Cominformists

Name and origin

The Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) was a Soviet-led body linking European communist parties from 1947, and at its third meeting in Romania on 28 June 1948 it expelled the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia the Serbo-Croatian form of the body's name, 'Informbiro', became current, and from it came both the name of the period (the Informbiro period) and of the group (informbirovci, ibeovci). The label was pejorative from the outset.

The purges

After the split the Yugoslav party leadership faced uncertainty over loyalty, and interior minister Aleksandar Ranković noted that it was impossible to know whom to trust and that one's closest comrades might now be the enemy. Ranković established a special anti-Cominform staff in the State Security Administration (UDB) and directed 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 concentrated in Serbia proper in absolute terms and in Montenegro relative to population.

Arrest and punishment figures differ by source. Radovan Radonjić (1983) stated that 16,288 were arrested and convicted, including 2,616 at various levels of the party leadership, while Ranković 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 Gradiška and at Jasenovac, the repurposed Ustaše camp.

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. 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. Inmate and death figures are contested: roughly 16,000 political prisoners served there, with some accounts giving about 13,000 in 1948–51, while deaths are put at between 400 and 600 according to some sources and at almost 4,000 in others. After normalisation with the USSR the camp passed to Croatian jurisdiction and remained a taboo subject in Yugoslavia until the early 1980s, with the first published female-prisoner testimony appearing only in 1990.

People and forces

Named cases alone indicate the scope of the purge. Sreten Žujović 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. The Hebrang case shows that accusations against Cominformists could be fabricated: Ranković fabricated the charge that Hebrang became an Ustaše spy during his 1942 captivity and was then blackmailed by the Soviets, and Hebrang died in Belgrade on 11 June 1949. The military and security apparatus were not exempt: 1,722 UDB servicemen and officers were convicted, and military arrests are estimated at 4,153 officers and soldiers by Radonjić and 7,000 officers by Đilas. In the same institutional setting, Colonel General Arso Jovanović had openly sided with the Soviet Union after the split and was killed by Yugoslav border guards while fleeing towards Romania; the Interior Ministry stated on 18 August 1948 that this was how he died, but in a 2000 Ljubljana court the head of UDBA in the Yugoslav General Staff testified that Jefto Šašić killed him in an argument in Belgrade and that the border incident was staged, and some 29 versions circulate.

Distinctions and disputes

Cominformists must be distinguished from the Cominform as an institution. The Cominform was a coordinating body of communist parties, limited to its newspaper and to exchanging experience and coordinating activity by mutual agreement. It must also be distinguished from the Comintern: formed after the Comintern's dissolution in 1943, the Cominform was not intended as its replacement, though it was considered a type of successor. Nor does the label cover the whole camp population: Goli Otok also held anti-communist nationalists (Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Albanian and others) and non-political prisoners serving ordinary criminal sentences, including some sentenced to death.

Cominformism existed alongside related repression abroad: in the Eastern Bloc, suspected 'Titoists' and supporters of the Cominform Resolution were themselves purged, so Koçi Xoxe was hanged in Albania on 10 June 1948 and László Rajk was arrested in Hungary on 15 June 1948. Armed opposition also appeared inside Yugoslavia: in 1948 an entire UDB division was deployed to Montenegro to suppress an insurrection led by Ilija Bulatović, and further risings in Kordun, Lika, Banovina and around Cazin in 1950 were ascribed by the authorities to Cominformism. Abroad, by late 1949 Pero Popivoda led an exiled opposition that named itself the League of Yugoslav Patriots for the Liberation of the Peoples of Yugoslavia from the Yoke of the Tito–Ranković Clique and Imperialist Slavery.

Historiography long avoided the subject. Yugoslav scholarship treated the ibeovci derogatorily and downplayed both the scale and Moscow's role, and Yugoslavia's 1963 Law on the Use of Archival Sources, which barred access to documents more recent than 1947, hampered research. The disputed punishment figures reflect this. The Informbiro period is conventionally closed by the Belgrade declaration of 2 June 1955 between Tito and Khrushchev.