Workers World, Vol. 22, No. 8
February 19 – The whole range of issues which caused the split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union should be reviewed in the light of the totality of objective world relationships which emerged during the Second World War and have continued to develop in a variety of different forms to this very day.
It would be entirely sterile and utterly pedantic to review each of the basic contentions of the Soviet and Yugoslav side of the controversy without taking into account the enormous influence of the Second World War and the divergent positions of Allied imperialism, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and the national liberation movements, particularly those in Eastern Europe, on the other hand.
It is often forgotten, and more often frequently concealed, that the Soviet Union and the national liberation movements which sprang up throughout all Eastern Europe (and also the anti-fascist resistance movement in the West) had to conduct a virtual two-front war. On the one hand, they had to conduct the major, fundamental struggle against the Nazi fascist war machine.
On the other hand, they had to conduct a political struggle within the strict limitations of the alliance with U.S.-Anglo-French imperialism. The latter was most deeply concerned with securing the restoration of the reactionary bourgeois regimes in Eastern Europe and with most stubbornly resisting and trying to prevent the emergence of socialist governments following the crushing Soviet victory over the Nazi fascist invaders.
This is one of the most important points that must be borne in mind in any attempt at evaluating the crisis in Yugoslav-Soviet relations which finally culminated in the split of 1948.
The Allied imperialists had not changed their fundamental approach to the Soviet Union as a result of the war. Their basic attitude, given the changed circumstances, was about the same as it had been before the war. Their class antagonism to the Soviet Union and to any emerging socialist government had not altered in the least during the war.
The Munich Pact with Hitler in 1938 was not the result of a psychological aberration of Britain’s Chamberlain or France’s Daladier. It was not a historical accident that these “democratic” allies engineered the Munich Pact with Hitler. It was a logical development given their class position and their anti-Soviet orientation.
The temporary reprieve that the Soviet Union won with its Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in 1939 (at an enormous loss of political prestige and the confidence of huge masses of the working class) proved to be short-lived when Hitler launched his sudden invasion of the Soviet Union.
The long delay in launching the Second Front by the Allies was motivated much less by military considerations than by fears than an earlier launching would materially help the Soviet Union.
It must now be admitted, on the basis of innumerable bourgeois sources, that the U.S. dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki not primarily for military reasons (“to save the lives of our GIs”). Rather it was meant to menace the Soviet Red Army, which was advancing on the Far Eastern front, and also to make a public demonstration of the military prowess of the U.S. Unquestionably this was also calculated to be used as an underlying element of advantage in future negotiations with the USSR.
All this is tremendously relevant to an understanding of the evolution in the relations between the USSR and Yugoslavia if we are to appraise these relations in the context of the objective conditions of the time.
If we examine the Yugoslav-Soviet split with the above in mind it opens up an entirely different perspective on the historical genesis of the struggle. In this regard, it is best to quote the Yugoslavs themselves, particularly, to quote from a book which as Tito’s personal endorsement and was written by one of his close collaborators. (See “Tito” by Vladimir Dedijer, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1953.)
Even before the Yugoslav government was formally established, and the reactionary, royalist elements were driven out, the Anglo-American Air Force during the war carried out deliberately hostile and destructive bombing missions directed against Yugoslavia at a time when the U.S. and Britain already had good reason to know that the Yugoslav Revolution was defeating the Nazi war machine and driving the counter-revolutionaries out of the country.
Thus is was that “the two largest industrial plants build in Yugoslavia with American capital – the Socony Vacuum plant at Slavansky Brod and the electric power plant at Novi Sad – were destroyed by the Anglo-American Air Force.” (Dedijer, p. 308.)
As was customary with some of the Allied governments who were threatened by Hitler’s invasion, the gold in some of the threatened European countries was shipped to the United States for safekeeping. The gold was returned at the end of the war to all the bourgeois governments. But it was not returned to the socialist countries, such as Yugoslavia.
The Yugoslav Ambassador in Washington, Kosan Ovic, said, “We entrusted this gold to the United States to keep it from falling into Hitler’s hands and being used by the enemy against the Allies. I regret to be compelled to say this. Had we allowed Hitler to plunder this gold we should not need today to prove our right to it as we must now, having entrusted it to a friendly Allied state.”
Then, showing how imperialism adds insult to injury, the ambassador said, “Now Yugoslavia is required to pay in gold 100 percent of the value of the industrial plants destroyed by the Anglo-American Air Force during the war.”
This is only one small sample of the pressure exerted upon Yugoslavia in the years immediately preceding the split. Yugoslavia’s gold at that time was worth $42 million. But by the standards of the time that was a great deal of money, especially for a poor country that had been ruined by Nazi occupation and the ensuing civil war.
The U.S. claim was somewhat reduced because of nationalizations. Nevertheless, Borda, the organ of the Yugoslav government, wrote at the time in angry but diplomatic terms, “Our public opinion interprets this attitude of the American government as a direct attempt to hamper the construction of New Yugoslavia. ... Our public opinion condemns this latest injustice which is being done us by Wall Street diplomacy and vigorously demands the return of property belonging to the people of Yugoslavia which no one has the right to speculate for inadmissible extortionate purposes.”
We quote this from Dedijer’s book, which gives the Yugoslav side of the dispute with the USSR and which is extremely tendentious and one-sided. Nevertheless, Dedijer has had to admit some examples of the extreme pressure exerted by U.S. imperialism in the years prior to the split and particularly the months leading up to the split and also thereafter.
The economic war waged by the U.S. against Yugoslavia, the other Eastern European countries, and of course the USSR, is well illustrated by this singularly vivid example with respect to trying to steal the Yugoslav treasury’s gold. It is only one of many outrages characteristic of a war of economic strangulation. However, it is the military harassment and intimidation which was more direct and more provocative.
Dedijer tells us that American planes soon began the harassment of the Yugoslav government by getting “planes by the squadron to fly over Yugoslav territory. This was a serious violation of our sovereignty and on several occasions Tito had personally spoken in the National Assembly advising cessation of this practice.” But to no avail.
Flagrant intrusions by U.S. imperialism into the air space of socialist countries took place both before the split between Yugoslavia and the USSR, as well as afterwards. They were – and are – a constant source of tension between imperialism and the socialist countries.
Dedijer continues: “The department of the then-Ministry of National Defense had on several occasions vainly drawn the attention of the military and air force attachés of the U.S. to these cases.” But again to no avail.
“Owing to the systematic character which these flights had assumed, violating the sovereignty of Yugoslav territory, the Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army personally sent a letter to the U.S. military attaché warning him of the seriousness of these cases.” The imperialist pressure nevertheless continued.
“No reply from the competent American military authorities came and the unauthorized flights continued.” On the contrary, they became more frequent.
“Between July 16 and Aug. 8,” according to Dedijer, “as many as 172 planes – among them 87 bombers, 40 fighters, and 45 transports – flew over Yugoslav territory without authorization. ... The Yugoslav Foreign Ministry had presented a dozen or so notes protesting these flagrant violations of Yugoslav sovereignty.”
Finally, Tito himself was forced to speak up in Parliament asking that this violation of Yugoslav territorial sovereignty stop. Again it was of no avail. The harassment continued and unauthorized flying over Yugoslav territory continued unabated.
Such was the military aspect of imperialist pressure on the Yugoslav government. It was inevitable that one of the planes would be shot down causing the death of its crew. But planes continued to fly over Yugoslav territory as part and parcel of the severe imperialist pressure.
Thus, according to Dedijer, “During the period from Aug. 10 to Aug. 20 a total of 110 Anglo-American planes flew over Yugoslav territory of which 34 were fighters, 57 bombers, 19 transports and unidentified planes. ... On an average, ten military planes violated Yugoslav territory during these 11 days, combat planes among them averaging 8.3.”
All manner of pressure, Dedijer tells us, intensified. The pressure went so far that even “the bulk of Yugoslavia’s river shipping, which the Hitlerites had removed to Germany, was deliberately held back although these vessels were indispensable to Yugoslavia.”
Dedijer’s final comment on this unrestrained campaign of military and economic pressure by the U.S. and its Western imperialist allies is summed up in this terse sentence: “Such were Yugoslavia’s relations with Western countries up to 1948.”
The imperialist bourgeoisie has for the last 30 years propagandized world public opinion and has carefully cultivated the bogus fear that the Soviet Union posed a military threat to Yugoslavia and might at any time seek to invade it. This line of propaganda has been consistently pursued by all the imperialist countries almost since the day of the breakup of the fraternal relationship between the USSR and Yugoslavia. Undoubtedly they will, at this appropriate moment, attempt a review of the origins of the Yugoslav-Soviet split in their usual tendentious way.
In their view, the entire struggle was simply an effort by the Yugoslav government to free itself from the domination of the Soviet Union. It was simply and plainly a struggle for “independence from Soviet hegemony” – ideologically, as well as politically, economically, and militarily.
If we examine the imperialist press over the last three decades since the split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, or the press of the social-democratic and left bourgeois allies, we see that the only relationship they are concerned with is how far Yugoslav society and the Yugoslav government, in particular, have moved away from the Soviet model. What they really mean is how far Yugoslavia has moved in the direction of capitalism.
More often than not the press is full of commendatory articles in praise of Tito’s “defiance of Moscow” and how Tito’s “agility” and “deftness” in diplomacy and in balancing East against West has made Yugoslavia a “strong, fiercely independent country” – a country which imperialism is so eager to defend.
But above everything else, the cause of the split is presented in all the contemporary annals of imperialist historiography as due to the propensity of the Soviet Union, both during Stalin’s time and after, for domination and conformity to Soviet norms of conduct.
In making an appraisal of the split from a revolutionary Marxist point of view, we, of necessity, are first dealing with what Marxists have always considered to be the subjective factor of history – the internal struggle in the international working class and communist movement as it existed at the time in the relationship between the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and other socialist countries and parties.
However, it is the totality of relationships between the two world systems which constitutes the objective factor, and this is the primary force of history.
In the years immediately after the Second World War, and up to and including the Korean War, the imperialist system was the predominant mode of production in the world. This meant that imperialism could exercise political, diplomatic, and military force sufficient to encircle the socialist countries, isolate some politically and diplomatically, strangle others economically, and continue a relentless, never-ending war of subversion and counter-revolutionary attempts at destabilization, not to speak of open war against others.
While imperialism has been severely restricted since the Second World War by the onrush of world historic revolutionary victories, it nevertheless still remains the primary mode of production in the world.
The examples that we have quoted from Dedijer’s book are significant because they attest to the objective factors which operated as a severe and unrelenting pressure on Yugoslavia by U.S. imperialism. They are also significant because they are testified to by Tito even after the split.
Dedijer, however, avoids in his book the far more formidable and broader issues which hovered over not only Yugoslavia but primarily the Soviet Union and all the other socialist countries.
For instance, he completely omits any reference whatever to the commencement of the Cold War and how it all began with virtual demands by the Allied imperialists to “liberate” all of Eastern Europe and return it on a silver platter to the tender mercies of U.S.-Anglo-French imperialism.
No reference whatever is made to Churchill’s war cry made at Fulton, Missouri, at the very time when most of the critical issues between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were under debate. Dedijer doesn’t deal with the significance this had in galvanizing the world imperialist bourgeoisie in its efforts to turn back the tide of socialism on the European continent.
The follow up was made by the notorious call to “contain” the Soviet Union – meaning to roll back the tide of socialism – by the infamous “X” article in Foreign Affairs written at the behest of the State Department by George Kennan. This subsequently became the fundamental policy of the U.S. as proclaimed in the notorious Truman Doctrine.
The purpose of the Truman Doctrine, which is given the scantiest mention in Dedijer’s book, was to destroy the national liberation movement of Greece and to exert the severest pressure on Yugoslavia, the other socialist countries in Eastern Europe, and above all the Soviet Union to stop aiding the Greek liberation movement.
There is no account of this aspect of the Greek struggle given in Dedijer’s book, except dubious quotations to illustrate Stalin’s willingness to abandon the Greek struggle when presumably the Yugoslavs under Tito were willing to continue the fight. Nevertheless, it was Tito who closed the border between Greece and Yugoslavia, which delivered the fatal body blow to the Greek liberation struggle. Most bourgeois accounts in the U.S., including Walter Lippman’s and many others, date the closing of the Greek-Yugoslav border as signifying the virtual end of the Greek resistance movement.
The Acheson-Marshall-Truman administration attempted to put over the so-called Marshall Plan over all of Europe not only because it was a recovery plan to resuscitate West European capitalism. It was also a carrot-and-stick policy directed to trying to wean away those East European regimes which had not firmly established themselves as yet (they were still “People’s Democracies”). It was an attempt to bring them into the capitalist orbit and to try to sabotage politically, strangle economically, and isolate diplomatically those who resisted the blandishments of the Marshall Plan.
In other words, Dedijer just gives sufficient material to cover the tendentious character of his anti-Soviet thesis. Of course, there is a great, great deal about the relationship of the Soviet Union under the Stalin leadership, not only with Yugoslavia but with other socialist states and parties generally, that needs to be said.
What is most characteristic of the Titoist approach is the complete denial of the overall objective basis of the entire course of the struggle, of which relentless imperialist pressure is the fundamental factor. Only after having uncovered the objective world relationships as the context in which the Yugoslav-Soviet split took place is it possible to examine the ideological and political issues as they were enunciated during that period and for years thereafter.
Last updated: 11 May 2026