People's Liberation Struggle (Narodnooslobodilačka borba)
인민해방투쟁
The official term for the KPJ-led anti-fascist armed struggle in occupied Yugoslavia during the Second World War, a framework that fused the war of liberation against the Axis occupiers with a social revolution against the old order into a single process. Under the banner of brotherhood among nations and an equal federal settlement, it drew Serbs and Croats alike into a mass partisan army and liberated the country without a permanent Red Army presence, conferring on the KPJ a distinctive self-earned legitimacy. That experience became the structural basis for postwar Yugoslavia's relatively autonomous position from Moscow's direction.
In depth
Official name and meaning
The 'People's Liberation Struggle' (Narodnooslobodilačka borba, NOB) is the official term used in Yugoslav historiography for the KPJ-led armed resistance waged across occupied Yugoslavia from July 1941 to May 1945. In Russian it was rendered as Народно-освободительная борьба. The struggle carried a dual character: it was simultaneously a war of liberation against the Axis occupiers and a social revolution against the pre-war order. Yugoslav historiography formalised this as the 'National Liberation War and Socialist Revolution' (Narodnooslobodilački rat i socijalistička revolucija).
Scale and operation
The armed uprising was decided at a KPJ Politburo meeting in Belgrade on 4 July 1941, with Tito appointed commander-in-chief of the Supreme Headquarters. What began as small partisan detachments grew into a regular army after the formation of the 1st Proletarian Brigade in December 1941, was reorganised as the People's Liberation Army (NOV) in November 1942, and by the war's end numbered 800,000 fighters in four field armies. In liberated territories, People's Liberation Committees ran civilian administration, and the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ), convened at Bihać in November 1942, laid the constitutional foundation for a postwar federal state.
Self-liberation and its political consequences
What fundamentally distinguishes the Yugoslav People's Liberation Struggle from other European resistance movements, and from the Soviet partisan movement, is the fact of self-liberation. Unlike the East European countries liberated by a resident Red Army, the Yugoslav partisans took the bulk of their territory independently, coordinating with Soviet forces only in the autumn 1944 Belgrade Offensive. The political self-consciousness bred by this experience, 'we liberated ourselves', was the core asset that enabled the KPJ to hold its organisational cohesion against Moscow's demand for submission at the time of the 1948 Cominform split. The Soviet side, seeking to undermine this narrative, tried to minimise the Yugoslav contribution; paradoxically, doing so only hardened the Yugoslav conviction that the autonomous road was historically earned.
Sources
- Wikipedia (EN) covers the Partisans as 'Europe's most effective anti-Axis resistance movement', the official name changes from NOPOJ through NOV to Yugoslav Army, the 800,000-strong force by April 1945, the dual liberation-and-revolution objectives, and the KPJ's pan-ethnic strategy under Tito
- Wikipedia (RU) Russian article: the term Народно-освободительная борьба народа Югославии as the historiographical designation, the 4 July 1941 Politburo meeting, the formation of the Supreme Headquarters, the progression from guerrilla war to conventional operations, and the seven major Axis offensives
- sh.wikipedia.org Serbo-Croatian article: NOB defined as the KPJ-led armed struggle of Yugoslav peoples, its character as both liberation from occupation and social revolution; the KPJ's counter to fratricidal policies through the slogan of brotherhood and unity; the partisan practice that units grow only through combat actions
- Marxists Internet Archive Colonel Fabijan Trgo, Survey of the People's Liberation War: the KPJ's platform of 'liberation and revolution' and the People's Liberation Front as the broad unifying framework; the all-Yugoslav character of the struggle and its simultaneous function as a struggle for each nationality; the formation of the 1st Proletarian Brigade in December 1941 and the subsequent transformation into a regular army
- doinghistoryinpublic.org Helena Trenkić: the Cominform's 1948 indictment took issue with the KPJ's narrative of self-liberation; Yugoslav claims to autonomy rested on the fact that unlike Eastern Bloc countries, Yugoslavia was not indebted to the USSR for military intervention; Soviet attempts to minimise the partisan role paradoxically reinforced the Yugoslav counter-narrative