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Yugoslavia The Soviet Union
Yugoslav relations with the Soviet Union remained stable in
the decade after Tito's death. Through the mid-1980s, Yugoslav
policy toward the Soviet Union was partly based on the
possibility that one side in an internal Yugoslav ethnic conflict
might invite the Soviet Union to intervene, providing a pretext
for restoring Yugoslavia to the Warsaw Pact. The 1948 rift with
the Soviet Union was repaired by the Belgrade Declaration of
1955, in which the Soviet Union conceded the right of other
socialist countries to interpret Marxism in their own way. But in
the ensuing three decades, covert Soviet contacts with illegal
nationalist and pro-Soviet groups in Yugoslavia kept alive the
fear that the Soviets might intervene
(see Threat Perception
, ch.
5).
As a leader of the nonaligned movement, Tito often criticized
Soviet policy. His stand against the Czechoslovak invasion of
1968 caused friction, and relations remained uneven throughout
the 1970s. That decade culminated in a strong Yugoslav
condemnation of the Afghan invasion in 1979. But in the 1980s,
official Yugoslav policy favored political and economic
rapprochement, and the Soviet Union remained the country's
largest trading partner throughout the period
(see Trading Partners
, ch. 3). In that decade, the two countries remained
ideological rivals in the socialist world, with Afghanistan as
the chief subject of Yugoslav polemics against Soviet policy. In
1988 Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Defense Minister
Dmitrii Yazov made official visits to reassure the Yugoslavs of
continued military and political stability between the two
countries. The fall of East European communist governments in
1989 eased the threat that the Soviet Union would invade
Yugoslavia under any circumstances and provided an opportunity to
shift the emphasis of Yugoslav trade toward the West.
Data as of December 1990
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