party-to-party relations

The concept begins from treating relations among communist parties as a distinct sphere from state-to-state relations. The Cominform's stated purpose was the exchange of experience and the coordination of activity, but in practice it was an instrument for unifying the lines of the member parties under the leadership of the Soviet party. After the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform in 1948, Tito and Kardelj refused to submit and argued that no party should be compelled to obey another and that each party had the right to its own road to socialist construction, suited to its own conditions. Although the dispute was presented as an ideological one, it was also a geopolitical struggle over the Balkans and a challenge to the hierarchy inside the international communist movement. In February 1948 Stalin made Kardelj and Dimitrov sign a treaty obliging Yugoslavia and Bulgaria to consult the Soviet Union on all foreign policy matters, precisely the form of relationship that the claim of party equality rejected.

The Belgrade declaration, signed by Tito and Khrushchev on 2 June 1955, guaranteed non-interference in internal affairs and recognised the right to interpret different forms of socialist development in different countries. It ended the Informbiro period and promised more equal relations among the satellite states and the Soviet Union. Relations between the two ruling parties themselves, however, were not restored at once. According to a US State Department intelligence brief of 22 June 1956, the reestablishment of party-to-party relations emerged as one of the visit's new developments only during Tito's trip to the USSR in June 1956, a subject that had merely been hinted at during the Soviet visit to Belgrade in 1955. Khrushchev had pressed for such an agreement in Belgrade in 1955 without success; the Yugoslavs agreed only in 1956. The brief holds that the terms were Tito's conditions: a Soviet commitment to recognise the equality of the two parties, informal bilateral ties rather than a new institution such as a replacement for the Cominform, and freedom of action for both sides, in contrast to the discipline traditionally required of foreign communist parties.

The principle subsequently branched in several directions. Yugoslavia developed this space into a course of its own between the two blocs, and the claim of party equality became an argument anticipating the polycentrism debates and the Sino-Soviet split. The limits of the reconciliation promised by the Belgrade declaration, meanwhile, became evident in the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 and the Soviet campaign against Tito that followed.