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Yugoslavia Communist Takeover and Consolidation
The communists under Tito emerged from the war as sole rulers
of Yugoslavia, without major Soviet assistance. King Petar
surrendered his powers to a three-member regency in late 1944,
and under Allied pressure Tito and Subasic agreed to merge their
governments. On March 7, 1945, a single provisional Yugoslav
government took office with Tito as prime minister and war
minister, Subasic in charge of foreign affairs, and Tito
supporters occupying almost all cabinet posts. A
communist-dominated Provisional Assembly convened in August, and
the government held elections to choose a Constituent Assembly in
November. New election laws barred alleged wartime collaborators
from voting and all candidates had to be nominated by the
communist-controlled People's Front, the descendant of the
wartime People's Liberation Front that encompassed all
non-collaborationist political parties and organizations. The
police harassed noncommunist politicians and suppressed their
newspapers during the election campaign. Subasic and other
non-communist ministers resigned in protest, while the Serbian
Radicals, the Croatian Peasant Party, and other parties boycotted
the election. People's Front candidates won 90 percent of the
vote.
The newly elected Constituent Assembly dissolved the monarchy
and established the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia on
November 29, 1945. Two months later, it adopted a Soviet-style
constitution that provided for a federation of six republics
under a strong central government. In an effort to prevent
Serbian domination of the new state, the regime made separate
republics of Montenegro and Macedonia and created within Serbia
itself an ethnically mixed Autonomous Province of Vojvodina and a
mostly Albanian Autonomous Region of Kosovo. At a later date, the
regime further divided Serbian territory by recognizing three
"nations," the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, in an attempt to
overcome competing Serbian and Croatian claims to that republic.
The constitution established a rubber-stamp Federal Assembly and
a presidential council to administer the federal government. It
also included restricted wording on the inviolability of the
home, the right to work, freedom of speech, association, and
religion, and other rights. Tito headed the party, government,
and armed forces; his party functionaries oversaw the industries
and supervised republican and local officials.
Tito's government repaired wartime damage, instituted land
reform, and established a Soviet-style economic system. United
Nations deliveries of supplies prevented starvation and contagion
but did not solve the fundamental problem of rural poverty. In
August 1945, the regime seized remaining large and medium-size
land holdings along with property belonging to banks, churches,
monasteries, absentee landlords, private companies, and the
expelled German minority. It gave half the land to peasants and
allocated the rest to state-owned enterprises. The authorities
postponed forced collectivization but required peasants to sell
any surplus to the state at below-market prices. Peasants
received incentives to join newly founded state and cooperative
farms. The Communists quickly implemented the Stalinist model for
rapid industrial development; by 1948 they had nationalized
virtually all the country's wealth except privately held land.
State planners set wages and prices and compiled a grandiose
five-year plan that emphasized exploitation of domestic raw
materials, development of heavy industry, and economic growth in
underdeveloped regions. The Yugoslavs relied on tax and price
policies, reparations, Soviet credits, and export of foodstuffs,
timber, mineral, and metal exports to generate capital. They
redirected the bulk of their trade toward the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe
(see Application of Stalinist Economics
, ch. 3).
Between 1945 and 1948, the government punished wartime
collaborators. British forces in Austria captured Ustase
members and Croatian and Slovenian collaborators along with
innocent refugees. These were returned to Yugoslavia, where
Partisans summarily executed thousands of innocent and guilty
prisoners. The regime also imprisoned thousands of Cetnici
and executed Mihajlovic and other Cetnik leaders as
collaborators after a show trial in 1946.
The Communists often used collaboration charges to stifle
political and religious opposition, as well as economic and
social initiatives. The Roman Catholic Church bitterly opposed
the new order. After the war, the authorities executed over 200
priests and nuns charged with participating in Ustase
atrocities. Archbishop Stepinac protested government excesses and
the secularization of education, institution of civil marriage,
and confiscation of church lands. In September 1946, the regime
sentenced him to imprisonment for sixteen years for complicity
with the Pavelic government. He served five years before the
regime released him. Yugoslav-Vatican relations deteriorated
during the imprisonment of Stepinac, and the government severed
them in 1952 when Pope Pius XII named Stepinac a cardinal. The
authorities permitted the funeral and burial of Stepinac in
Zagreb in 1960, after which Yugoslav-Vatican relations gradually
improved until diplomatic relations were reestablished in 1970.
Data as of December 1990
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