Our Own Path: Selected Writings From Yugoslav Communism

By Lenny Flank

Yugoslavia was unique among the Communist nations.Defying both Moscow and Beijing, Yugoslavia under Tito followed its own path, building a system that practiced relative political openness, economic decentralization through market socialism, and a neutral foreign policy. This anthology contains writings from both supporters and critics of the Yugoslav system.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lenny Flank
• Release date: Nov 10, 2009
• ISBN: 9781452315973

Lenny Flank

Longtime social activist, labor organizer, environmental organizer, antiwar.

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Our Own Path: Selected Writings From Yugoslav Communism

Edited and with Introduction by Lenny Flank

© Copyright 2009 by Lenny Flank

All rights reserved

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Contents

Editor’s Preface

Terror by the Fascist Bandits

The Tasks Before the People’s Liberation Partisan Detachments

Tito Against the Peoples of Greece and Albania

An Open Letter to Congress, Central Committee and Members of the Yugoslav Communist Party From the International Secretariat of the Fourth International

Yugoslav Events and the World Crisis of Stalinism

Concerning the National Question and Social Patriotism: Speech held at the Slovene Academy of Arts and Sciences

Communism and Fatherland

Workers Manage Factories in Yugoslavia

The Yugoslav Revolution: Resolution Adopted by the Third Congress of the Fourth International—Paris, April 1951

Speech in the Indian Parliament

The SANU Memorandum

Statement On Former Yugoslavia

Editor’s Preface

Yugoslavia was unique among the Communist nations. While the rest of the Eastern European Communist states were pliant puppets of the Soviet Union who supported Russian interests at every turn, Yugoslavia defied Moscow and became a major spokesperson for the Non-Aligned Nations during the Cold War. While other Eastern European nations were subject to harsh censorship and tight control, Yugoslavia – though it remained a single-party state with Josip Tito as its President for Life—was relatively open. While the Eastern European nations had an economic structure that was ruthlessly controlled by the central state planning apparatus, Yugoslav industry was managed by workers councils made up of factory representatives. While Moscow oversaw the foreign trade of all the other Eastern European economies, Yugoslavia traded freely with the West (during the 1980’s, at the height of the Cold War, Yugoslavia even manufactured an economy car, called the Yugo, for the American market). From the beginning, Yugoslavia under Tito was determined to follow its own path.

The history of Yugoslav Communism began in April 1941, when the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was invaded by Nazi Germany. Two major resistance groups soon appeared—the Chetniks, commanded by Royalist military officers, and the People’s Liberation Army, led by Yugoslav Communist Party official Josip Tito. As the war went on, the Chetniks became dominated by Serb nationalists, who increasingly began to collaborate with the Nazis in the suppression of other ethnic resistance groups. Tito, on the other hand, freely welcomed everyone to his Partisans, and quickly came to control large areas of liberated territory. At the Tehran conference in 1943, Tito’s Partisans were recognized by the Allies as the provisional government of Yugoslavia, and they began dropping weapons and supplies into Partisan-controlled territory. In response, Tito drew up a plan for a post-war Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that would consist of a Federation of a number of different ethnic provinces, including Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Montenegro.

By 1944, the Partisans had driven the Nazis out of the province of Serbia, and by May 1945 they controlled the entire area of Yugoslavia. Tito was elected as President of the republic.

At first, Tito seemed to be firmly in the Soviet orbit. The Constitution of the Socialist Federated Republic was a virtual copy of the Constitution of the USSR, and Yugoslavia promptly joined the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), the Soviet-dominated Communist Third International through which Stalin gave his marching orders to communist parties around the world (Stalin replied by moving Cominform headquarters to Belgrade). As the rivalry began between the USSR and the US, Tito launched a flurry of angry words at the Western imperialists, and in August 1946, two American aircraft were shot down over Yugoslav territory—the first casualties of the Cold War.

Relations between Yugoslavia and the neighboring Communist nations of Bulgaria and Albania became so close that serious negotiations began towards incorporating them into the Yugoslav Federal Republic. Yugoslavia also began supporting the Soviet-approved Greek communist guerrillas, providing them with weapons and supplies.

A split between Moscow and Belgrade, however, was inevitable. Unlike all the other Eastern European nations, which had been liberated and occupied by the Soviet Red Army, Yugoslavia had liberated itself from the Nazis through its own efforts, and Tito’s government was not dependent upon Moscow for its position or legitimacy. Stalin, meanwhile, made every effort to depict himself as the only shining light in Communism, and ruthlessly subordinated every other Communist Party to his sole authority.

The clash began when Stalin intervened in the Bulgaria-Yugoslavia unification negotiations (which had begun without the USSR’s knowledge or approval), bluntly informing Tito that any unified nation that resulted from these talks must be subordinated to Moscow. While Bulgaria dutifully complied, Tito rejected the demand, and the talks ended. At the same time, Tito began voting against the Soviet Union at the UN, cut off its supplies to the Greek communists, and began accepting postwar Marshall Plan economic aid from the United States. In 1948, the Soviet Union expelled Yugoslavia from Cominform, and the split became final.

After the split, Tito announced that Yugoslavia would be socialist, but independent. In the diplomatic sphere, Yugoslavia became a founding member of the Non-Aligned Nations movement, and, along with India, Algeria, Venezuela, Malaysia and Indonesia, maintained neutrality in the Cold War and opposed militarism on both sides. In the military sphere, the Yugoslav Army maintained two defense plans, one against invasion by the Warsaw pact, and another against invasion by NATO.

In the economic sphere, Tito, heavily influenced by his Vice President, Milovan Djilas, introduced in 1950 the strategy of samoupravlijanje (self-management), a form of market socialism in which factories were to be run by elected worker councils, and workers were to directly receive a share of the factory’s profits.

Yugoslavia never became the repressive police state that the Stalinists did. Censorship was loose, writings from dissidents and critics were widely available, and travel and trade with the West was encouraged. Yugoslavia remained, however, a single-party state with a leader who had been elected for life, and this produced criticism. In 1956, Vice President Djilas, the presumed heir-apparent to Tito who had formulated the policies of self-management, began to call for greater democracy within the party, followed by a demand for multiple national parties and free elections. He was arrested and imprisoned twice in the next six years.

Under Tito’s market socialism, however, Yugoslavia obtained a much higher standard of living than the rest of Eastern Europe, and this, combined with Tito’s genuine popularity as a national war hero, reduced the level of political opposition.

Under the surface, however, tensions were still present. Yugoslavia was a conglomeration of several different ethnic and national groups, each of which still had its own interests. In 1971, a nationalist revival in Croatia, known as the Croatian Spring, won wide support among students and professionals. In response, the Federal constitution was re-written in 1974 to give more autonomy to the federated national provinces. At this time, the Tito government also granted autonomy to the Serbian provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina—a move which angered Serb nationalists.

When Tito died in 1980, power was passed to a collective leadership, in which the presidents of the various federated provinces were to rotate control of the Yugoslav Republic. Without Tito, however, the glue that held the Federal republic together vanished, and ethnic nationalism began to tear Yugoslavia apart. In 1986, Serb nationalists published the SANU Memorandum, which called for the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the incorporation of ethnic Serb areas of Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia and others into a Greater Serbia. In 1987, former Yugoslav Communist Party official Slobodan Milosevic, preaching Serb nationalism, became the leading political figure in Serbia. When Yugoslavia finally broke up (Croatia and Slovenia both formally seceded in 1991), Milosevic led Serbia on a series of invasions and wars, seizing areas which contained ethnic Serbs and carrying out a genocidal policy of ethnic cleansing, in which non-Serbs were systematically killed or removed. The Yugoslav Wars resulted in NATO military intervention and war crimes trials at the UN.

Terror by the Fascist Bandits

Josip Tito

September 8, 1941

(Editor’s Note: The Yugoslav Communist movement grew to significance during World War II. As the largest and best-organized anti-Nazi resistance group, the Yugoslav Communists under Tito gained popular support, and even gained diplomatic support from the Allied powers.)

The savage murder of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes continues. It is not only hangmen of the forces of occupation who are participating in this extermination of the South Slavs, but domestic quislings as well. The establishment of the miserable puppet government, headed by that repulsive traitor to the Serbian people, that German spy and mercenary, the miserable General Nedic, was accompanied, on September 3, 1941, by the heinous murder of fifty Serbs in Belgrade. Hitler’s fascist bandits and their murderous lackeys from Nedic’s criminal gang have used the supposed killing of a German soldier in Belgrade as a pretext for the massacre of these fifty sons of Serbian people. This is, of course, nothing but sheer fabrication, typical of the bloodthirsty fascists, typical of those who set fire to the Reichstag themselves so as to have an excuse for slaughtering and interning in concentration camps hundreds of thousands of German citizens. Ever since the German fascist criminals enslaved our country, they have been killing, without surcease, the finest sons of our people, our children, women and elders, razing our villages and towns — but the people have arisen to defend themselves and have already caused the enemy much grief. The fascist bandits, feeling themselves too weak to exterminate our peoples alone, have drawn up a diabolic plan. They have hired domestic hangmen and murderers to do their bloody work for them. In Croatia, they have hired a beast who unfortunately has the appearance of a man to annihilate not only the Serbs but the Croats as well. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs, women, children and elderly people have met their death under the knife at the hands of Pavelic’s Ustashi bands. Thousands of Serbian men and women have been killed by the despicable Ljotidites and Acimovic’s agents, who hunt down Serbs and turn them over to the German executioners. The traitorous Serbian Ljoticites burn down Serbian villages, and together with the Germans, murder our peaceful population. Taking note of the eagerness of these degenerates, the German fascist bandits have found yet other bandits and traitors, headed by Nedic, who, under cover of the Serbian Government, destroy and massacre our people, so that Serb kills Serb, so that the Slavs exterminate themselves. Thus do these traitors pave the way for the German and other invaders to finally become masters of our beautiful, fertile plains, our wealth of forests, our majestic mountains, our fruitful vineyards, our coastal areas, our proud Dalmatia, our towns and villages.

Nedic, the traitor, a blackguard who deserves the same fate as his twin Pavelic in Croatia, threatens to massacre and wipe out the pride of our land, our glorious Partisans, who are spilling their blood to uphold the honour of their nation, honour that has been sullied by traitors like Nedic, Ljotic and the rest of the fifth-columnist gang. With the help of the German bandits, he is organizing detachments of sorts, who are plundering the people and slaughtering the best men and women en masse; he is organizing these detachments for the purpose of waging war on the Serbian people, of carrying on the work the German invaders have begun, of transforming the enslaved Serbian nation into an obedient lackey of the fascist malefactors bent on conquest.

The contemptible traitor, Nedic, and a handful of mercenaries, offer their services to the occupiers and oppressors of our people now when that invader is being dealt hard blows by the heroic Red Army, when the ground is burning under his feet in all occupied countries, when the entire civilized world has united in the struggle against the fascist would-be conquerors, when all Slavs are uniting to struggle for the salvation of Slavdom, when the ultimate collapse of the maddened fascist bands is on the horizon.

The despicable Nedic is wrong if he thinks his plans will succeed. The Serbian people will give him an answer worthy of them, the kind of answer they have given to all traitors throughout their history. The Serbian Partisans, like Partisans in all the other parts of Yugoslavia, will continue with even greater vigour to prosecute their fight against those who have invaded our country, against the various Pavelices, Necides, Ljotices, Acimovices, and all the traitors to the people. The Serbian and the other nationalities are helping, and will help even more, the heroic fight of the Partisans, until final victory over the invaders and their lackeys — the Necices and their ilk.

This sham, puppet government, headed by the even more spurious General Nedic, threatens massacres. His partner in betrayal, Pavelic, did the same, but he achieved the opposite effect — the people arose en masse against this traitor. The people have never supported blackguards and traitors and will not do so now. Necic threatens to slaughter the people and our reply to him is that the Partisans, together with the rest of the people, will extirpate his band just as mercilessly as they will deal with his criminal masters: the German, Italian and other invaders. Blood for blood, death for death — that is our slogan in this general people’s liberation struggle.

The Tasks Before the People’s Liberation Partisan Detachments

Josip Tito

August 1941

(The years of anti-Nazi resistance gave the Yugoslav Communists a huge network of experienced fighters and an organized political network that administrated large areas of the country. This was largely due to Tito’s embracing of all ethnic and national groups who wanted to fight the Nazis. )

First. The People’s Liberation Partisan Detachments in all regions of Yugoslavia (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Macedonia, Vojvodma, Sandžak and Dalmatia) have as their principal goal the liberation of the peoples of Yugoslavia from the invaders and the fight against the invaders’ local agents who are helping them to oppress and terrorize our people.

Second. The greatest enemy of the freedom and independence of our people is German fascism, followed by all the other fascist hangers-on marauding throughout the country. It is consequently the bounden duty of all patriots to fight relentlessly until the complete annihilation of these fascist bands.

Third. The Partisan Detachments are called People’s Liberation Partisan Detachments because they are not fighting units of any particular political party — nor in this specific case of the Communist Party, regardless of the fact that Communists are fighting in the front ranks; rather they are fighting units of the peoples of Yugoslavia which ought to be joined by all patriots capable of bearing arms against the invaders, regardless of their political convictions.

Fourth. The Partisan Detachments have numerous tasks to carry out in the common struggle against the enemies of our people. They must destroy all objects of use to the fascist invaders: railways, bridges, factories, workshops, ammunition and arms dumps. They must use all their powers to prevent the enemy from confiscating grain, livestock and other foodstuffs from the peasants. Requisitional grain, livestock and other food supplies must be taken away from the enemy by force and distributed among the people, the necessary amount being retained to supply the detachments. The Partisan Detachments must prevent the collection of taxes and other levies as this money is used by the invaders to carry on their war of conquest and subjugate the people.

Fifth. The Partisan Detachments must defend, by force of arms, villages, towns and other settlements from fascist outrages. They must protect the people’s property from being plundered by the invaders.

Sixth. The Partisan Detachments must destroy fascist units whenever they come across them. Particularly kill officers, Gestapo men, Black Shirts and so on. They must also be ruthless in annihilating their local henchmen, traitors to the people of various categories and provocateurs, agents who are handing over in great numbers the best sons of our people to the fascist hangmen, serving the occupier like faithful dogs and terrorizing the people.

Seventh. The Partisan Detachments must be tireless in stimulating the resistance of the people, raising insurrections among the people and putting themselves at the head of them as the militant hard core. The experience of Partisan warfare so far has demonstrated that the question of the nationwide uprising has been neglected; it is therefore necessary to make good this shortcoming without delay lest the Partisans isolate themselves from the masses who are ready to fight for their just cause.

Eighth. The political line of the Partisan Detachments must be: the People’s Liberation Anti-fascist Front of all the nationalities of Yugoslavia, regardless of political or religious beliefs.

Ninth. There must be no exclusiveness in forming Partisan Detachments; opportunities for broad initiative in forming Partisan Detachments must be left open. Once formed, Partisan Detachments should be immediately linked with the local and regional HQs and put under their command.

Tenth. HQs and commanders must be on the alert lest the enemy infiltrate spies and agents provocateurs into the Partisan ranks. If they should appear, they must be shot immediately and their names published.

Eleventh. The HQs and commanders of Partisan Detachments must keep a sharp watch on discipline in the detachments. Looting, betrayal or other breach of discipline must be punished severely.

Twelfth. HQs must be responsible for the supplies of the fighting men, and for equipping them, etc. Food supplies must be organized in conjunction with the Committees of the People’s Liberation Front which has the task of collecting for the People’s Liberation Fund. Where such Committees still do not exist, provisions should be secured either by cash payment or as voluntary contributions from peasants and other citizens.

Thirteenth. All Partisan Detachments and their HQs, from Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herezegovina, Vojvodina, Dalmatia, Macedonia and Sandžak, come under the supreme command of the GHQ of the People’s Liberation Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia.

HQs must he well linked up with each other for purposes of battle coordination and successful conduct of operations.

Fourteenth. HQs and commanders must be responsible for seeing that the wounded and sick are given the proper medical care in terms of personnel and supplies.

Fifteenth. As the uprising of the masses spreads and develops, the necessary commands will be set up; it is therefore essential for the HQs and commanders to be on the lookout for tried and tested commanders and commissars, who can lead the insurgent masses.

Sixteenth. Wherever strategic and other circumstances are favourable, large-scale military units may, where needed, be formed by merging number of Partisan Detachments in order to facilitate the conduct of major operations

Tito Against the Peoples of Greece and Albania

World News and Views, Vol. 29, No. 10

August 27, 1949

(Editor’s Note: In the postwar period, while the Soviet Union tightened its control over Eastern Europe, turning the various Communist Parties into pliant puppets of Moscow, Tito alone had the means to defy the Russians. Dependent upon neither Soviet military or political support, Tito’s government declared that the Yugoslav Party would go its own way, independent of the USSR’s dictates. The Russians, in response, took firm steps to discipline Tito and bring him into the Soviet orbit. The breaking point came in 1948-1949, when Tito cut off the flow of weapons from neighboring Albania to the Soviet-backed Greek Communist Party, which was then engaged in a bitter civil war against the Greek military government. The pro-Soviet World News and Views dutifully attacked Tito.)

During the last weeks, the Tito clique have increased their world campaign of slander against the Soviet Union and the Popular Democracies. New repressive measures have been taken against Yugoslav Communists who have a real internationalist outlook. New measures, too, have been carried out against Soviet citizens living in Yugoslavia. Moreover, the Tito Government has integrated still more closely with Western imperialism its aggressive policy and actions against the peoples of Greece and Albania.

At first, the Greek monarcho-fascist press treated the Tito descent into the imperialist camp with some reserve. They were jealous that the Titoites would replace them in the hearts, and on the pay roll of the imperialists. Lately, however, a close co-operation has developed between the Titoites and Greek fascists. Tito’s decision with regard to Greece, writes the right-wing Greek paper Vema (13.7.49):

irrespective of the pretexts he gives for this act, represents the fulfilment of an old and persistent aim of Britain and the other Western Powers…No one doubts the honesty of Tito’s attitude and his real intention to carry out the announced decision.

In Washington, the Yugoslav Ambassador, Sava Kosanovic, was in conference with Dean Acheson, U.S. Secretary of State, on August 16. The next day the Yugoslav Chargé d’Affaires in Athens had an official meeting with the Permanent Secretary of Foreign Affairs of the Greek Government. The Greek right- wing press referred to this meeting as an official step towards establishment of friendly relations between the Athens and Belgrade Governments. On August 16, Free Greece Radio reported that Yugoslav troops had shelled the Greek Democratic Army in the rear and flank when re-grouping in the St. Stephanos area, south of the Yugoslav border.

The News Chronicle correspondent in Northern Greece reports (22.8.49) that:

Although nothing can yet be cabled of the collaboration between Athens and Belgrade, there have been instances of co-operation on a local scale along the border.

One of the main roles that Western imperialism has assigned to the Titoites is pressure and aggression against Albania. Tito is reviving the old Serb chauvinist anti-Albanian policy and, jointly with the Greek fascists, plotting aggression against Albania. New Greek aggressions have taken place on Albanian territory during the last few weeks. Greek troops and planes (obtained from Britain) have violated Albanian territory. The Greek right-wing press calls for full-scale invasion. According to a United Press dispatch of August