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Welcome to MSB's Yugoslav History Interlude Episode 4 what Rough Beast Slouches toward the Ballot Box? To be elected in June 1944, two weeks after his appointment as Prime Minister of the Government in Exile of Yugoslavia, Ivan Shubai landed on a small Adriatic island, Vis, for meeting with Josip Broz, codename Tito, Marshal of the Partisan Armed Forces and General Secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Tito himself had arrived on Vis only about a week before the Germans had launched a massive airborne raid at the end of May. They had failed to kill Tito, but his headquarters was temporarily overrun and he, his staff and the allied diplomatic missions attached to the partisan command were forced to relocate to the more secure island refuge. Tito and Chubasic would meet twice in Naples in August and then in Belgrade just days after its liberation by a combined force of partisan and Red army troops. The result of these three meetings was the Tito Subai agreement or agreements, a blueprint for cooperation between the royal government in exile and the communist led partisans, officially known as the National Liberation Movement. In the main, the agreement was simple and unobjectionable. The two organizations recognized each other, agreed to cooperate to defeat the occupiers and to create a united coalition government composed of members appointed by both sides at the earliest possible moment. The royal government accepted the partisans political apparatus as temporary managers of the liberated Yugoslav territory under their control, accepted the National Liberation army as the legitimate armed forces of Yugoslavia, and recognized Tito's authority as supreme military commander for the country. Tito, for his part, agreed not to make any final decisions about the form of government to be adopted in the Yugoslavia to come. Elections for a new constituent assembly would be held after the final liberation of the country, and until then the anti fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia, or Avnoj, would enjoy full legislative authority. I'll talk more about them soon, but for now just know that this is the partisan parliament. King Peter himself, though he was staying nearby, was excluded from the talks at Vis and was not even informed about the Belgrade negotiations until after their conclusion in November. The king learned by a letter that he was to be prohibited from entering the country until a referendum could be held on the future of the monarchy. His constitutional authority as head of state would in the interim be exercised by a regency council appointed by the king and nominally loyal to him. There would be oaths and that sort of thing, but the men chosen would still need to be acceptable to Tito. If it seems as though the royal government was making a lot more concessions than the partisans in these agreements, the. Well, they were operating from a much weaker position and everyone, at least everyone except King Peter, knew it. In truth, neither side was eager for the agreement. Subosuch and Peter were under intense pressure from the British government, who had concluded correctly that the royals could either sign the agreement, benefit from the halo of legitimacy around the victorious partisans, and retain some influence over future events in Yugoslavia, or they could refuse it and cede the field completely to the communists. Meanwhile, Stalin was breathing down Tito's neck, anxious that open conflict in Yugoslavia could trigger a cascading crisis that would draw in the British as patrons of the Karadjordjevic dynasty and lead to war between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. But still Peter was upset. He was one of those monarchs who did not understand the real limitations of his position, and he felt betrayed both by his own government and by allied leadership. In his view, they were altogether too willing to favor Tito's position over his own. And for no better reason than that the partisan marshal commanded a battle hardened army of well over half a million and a civilian government which now administered nearly the whole of Yugoslavia. I mean, come on, he didn't even have a crown. So the king responded by firing Subasuch and then a week later, having failed to find an acceptable replacement, reappointed him. That's a good sign, right?
So powerful.
Inspires trust and devotion in your underlings. Next, he set himself to picking his nominees for the regency council. And naturally he settled on the man who always seems to be on hand and ready to bungle things at every crucial moment, Dushan Simovich. Tito was happy with this choice, presumably because he knew an easy opponent when he saw one. But Subasi refused to sanction the king's choice, pointing out that Simovich had not exactly covered himself in glory when he was serving as prime minister. Ultimately, Peter wouldn't come up with any acceptable nominees. All three members of the regency council, though moderates who were acceptable to everyone, would be nominated by the partisans. For months, Peter dragged his feet on the agreements, apparently unable to recognize how badly eroded his position had become. At first, he refused to allow any representatives of his government to return to Yugoslavia, perhaps because he was terrified that they would fall under the sway of Tito's charisma. Throughout 1945, he complained bitterly in radio addresses and an endless correspondence of letters to British and American leaders that the government was disregarding the constitution, that the regents were not deferring to his wishes that avnoy was exceeding its authority and and so on. In his book the Balkans since the Second World War, RJ Crampton writes of this. In this the king was constitutionally correct but politically unwise. Tito welcomed the king's ineffectual interventions, which further diminished the monarch's prestige and influence both in London and in Yugoslavia. With the king frittering away his remaining political capital, the Communists worked swiftly and ruthlessly to neuter any potential opposition from the other parties within Yugoslavia. They had spent the war years playing down their ultimate socialist ambitions in order to present the broadest possible front against the occupiers. But they had never given up on those dreams. Elections were coming up in November, and a crushing victory at the ballot box would give them the mandate they needed to transform postwar Yugoslavia, as had been the case with the National Liberation Movement and the National Liberation army, which is to say, the partisans. During the war, the Communists formed a union of allied parties, the People's Front, which was not itself inherently or universally Communist, but which was led by the Communist Party and fronted by Tito himself. In the November 1945 elections, this People's Front won 90% of the vote, with turnout in the neighborhood of 85%. Though it would have seemed impossible, insane, a fever dream just five years prior, the Communists had won. How? In each of the past three installments I've focused on political actors and factions who, at the moment of Yugoslavia's entry into the Second World War, could reasonably expect to weather the crisis and, when the high tide of fascism inevitably receded, resume the authority which they had previously enjoyed. King Peter II may have had no practical experience of government, but legally he had already been king since 1934, and his Karadjordjevic dynasty had reigned first over Serbia and then Yugoslavia since 1903. Dushan Simovic himself had only come to power thanks to the crisis created by the war. But as a high ranking Serbian general and prime minister of the royal government, he represented the status quo ante and enjoyed the full, if by then somewhat dubious, legitimacy of the Serbian political establishment. Vladko Maciek and Ivan Shubai led the largest minority population in the kingdom and the most influential opposition party. None of that was true for the Communists, though they had never ceased to inspire a frothing, irrational, elemental terror in the authorities. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia was marginal, a nonentity that had exercised no meaningful influence on Yugoslavian politics since 1921. But for the war and the occupation, there is every reason to believe that they would have remained exactly that. Back in 1920, in the newly United Kingdom's first nationwide election, the Communist Party actually received more than 12% of the vote, winning the third largest share of seats in the national assembly, although do note here that they secured more seats than the Croatian Peasant Party despite receiving fewer total votes. This happened because the Communists were a nationwide party, and so they benefited from pro Serbian gerrymandering in certain regions. This strong showing in 1920 convinced the Royal authorities that the Communist Party represented a deadly threat to their power, and a provocation was soon found to justify the suppression of the party. About a month after the election, miners in Bosnia Herzegovina went on strike. Police and army forces were sent in to suppress the strike. They killed a number of miners, and in response, other trade unions, Communist affiliated trade unions called for a general strike. The government then issued a decree which was probably unconstitutional, shutting down all Communist affiliated organizations, including newspapers, meeting houses and labor unions. They stripped scholarships from Communist students, purged the civil service of Communist sympathizers, arrested thousands of known Communists, and killed or tortured a select few. The decree did not make it illegal technically to be a Communist, but you weren't allowed to attend meetings, possess Communist literature, or read, write or say anything about Communism. The following summer, members of a more radical sect within the Communist Party retaliated by assassinating the minister responsible for writing the decree, and the government banned the Communist Party outright. Party leadership at the time was completely unprepared for a crackdown on this scale, and the party all but evaporated. Its leaders fled abroad, mostly to Austria, Czechoslovakia, France and the Soviet Union. Membership plummeted. The numbers I've seen quoted vary pretty dramatically, but there may have been as many as 50,000 card carrying communists before the bans went into effect. Fewer than 700 die hards in 1924, and less than 500, perhaps as low as 200 in 1932. But as those numbers, even at the highest end of the scale indicate, most of the votes cast for the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in the 1920 elections did not come from fully committed party members. Many of them were simple protest votes against the widely resented establishment. Regionally, the their best performances came in Montenegro and Macedonia, regions with relatively few Communists overall, where they received 36 and 33% of the vote, respectively. But this was because they were the only party to recognize Montenegrin and Macedonian as distinct identities, and so they captured the nationalist vote. Aside from all of the repressions, the Communist Party in Yugoslavia had a demographic problem. Ideologically, their target audience was the urban working class. But in 1920, Yugoslavia didn't have one of those. Industrial and mine workers, the backbone of workers movements around the world, made up only a tiny fraction of the population, and the vast majority, around 80%, were rural peasants with plenty of grievances against the state and the status quo, but little solidarity with their urban counterparts. In the 1930s, this would begin to change. But we'll get there. The Communists were also distracted by an endlessly recirculating debate over tactics between a radical Bolshevist wing and a more moderate center. The moderates had close ties to the labor unions and wanted to work within the democratic system through education, propaganda and coalition building to create a mass movement that was capable of winning elections and enacting reforms. The radicals wanted to form a disciplined cadre of undercover operatives ready to seize power in an armed uprising. The moderates preferred a united Yugoslavia with limited regional autonomy, while the radicals went as far as advocating the total breakup of the country. The moderates sought closer ties with the non communist peasant parties based on their shared grievances against the ruling cohort in Belgrade, while the radicals made overtures to nationalist rebels in both the Bulgarian IMRO and and the Croatian Ustasha based on their shared desire to assassinate the ruling cohort in Belgrade. For our purposes, however, we do not need to go into the details of these debates or the profiles of the various men and women who took on the thankless job of rebuilding the party after 1920, because in 1937 a certain Joseph Stalin had them all killed. This purge wiped out the top rank of the party, most of whom were staying in Moscow to ensure their safety, and and left Tito, who only narrowly escaped being purged himself, as the highest ranking member of the party and now its de facto head. In matters of tactics, Tito preferred and was adept at the kind of COVID organizing favored by the radical faction. Even before taking over the party, he had argued strenuously that they had to accept the dangers of operating secretly inside Yugoslavia, that the party would never get anywhere as long as its leaders remained in exile. But for his part, the man does not seem to have been particularly interested in the finer points of Communist theory. He had first distinguished himself for his arguments against factionalism itself, and there is reason to believe it was this very disinterest that saved his life during Stalin's purges. So, once functionally in charge of the party, he set himself to resolving the radical versus moderate dispute, which had by then come to the point of violence, by including representatives of both factions in his leadership team as he rebuilt the party, and in a sign of his commitment to truly multiethnic Yugoslavism, or potentially a complete coincidence, the three men in his inner circle, who would soon come to be known as the architects of the second Yugoslavia, included one Slovenian, one Serbian, and one Montenegrin, while of course, Tito himself represented Croatia. But there was one faction that Tito considered the Tito faction. As he rebuilt the party, Tito was careful to promote those who were loyal to him personally, regardless of their doctrinal positions. Party officials who demonstrated too much independence or acted contrary to his plans were carefully, deliberately sidelined and replaced with more reliable proxies. But this was rarely necessary. Considering the turnover in the upper echelons of the Yugoslav Communist Party thus far and the ongoing Soviet purges, it is remarkable how many of the men enrolled in Tito's temporary leadership team in 1938 remained his loyal allies throughout the war and for the rest of their careers. Perhaps that is simply a testament to his personal charisma. He had presence. He impressed everyone he met, even his avowed enemies. The allied officers who visited partisan headquarters often seemed awestruck by the man. And King Peter complained bitterly in his autobiography that his own ministers became devotees of Tito. After one meeting, even my aide de camp was converted from being 100% anti Tito to 100% pro Tito as well. As after his first meeting, I noted a change in subasic and was conscious that Tito had some hold over him. The rejuvenated Communist Party he created was, in the words of historian Marie Janine Kallick, reminiscent of the young Bosnians before the First World War. Yugoslavism was not just a vision, but a way of life. The party enforced a strict code of values and behavior, emphasizing ideological loyalty, willing sacrifice, familial solidarity, spartan discipline, and somber puritanism. By the end of the decade, the party was tightly organized, authoritatively led, and peacefully focused on a pro Yugoslav aim. There's no telling what might have happened had the war not interposed itself when it did. Perhaps internal tension would have torn the party asunder again. Perhaps Stalin would have purged Tito eventually. Instead, the brutal logic of war collapsed the tactical debate into a single point. There was no longer a system to work within or overthrow. And victory over the occupiers was going to require both a huge popular front, mass movement, and disciplined underground operators outside the rarefied inner circle around Tito. The party as a whole was growing rapidly during this period, both in formal membership and and in influence. By 1939, its membership role crossed 6,000, and by the time of the uprising in 41. There were at least 8,000 and perhaps as high as 12,000 members. Once again, demographics tell much of the story. During the Communist Party's two decades of exile, a new hybrid class of worker peasants, peasants who still worked the land in their home villages, but now spent part of every year living and working in the cities for desperately needed wages, and had emerged. The cities expanded rapidly to accommodate this influx of population. Not enough. Never enough. And living conditions were abominable. Imagine all the worst deprivations of the Industrial revolution. Children playing in trash heaps, multiple people renting a single bed in a damp, unsafe, structurally catastrophic tenement. No bathrooms, but open sewers everywhere. It was enough to make a person want to do something about it, along with money from their city jobs. And never enough money for that matter. The worker peasants also soaked up leftist ideas in the cities and then carried them back to their villages. The political chaos of the 30s had given the younger generation plenty of reasons to favor communism. Fascism was visibly rising all around them, and yet the established parties who were running their country were all too willing to either ignore or accommodate it. Only the Communists were voluble and resolute in their opposition. At the same time, young people were radicalized by the police state, first imposed during King Alexander's dictatorship, and by resentment at the old fashioned morals which the establishment was trying to force upon them. Then came Simovich's couple, which, although it was initially popular, deprived the government of any remaining vestige of democratic legitimacy. The invasion afterwards destroyed the prestige of the army, and flight abroad made the young king look like a coward. And then, when he settled in London, an impotent lackey of the British. The invaders carved up the country along arbitrary lines, destroying established trans regional networks of trade and cooperation. They seized what little industry Yugoslavia had and plundered every kind of resource, reducing the people to starvation. Censorship and curfews snuffed out any semblance of civic life. By 1942, Serbian civilians were not even allowed to visit the local pub for leisure. Add to that the atrocities, the ethnic cleansing, the retaliatory executions. In a few short months, every institution of their society collapsed, to be replaced by the howling void. As Callick writes, the devastating impact of the war economy brought the social pyramid crashing to the ground. Galloping inflation caused a gigantic destruction of business values and leveled class and status differences. While peasants were freed of their debts overnight, the middle class became poor because the value of their wages, pensions and savings melted away. The former advantage of urban life over rural life now turned into a disadvantage to Secure food, city dwellers had to swap or sell everything they owned. Gold and jewelry, furniture and clothing now changed hands for a song. Economic plight, the rule of terror, and the omnifarious and omnipresent experience. With violence destroyed in a very short period of time, nearly everything that had once constituted traditional society, leaving the political, social, economic and psychological foundations of the old order in irrevocable ruin. The war accelerated basic social changes and created approaches with which to bridge the old rifts between the urban and rural populations. As the old world was dying out in the liberated territory under partisan control, a new one was struggling to be born. Until now, I have generally used the terms communist and partisan interchangeably. That's how most people at the time thought of them. The partisan leadership was decidedly communist, and they weren't shy about advertising it. Partisan symbols borrowed heavily from the iconography of the Soviet Union. Their most elite combat units were called Proletarian brigades, and the first such was established on Stalin's birthday. It's not subtle, but even so, the vast majority of Yugoslavs who joined the partisan movement were not themselves communists. It was a broad popular front, and as long as you were anti fascist, you were welcome. In Slovenia, for example, the the first resistance group to take up arms was called the Liberation Front. Communist led, but composed of members from 18 different organizations, including followers of the centrist Christian Socialist Party, Gym Bros from the recreational athletics organization Sokol, a broad spectrum of progressive intellectuals, former army officers, and even defectors from the major collaboration parties. Essentially, the communist pitch was, hey man, there's a bunch of fascists over there and we're going to go fight them. It seems like you also want to fight them, so why don't you join us? And since we know where we're going, why not let us lead the way? Oh, and as we've got some time before we get to the fighting, let's all read some Marxist theory together, maybe sing a few stirring songs about the liberation of the working class. It's cool if you don't want to, but you know everybody else is going to be doing it. Or to put it another way, per Josip Tomashevic, the grand strategy of the communists was to oppose, with the help of Popular Front organizations, the armies of the occupying powers and the armed units of the collaborationists. Unequivocally and at all costs, through armed struggle, they hoped to become the controlling military force in the country, so that political control of the state would be within their grasp at the end of the war. Since Yugoslavia was an agricultural country, whose peasants were strong believers in peasant ownership of the land. The communists could not hope to attract the peasants, without whom they could not achieve victory by advocating traditional communist objectives. So, under the direction of political commissars embedded with the troops, the partisan army doubled as a massive education program. The hundreds of thousands of illiterate peasant soldiers who enlisted were taught reading, writing, Marxist theory and socialist ethics. The ethnic, regional and religious differences that had made the first Yugoslavia so unwieldy were subsumed into a new collective partisan identity, naturally created through the shared hardships of the war and consciously reinforced through army rituals. They read the works of the great Yugoslav national poets to each other in camp. They danced traditional folk songs together and invented new holidays to celebrate. In 1945, even though the war was winding down, Tito used his authority as supreme commander of Yugoslav armed forces, recognized by the king and all, to order mass mobilization. This was done for a bunch of very sensible, practical reasons. A big army would give Yugoslavia more heft at the bargaining table. Keeping soldiers in the field would give civilian authorities at home more time to rebuild some of the country's housing stock and make it easier for the government to manage the available food, preventing food famine. But it also meant enrolling the maximum possible number of people into this partisan education system. And this lowish key program of socialist groundwork was not limited to the army. Whenever the partisans liberated a chunk of territory, they created an ad hoc local council to administer it. Ope
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