Yugoslavia, Relations with

YUGOSLAVIA, RELATIONS WITH

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was proclaimed on December 1, 1918, and was renamed Yugoslavia on October 3, 1929 by Alexander Karadjordjevic. The creation of the new enlarged South Slav state and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia together ruptured the once-strong bonds between Russia and the South Slav lands, especially Serbia.

Russian support for Serbia in the summer of 1914 had helped precipitate World War I, which destroyed the Romanov dynasty and eventually brought the Bolsheviks to power. Like its neighbors,

the new Yugoslav state was fiercely anticommunist. In 1920 and 1921 the kingdom joined Romania and Czechoslovakia in a series of bilateral pacts that came to be known as the Little Entente. The alliance was primarily aimed at thwarting Hungarian irredentism (one country's claim to territories ruled or governed by others based on ethnic, cultural, or historic ties), since the former kingdom of Hungary had lost approximately 70 percent of its prewar territory. The Little Entente also served as part of France's eastern security system designed to contain both Germany and Bolshevik Russia. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, relations between Moscow and Belgrade were but a shadow of that which had preceded World War I. Not only was Yugoslavia a supporter of the postwar settlements that had aggrandized its territory, but it also sought to isolate the Bolshevik revolution; moreover, it had little trade with the new Soviet state, in part because prewar relations between St. Petersburg and Belgrade had been based almost entirely on diplomatic and cultural rather than economic links. In addition, the rise of Nazi Germany left much of Yugoslav trade within the Third Reich's orbit.

In 1941 Germany occupied Yugoslavia. Two groups, the Chetniks, led by Dra a Mihailovic, and the Partisans, under Josip Broz Tito, a Moscow-trained communist, fought the Germans and at the same time vied for supremacy within Yugoslavia. Although Tito emerged victorious and Stalin's so-called Percentages Agreement with Winston Churchill gave Moscow 50 percent influence in Yugoslavia, the Red Army had not occupied the country, and thus the Soviet Union was unable to influence developments there as it could in other areas of central and southeastern Europe. Tito's popularity and mass following stood in contrast to the situation in the other countries of the future "bloc," where there were at best small native communist parties dominated by the Soviet Union.

As a result, the communist state created in Yugoslavia in 1946 was independent of Soviet stew-ardship even though its constitution was initially modeled on the Soviet constitution. From the outset, Tito pursued an independent domestic policy and an aggressive foreign one. His ambitions threatened both Stalin's leadership (by his promotion of national communist movements) and also peace in Europe (by such actions as the shooting down of American planes during the Trieste Affair, the Italian-Yugoslav border dispute, and his support for the communists in the Greek Civil War). When Tito attempted to create a separate customs union with Bulgaria without consulting the Soviet Union beforehand, and refused to abandon the effort as Stalin demanded, a break, usually referred to as the Tito-Stalin split, quickly followed.

On June 28, 1948, the Cominform, the umbrella communist propaganda organ directed by Moscow, expelled Yugoslavia, charging Tito with betraying the international communist movement. Stalin hoped that this would force Yugoslavia to submit to Soviet leadership, but he miscalculated. Instead, Tito turned to a West that was all too willing to forget his ideology and past actions and provide assistance to enable Yugoslavia to pursue its own command economy and an independent diplomatic and political stance that served as a counterforce to the Soviet leader. Yugoslavia, for example, supported the United Nations resolution authorizing resistance to the invasion of South Korea in June 1950. Tito soon became one of the founders of the nonaligned movement, which held its first conference in Belgrade in 1961.

Stalin's death in 1953 opened the door for a partial rapprochement with Belgrade. Issues such as navigation and trade along the Danube River were resolved, but the ideological rift never entirely healed. In May 1955 Nikita Khrushchev visited Belgrade, and the following year Tito visited to Moscow, and the Cominform, which dissolved in April 1956, renounced its earlier condemnations. Despite seemingly cordial relations, however, the strains between Moscow and Belgrade persisted, especially after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, which saw the independent-minded Hungarian revolt crushed, and the arrest and subsequent murder of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian prime minister, who had taken refuge in the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest from 1956 until 1958. In 1957 Tito angered Moscow by refusing to sign a declaration commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

In the wake of the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s, another reconciliation took place, most notably in the area of trade. However, Yugoslavia continued to develop economic ties with western Europe, as witnessed by the hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs who went west for employment as well as by western investment in Yugoslavia. For Belgrade, improved relations with Moscow were but one part of a foreign policy that also looked to the West (despite anti-American rhetoric), China (after a reconciliation in the early 1970s), and the Third World for influence and economic advantages. Soviet leaders in turn realized that the ideological squabble with Belgrade served little purpose.

The death of Tito in 1980 began the fracturing of a Yugoslav state strained by economic problems and national resentments, and by 1990 the country fragmented. Similarly, the Soviet Union lost its empire in eastern Europe in 1989, and by 1991 the Soviet Union itself dissolved.

The break-up of the two states ironically brought both of them full circle. During the nineteenth century, Russia had been the sole great power supporter of Serbia. Although a "Yugoslavia" continued to exist after 1990, the name denoted a rump state that comprised only Serbia and Montenegro. As the wars in the former Yugoslavia raged, Moscow again served as Belgrade's principal benefactor, citing historical, religious, and cultural ties. From military aid to peacekeeping in the wake of Slobodan Milosevic's failed attempt to promote Serb authority through the brutal suppression of the Albanian Kosovars, Russia had regained an influence in Belgrade that it had not seen since the early days of World War I.

See also: balkan wars; communist bloc; communist information bureau; montenegro, relations with; serbia, relations with

bibliography

Djordjevic, Dimitrije. (1992). "The Yugoslav Phenomenon." In The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, ed. Joseph Held. New York: Columbia University Press.

Glenny, Misha. (2000). The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804–1999. New York: Viking Penguin.

Hupchick, Dennis P. (2002). The Balkans: From Constantinople to Communism. New York: Palgrave.

Jelavich, Barbara. (1974). St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1814–1974. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Rothschild, Joseph, and Wingfield, Nancy M. (2000). Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II. 3rd edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Richard Frucht