In this respect, Josip Broz Tito, the General Secretary of the party's Central Committee, called for gradual "withering away of the state".

They were given greater decision-making autonomy, but their role was changed from being a virtual administrative arm of the government to a part in which they would be used to persuade and educate instead of direct.

Following the 1944 power-sharing agreement concluded with the Yugoslav government-in-exile, the CPY led the formation of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia in March 1945.

[8] Yugoslavia was compelled to ask the United States for economic assistance in the summer of 1948 due to the closure of foreign trade with the countries of the Eastern Bloc.

[9] The United States Government cautiously approved the request, wishing to score a Cold War victory over the Soviet Union.

[11] By 1951, faced with the prospect of a Soviet invasion, Yugoslavia joined the Mutual Defense Assistance Program and began receiving US military aid as well.

[15] In the early 1950s, the CPY introduced the concept of "struggle of opinions" to refer to such exchanges of ideas amid the liberalisation of the economy and administration.

[18] According to Aleksandar Ranković, the principal objective of the upcoming CPY congress was to align the party with the reforms which took place in the preceding years.

In his speech, he criticised Soviet imperialism and Russian chauvinism, and declared the CPY went down the correct path of decentralisation, democratic economic management, and "withering away of the state".

[24] The congress declared that this would leave the central party apparatus to pursue the development of policies and ideology and act primarily through persuasion.

At the same time, the congress took steps to restrict the investment decision-making autonomy of the workers' councils and make it more difficult to replace their company managers.

These were responses to frequent replacements of company managers and instances of misappropriation of investment funds by the workers' councils manipulated by local party officials.

[36] One camp, formed around Đilas, Pijade and possibly Blagoje Nešković, favoured a faster pace of decentralisation of the party and the country.

Namely, as the SKJ viewed the adopted changes as a formalisation of the reforms leading up to the congress, its membership was cautioned to refrain from straying from the new party line.

Also, there were examples where lower-level party bodies interpreted the new policies as giving them the option of ignoring instructions from above, avoiding meetings, or performing their financial obligations.

[38] The policy change also spurred a debate on the Yugoslav federal system – the role of constituent republics and the status of various peoples in Yugoslavia.

The SKJ portrayed the diverse national heritages of the peoples of Yugoslavia as components of a shared Yugoslav culture while avoiding all forms of forced assimilation.

[36] Stalin's death in 1953 substantially reduced the Soviet threat to Yugoslavia, taking away a significant reason for the far-reaching extent of the reforms embraced by the SKJ.

In particular, Tito was concerned about maintaining the leading position of the SKJ in society, fearing that adopting Western ideas might undermine the party's dominance.

[36] Most significantly, the committee began to backtrack on the congress's plans for a reduction in the SKJ's role in government and for a gradual "withering away of the state".

In May 1955, when Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin visited Belgrade, Yugoslavia and the USSR agreed to rebuild their relations on new grounds, marking the end of the Informbiro period.

[41] Tito discovered he could maximise his negotiating power by keeping Yugoslavia neutral in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.