Yugoslavia was an economically backward country at the time of the revolution. Indeed the Balkans, which comprise Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia, were the most backward part of Europe. The region accounted for just 2.5 percent of European industrial production, most of this closely connected with agriculture--milling, wine-pressing, and manufacture of vegetable oils. About 80 percent of the Yugoslav population of 16 million were peasants, 1 million of whom were landless and worked as migratory, seasonal farm workers.

The land was in the hands of a few large landowners, and the peasantry was oppressed by the hangovers of semifeudal conditions onto which the harshest of capitalist social relations had been grafted. Agricultural taxes in the Balkans were among the highest in the world. The mortgage and loan debts of the peasants were enormous. Interest rates for seed and tools in the region ran up to 80 percent. In some areas the peasants were still engaged in subsistence farming. The modern working class numbered at most 100,000.

Yugoslavia was dominated by foreign capital, first British and French, and then by growing German interests in the 1920s and 1930s. It was effectively a semicolony of these European imperialist powers, with its economic and social development held back in their interests.

Yugoslavia was united as a country at the end of World War I with the coming together of six republics under the Serbian monarchy. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, established in 1918, took the name Yugoslavia in 1929. When World War II opened, there was little or no all-Yugoslav industrial infrastructure. Within this framework, the north and west were relatively more modern and advanced, the south more backward.

The legacy of colonial domination by the "European" Austro-Hungarian Empire or by the "Asian" Ottoman Empire--as the bourgeois press insists on designating these powers--left its mark in the form of different languages and alphabets, ethnic origins, and religions. Serbia, home of the oppressive Karageorgevich monarchy, dominated Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Vojvodina. National oppression was enshrined in law. There was no separation between the state and the church--between the state and the hierarchy of the Serbian-based Orthodox Church of Yugoslavia, that is.

The workers’ movement was weak, beset by both the objective backwardness of the country and harsh repression. Many political oppositionists were imprisoned; some were executed.  
 
Impact of 1917 Bolshevik revolution
Despite the weakness of the organized Communist Party and workers’ movement, the 1917 Russian revolution had great prestige there. Yugoslav peasants and youth were attracted by the revolution’s agrarian reform and by its broader democratic and social conquests. In the brief democratic interlude following the country’s formation after World War I, the Communist Party grew rapidly. By 1920 it had 60,000 members and in the elections of that year the party came in third, winning 12 percent of the vote. But a period of severe repression followed. By the outbreak of World War II, the Communist Party--which was underground or semilegal from 1921 onward, and whose leadership spent many years out of the country--numbered about 12,000, with 30,000 in the Communist youth organization. It had also gone through a qualitative political transformation through its adherence to the course of the Stalin-led Communist International.

This was the general condition of Yugoslavia at the outbreak of World War II. In April 1941 the Axis powers invaded--primarily German troops, assisted by Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian forces. The Axis occupation won the support of the Yugoslav landowners and capitalists in their majority; the rise of German imperialist domination had ensured their pro-Berlin orientation.

Prior to the Axis invasion, the Karageorgevich monarchy had concluded an agreement with Hitler. Forces within the army officer corps then ousted the government in a coup. The king fled, along with the "royal purse." The new government, which proclaimed neutrality, organized no resistance to the Axis forces that soon crossed its borders. After eleven days, including the horrific bombing of Belgrade (which ranks alongside the devastation of Coventry and Dresden), the German occupation was complete.

In the Croatian capital of Zagreb a fascist regime under nationalist colors, the Ustashi, was established. It actively collaborated with the occupation forces, carrying out mass killings of Gypsies, Jews, and Serbs.

The Serbian monarchy set up shop in Britain. Pro-monarchy forces, known as Chetniks, established a guerrilla operation under the royalist general Draza Mihailovic. They received financial and military aid from the Allied powers--the governments of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union.

The principal opposition to the occupying forces was the armed Partisans. Led by the Yugoslav Communist Party, the Partisan movement was a national liberation army. It was originally set up to harass the occupying forces, not to launch an insurrectionary struggle. This was in line with dictates from the Stalin regime in Moscow, which had recognized the occupation administration and was looking to avert a German invasion of the Soviet Union.

The Yugoslav party, now headed by the Croatian-born Josip Broz Tito, followed Moscow’s instructions, establishing small armed units at first. It had no intention then to take power, nor any idea that within four years it would be in power.  
 
Partisans resist imperialist occupation
But the armed resistance to both the homegrown and occupying fascist forces proved tremendously popular, and the peasant masses pressed for broader social goals. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin gave the go-ahead to the Partisans to organize a military struggle, calling on them to act jointly with Mihailovic’s Chetniks and all forces opposed to the occupation.

Workers and peasants poured into the ranks of the Partisans, who waged a courageous struggle that tied down thirty-three Axis divisions--some 500,000 troops. The fight was bitter and hard: nearly two million Yugoslavs, more than a tenth of the population, died in the war.

In the course of the successful struggle, popular committees were elected to administer liberated zones, organizing education, health care, and munitions production. Peasants seized the land of landowners who had fled or collaborated with the occupying armies. As liberated zones became linked, a newspaper began to be published three times a week, a railway system was organized, and a mail system established. In November 1942 a broad national body based on elected representatives of the popular committees was established--the Anti-Fascist Council of People’s Liberation, or AVNOJ (pronounced Avnoy).

A year later, in November 1943, AVNOJ proclaimed a provisional government and announced that the king could not return. At the same time, at the meeting of U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in Tehran, the Allied powers first agreed that influence in postwar Yugoslavia would be shared equally between the imperialist allies and Moscow.

By late 1942 the Partisans numbered 150,000. By the end of 1943 they had grown to 300,000, and by the end of the war they were effectively a full-fledged army numbering 800,000.

The Partisans took on the character of a mass social movement. Without aid from any outside source, the movement won working people from every nationality. This included substantial recruitment of prisoners of war and deserters from the German, Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian armies, a recruitment policy that became the subject of sharp criticism from Moscow.

The Partisans took steps to mobilize women in the struggle, organizing two national conferences for this purpose. The predominance of young fighters was reflected in the peasants’ description of the armed Partisan detachments as "the youth."

The big majority of fighters were peasants, including in the Proletarian Brigades, which formed the backbone of the Partisan army. Many workers from the cities joined the brigades and other Partisan units as well. The Proletarian Brigades were the first fighting units that were not restricted to operations in a particular region.  
 
Unite toilers from every nationality
In uniting the toilers from every nationality behind the antifascist struggle, the Partisans advanced a program that struck at the heart of national privilege and went a long way to overcoming national enmities. It called for equality and mutual respect for all nationalities and opposed chauvinism and the domination of one nation over others.

The Partisans combined this with the objective of implementing social and economic advances in the interests of working people. They also looked beyond old "Yugoslavia" and presented the perspective of a broader Balkan federation.

The success of this approach in uniting working people in the Partisan movement confirmed in life that defense of national rights and opposition to national privilege are not the path toward nationalism, but the only road to unite the working class in the internationalist fight for socialism.

This stance allowed the Partisans to win over masses of peasants and workers from the murderous Croatian fascists and Serbian nationalist forces. In the town of Foca in Bosnia, for example, Ustashi forces in May 1941 killed all residents of Serbian origin who had not fled. Six months later a Partisan unit, made up of toilers of Serbian and Croatian nationality, seized the city. They tried and executed Ustashi members who were guilty of these crimes but did not take action against anyone on the basis of their nationality. Then the capitalist-led Chetniks defeated the Partisans and captured the town. They, in turn, killed everyone of Croatian origin they could round up.

When the "Big Three"--London, Washington, and the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union--demanded the restoration of the monarchy at the end of the war, Tito agreed in early 1945 to a joint government responsible to a regency--a representative of the crown--whose members would be approved by the national committee of the AVNOJ. The AVNOJ would have full legislative powers until a constituent assembly convened to make final decisions. A joint government of Tito and Ivan Subasic, prime minister of the royal government-in-exile in London, was established in March 1945.  
 
Overthrow of capitalist rule
At the same time, the revolutionary mobilization by the Partisans encroached on capitalist property relations more and more. A Partisan decree of November 24, 1944, ordered the confiscation of the property of occupiers, including extensive German capital, and their Yugoslav collaborators. This amounted to 80 percent of industry, most banks, and almost all large commercial enterprises. The subsequent nationalization law of December 1946 largely registered an already existing fact.

The new government also enacted a massive land reform in August 1945. It confiscated the property of the great landowners without compensation and put 95 percent of cultivated land into the hands of working peasants.

The government instituted steps toward economic planning, including a state monopoly of foreign trade. It took measures that during the initial years of the revolution substantially narrowed the gap between different parts of the country.

This increasingly anticapitalist course made clear that Subasic and the four other representatives of the capitalists and landed nobility had no real sway in the government. It was acting as a workers’ and peasants’ government on the momentum of the revolutionary struggle. Power was in the hands of the Communist Party, the leading force in the AVNOJ.

The capitalist figures resigned over the course of 1945, including Subasic. In the fall of 1945, the monarchy was abolished--implementing the AVNOJ decision of two years earlier--and the capitalist parties boycotted the November 11 elections to the constituent assembly because they knew they would be heavily defeated. The new Federal People’s Republic was installed on November 29 and the new constitution adopted on January 31, 1946.

In the course of implementing these anticapitalist measures, and propelled by the mobilizations of workers and peasants that went along with them, a workers’ state was established in Yugoslavia--a state based on the workers’ successful conquest of state property in the basic means of production, a thoroughgoing land reform, economic planning, and a state monopoly of foreign trade.
 
 
Related article:
Workers in Yugoslavia press their demands  
 
 
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