Informbiro period
The new foreign policy circumstances led Tito to end Yugoslav support of Communist forces in the Greek Civil War and concluded the Balkan Pact, an agreement of cooperation and defence with Greece and Turkey.
The period had an impact on Yugoslavia's contemporary art and popular culture, as artists were encouraged to seek inspiration in the wartime struggle of the Yugoslav Partisans and the construction of new infrastructure.
[3] In September 1947, when the Soviets formed the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties, also known as the Cominform, they insisted on headquartering it in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade, expanding their agents' access to Yugoslavia.
[4] After the war, Stalin and Tito, and by extension the USSR and Yugoslavia, had increasingly divergent objectives and priorities in the areas of foreign relations, economic policies, and even in ideological approaches to the development of a Communist society.
The agreement, calling for greater integration between the two countries, was negotiated without consulting the USSR, leading Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov to denounce it.
[10] Since 1947, Yugoslavia provided increasing aid to the Democratic Army of Greece (Δημοκρατικός Στρατός Ελλάδας, Dimokratikós Stratós Elládas, DSE) in the Greek Civil War.
[11] Even after Stalin obtained assurances from Yugoslav leadership that the aid would cease, Tito informed Nikos Zachariadis of the Communist Party of Greece that the DSE could count on further help.
[12] In the immediate aftermath of the Tito–Stalin split, the leadership of the ruling Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunistička partija Jugoslavije, KPJ) was faced with uncertainty over personal loyalty.
[15] In response to the situation in the country, Ranković established a special anti-Cominform staff in the State Security Administration (Uprava državne bezbednosti, UDB) consisting of his deputy, and nominal head of the UDB, Svetislav Stefanović Ćeća, Veljko Mićunović, Jovo Kapičić, Vojislav Biljanović, Mile Milatović, and Jefto Šašić as the head of the Counterintelligence Service (Kontraobaveštajna služba, KOS).
According to Yugoslav sources, the group consisted of 4,928 people including 475 specifically chosen military and civilian experts sent to the USSR and elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc for training, and comparably few defectors.
[30] By late 1949, Popivoda was established as the undisputed leader of the exiled opposition, and the group named itself the League of Yugoslav Patriots for the Liberation of the Peoples of Yugoslavia from the Yoke of the Tito-Ranković Clique and Imperialist Slavery.
They supported the publication of several newspapers advocating anti-Titoist efforts, the most influential being Za socijalističku Jugoslaviju (For Socialist Yugoslavia) and Nova borba (New Struggle).
Various non-military experts were trained for a future takeover of the government, while military personnel were organised into four international brigades deployed to Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria near their Yugoslav borders, and an air force unit was set up in the Ural Mountains.
[35] As a result, an entire UDB division was deployed to Montenegro in the summer and autumn of 1948 to combat the insurrection led by former secretary of the KPJ organisation Ilija Bulatović, in the town of Bijelo Polje.
[37] Two more insurrections, led by ethnic Serb veterans of the Partisan forces and former army officers, took place in the areas of Kordun, Lika, Banovina in Croatia, and just across the federal unit's border in Bosnia and Herzegovina where rebellion centered on the city of Cazin in 1950.
[44] Throughout the Informbiro period, spanning from 1948 to 1954, Albania and Yugoslavia were embroiled in a series of armed confrontations fueled by territorial disputes and ideological differences between their leaders, Josip Broz Tito and Enver Hoxha.
Prior to 1948, the Yugoslav economy relied on state-controlled trade of agricultural products and raw materials to the USSR in exchange for processed goods and machinery.
Soon, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank approved loans as well, albeit requiring Yugoslavia to use them to repay pre-war debts to Britain, France, Italy and Belgium.
[65] The push to increased efficiency led to lay-offs of workers deemed less productive—including women, the elderly and even maintenance crews, which did not actually produce anything—resulting in a sharp rise in unemployment.
[68] There was a proposal led by Ranković in 1949 to introduce oblasts as an intermediate-level administrative bodies designed to reduce power of federal republics, but it was dismissed by the KPJ central committee following Slovene objections.
[69] In 1952, Deputy Prime Minister Edvard Kardelj drafted constitutional amendments to reflect the reality of the economic reforms of 1950–51 leading to a debate which would extend for more than a year.
Furthermore, it sought to reflect the economic power of each constituent republic, giving a majority to Slovenia and Croatia if strictly applied, while ensuring equal representation of each federal unit in the assembly to counterbalance this.
[71] Ultimately, the KPJ accepted decentralisation and rebranded itself as the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (Savez komunista Jugoslavije, SKJ) at its sixth congress held in Zagreb in 1952 to reflect the prevailing spirit.
[74] Shortly before Yugoslavia joined the MDAP, the Yugoslav military held an exercise near Banja Luka in 1951 which hosted US observers, including the Chief of Staff of the United States Army General J. Lawton Collins.
[89] On 1 July 1954, as signing of the Bled agreement was imminent, a Soviet ambassador delivered Nikita Khrushchev's message to Tito indicating an urgent desire to restore relations between the USSR and Yugoslavia.
US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles met with Tito at the Brijuni Islands in November 1955 and was able to confirm to Eisenhower that Yugoslavia would keep its distance from the Eastern Bloc.
The overall design of the new KPJ central committee building was changed to give the structure the appearance of an American skyscraper in an effort to contrast it from the Stalinist architecture.
Castle), a ballet pantomime written by Fadil Hadžić and directed by Milan Katić, while the other is Walter and Norbert Neugebauer's cartoon Veliki miting (The Big Meeting).
[99] The period of the purges following the Tito–Stalin split was more extensively covered by Yugoslav writers, playwrights, and filmmakers since 1968 when Dragoslav Mihailović wrote his novel Kad su cvetale tikve (When the Pumpkins Blossomed) and especially in the 1980s.
Particularly notable literary works were written by Puriša Đorđević, Ferdo Godina, Branko Hofman, Antonije Isaković, Dušan Jovanović, Dragan Kalajdžić, Žarko Komanin, Krsto Papić, Slobodan Selenić, Abdulah Sidran, Aleksandar Tišma, and Pavle Ugrinov contributing to what literary and social commentator Predrag Matvejević named the "Goli Otok literature" after the prison.
