June.

As a consequence, the Cominform moved its headquarters and its newspaper from Belgrade to Bucharest, and it launched a campaign to transform the programmes and cadres of the Eastern European communist parties. Yugoslavia moved toward an independent path of self-managed socialism, while the Cominform's decision became the starting point for the campaign against alleged 'Titoism' and the accompanying purges in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe.