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Yugoslavia Nonalignment and Yugoslav-Soviet Rapprochement
Yugoslav-Soviet relations showed signs of new life soon after
Stalin died in March 1953. In an unprecedented gesture, Nikita
Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, visited Tito in Belgrade in 1955. Khrushchev expressed the
regrets of the Soviet party for the rift, although he did not
blame it on Stalin directly. Tito rejected this explanation, and
after formal discussions the Yugoslav and Soviet leaders decided
to resume only state relations. In the final communique of the
meeting, known as the Belgrade Declaration, the Soviet Union
acknowledged the right of individual socialist countries to
follow their own path toward socialism.
The Yugoslav and Soviet parties restored relations in 1956,
and at the Soviet Communist Party's Twentieth Congress,
Khrushchev blasted Stalin for his "shameful role" in the
Yugoslav-Soviet estrangement. After a visit to the Soviet Union
in June that deepened the rapprochement, Tito entertained hopes
that all of Eastern Europe would adopt some version of
Yugoslavia's model for socialist development. Movement toward
liberalization in the Soviet bloc, however, ground to a halt with
the 1956 Hungarian revolution and the Soviet invasion that
crushed it. Yugoslav-Hungarian relations cooled after the
execution of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian revolutionary leader who
had taken asylum in the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest.
Yugoslav-Soviet relations were unstable in the years following
the Hungarian invasion, but by 1961 they had entered a period of
detente.
Nonalignment became the keystone of Yugoslavia's foreign
policy in the 1950s. While isolated from the Great Powers,
Yugoslavia strove to forge strong ties with Third World countries
similarly interested in avoiding an alliance with East or West
and the hard choice between communism and capitalism. Tito found
common ground with Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser and
India's prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and they worked together
to organize a movement of Third World nations whose collective
statements on international issues would carry greater weight
than their individual voices. In 1961 Belgrade hosted the first
major conference of the world's nonaligned nations. Tito used the
prestige gained from the meeting and from his denunciations of
neocolonialism to enhance the leverage gained by positioning
Yugoslavia between East and West.
Data as of December 1990
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