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Yugoslavia Breaking with the Soviet Union
Several years before World War II, Tito had survived Josef
Stalin's purge of Yugoslav communists in the Soviet Union. In
fact, Stalin had sent him back to Yugoslavia to reinvigorate the
party there. After the war, Tito was able to unite the country
because his leadership of the
Partisan (see Glossary) forces
against the Nazis had made him a charismatic national hero and
put his Communist Party in a position to assume power. Under
Tito's patronage, an entire generation of wartime
Partisans (see Glossary) became the postwar ruling class of Yugoslavia.
In 1948 Yugoslavia received international attention as the
first country to break from Stalin's monolithic communist bloc,
and the country subsequently maintained an independent foreign
policy that made it a prototypical postwar "nonaligned nation."
Shortly after his break with Stalin, Tito began a process of
guaranteeing political equality to the constituent republics. At
that time, Tito deemed a degree of regional autonomy necessary to
maintain his own internal political support, because the external
backing of the communist bloc no longer provided legitimacy to
his regime.
Tito's first constitution (1946) was modeled on the Soviet
constitution. This constitution included direct Communist Party
control over all aspects of state activity, no recognition of the
constituent republics as political entities, and no stipulation
of individual civil liberties. Tito refused to make his country
fully subservient to the Soviet bloc, however, and in 1948 Stalin
ejected Yugoslavia from the
Cominform (Communist Information
Bureau--see Glossary). From that time, Tito fashioned an
independent political leadership that soon moved away from the
rigid state domination of Stalinism.
The Sixth Communist Party Congress (1952) was a watershed of
Yugoslav political change, driven primarily by the need to prove
that Yugoslavia could create a form of socialism superior to the
Stalinist version from which it had recently split. In that
meeting, liberal forces led by Milovan Djilas (a long-time close
adviser of Tito) created a constitution that partially separated
party and state political functions and restored some political
rights to the constituent republics and some civil rights to
individuals. At that time, constitutional foundations were also
built for workers' control over enterprises and expanded local
government power. The Federal People's Assembly established by
the 1953 constitution contained two houses--a Federal Chamber,
directly representing the regions, and a Chamber of Producers,
representing economic enterprises and worker groups. The federal
government executive branch (the Federal Executive Council, FEC)
included only the five ministries dealing with national affairs
and foreign policy. Foreign policy became the most important
function of the FEC. The Communist Party retained exclusive
political control, based on the Leninist credo that the state
bureaucracy would wither away, and that a multiparty system would
only bring more cumbersome bureaucratic institutions.
Through the remainder of the 1950s, the economic
decentralization of the 1953 constitution increased friction
among the republics, which sought advantages in national
allocation and resource redistribution policy. By 1960 this
friction generated a new wave of constitutional change, aimed at
preserving regional autonomy while restoring economic policy
decisions to the federal level.
Data as of December 1990
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