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Vol. 78/No. 22      June 9, 2014

 
United fight by Yugoslav toilers
toppled capitalist rule in 1940s
(Books of the Month column)

The Truth About Yugoslavia is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for June. It was published in 1993 to oppose Washington’s military intervention there. From the chapter “The Roots of the Conflict in Yugoslavia,” the excerpt below reviews some of the history of the country up through the popular fight against Nazi occupation, which culminated in a workers and peasants government in 1945. Copyright © 1993 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY GEORGE FYSON
AND JONATHAN SILBERMAN
 
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.

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. …

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 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. …

[T]he 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 [Ivan] 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.  
 
 
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