The Search for a Communist Legitimacy: Tito's Yugoslavia Author: Robert Edward Niebuhr Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/1953 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2008 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of History THE SEARCH FOR A COMMUNIST LEGITIMACY: TITO’S YUGOSLAVIA a dissertation by ROBERT EDWARD NIEBUHR submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December, 2008 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE ABSTRACT . iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS . v NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND TERMS . vi INTRODUCTION . 1 1 A STRUGGLE FOR THE HEARTS AND MINDS: IDEOLOGY AND YUGOSLAVIA’S THIRD WAY TO PARADISE . 26 2 NONALIGNMENT: YUGOSLAVIA’S ANSWER TO BLOC POLITICS . 74 3 POLITICS OF FEAR AND TOTAL NATIONAL DEFENSE . 133 4 TITO’S TWILIGHT AND THE FEAR OF UNRAVELING . 180 5 CONCLUSION: YUGOSLAVIA AND THE LEGACY OF THE COLD WAR . 245 EPILOGUE: THE TRIUMPH OF FEAR. 254 APPENDIX A: LIST OF KEY LCY OFFICIALS, 1958 . 272 APPENDIX B: ETHNIC COMPOSITION OF JNA, 1963 . 274 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 275 INDEX . 289 © copyright by ROBERT EDWARD NIEBUHR 2008 iii ABSTRACT THE SEARCH FOR A COMMUNIST LEGITIMACY: TITO’S YUGOSLAVIA ROBERT EDWARD NIEBUHR Supervised by Larry Wolff Titoist Yugoslavia—the multiethnic state rising out of the chaos of World War II—is a particularly interesting setting to examine the integrity of the modern nation-state and, more specifically, the viability of a distinctly multi-ethnic nation-building project. Much scholarly literature has been devoted to the brutal civil wars that destroyed Yugoslavia during the 1990s with emphasizes on divisive nationalism and dysfunctional politics. But what held Tito’s state together for the preceding forty-six years? In an attempt to understand better what united the stable, multiethnic, and successful Yugoslavia that existed before 1991, this dissertation illuminates the pervasive problem of legitimacy within this larger history. Cast aside and threatened with removal by Stalin’s henchmen after the war, Tito made his revolution a genuine alternative to Soviet control. Because Tito and the ruling elite feared the loss of political power by either foreign aggression or from domestic groups challenging the Communist Party’s (LCY) claim to govern, they fought hard for the reform of Marxism. Furthermore, Yugoslav elites manipulated popular conceptions of a Yugoslav identity as a means to solidify their regime with a unifying and progressive identity. Citing elite perceptions of the Yugoslav system—including key aspects of central institutions such as the LCY and the military— this dissertation attempts to reconcile how leaders of a country that scholars have dismissed as full of national hatreds had constructed a functioning and popular system for so long. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I would like to thank my supervisor, Larry Wolff. His careful critique and analysis of my work over the years was most helpful and his encouraging attitude made such a large project bearable. James Cronin and Timothy Crawford also served as wonderful advisors since my beginning at Boston College. Work in their seminars led to presentations and publications of journal articles, giving me greater experience and confidence in my scholarship. I should also like to thank the history department at Boston College for its generous funding as well as the Graduate Student Association, for awarding me a Research Expense Grant for my archival work in Hungary and Serbia during the summer of 2007. The many helpful archivists made this undertaking possible—a warm thanks to all of them. Dean Candace Hetzner helped find funding for several trips to former Yugoslavia and for that, I am grateful. The Fulbright program deserves appreciation for funding my original research for my Master’s Thesis at Arizona State University. As a Fulbrighter in Croatia, I not only gained tremendous insight into life in Yugoslavia, but also made lasting friendships. Finally, and in some ways most importantly, I would like to thank Mike Chapman, whose dedication to learning and rigorous commentary on writing style stands in a class of its own. I should like to mention some of the people over the years who have worked with me and mentored this and other projects, including, but surely not limited to: Stephen Batalden, Danko Šipka, Thomas Butler, Bernd Scherak, But Dedaj, and Ligia Gómez Franco. Despite all of the good advice throughout my academic career, no one but me is responsible for the flaws of my work. ROBERT NIEBUHR v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS LCY* League of Communists of Yugoslavia JNA/YPA Yugoslav People’s Army TDF Territorial Defense Forces UDB-a Uprava državne bezbednosti (Office of State Security) USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics EU European Union EEC European Economic Community NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization COMINFORM Communist Information Bureau COMINTERN Communist International CSCE Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe *In 1952, the official name of Yugoslavia’s Communist Party (then, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, CPY) changed to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY). Unless otherwise specified, any mention of communists in Yugoslavia refers to the LCY. vi NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND TERMS In his recent translation of Dante’s Inferno, John Ciardi has noted that language is like a musical instrument, and, as such, each language enjoys its own specific logic. Ciardi stated that to unveil the rich language of Dante for English readers, he rejected the notion of word-for-word translation. Instead, “transposition” has replaced the conception of directly correlating words exactly from the original language.1 I agree wholeheartedly with this concept of bringing alive the original text as part of a broader understanding in order to capture better the spirit of the speaker’s language. I have been fortunate to learn Serbo–Croatian—or, today, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin—from native speakers in the United States and in former Yugoslavia; but, in addition, I have been able to share my skills with other language learners. In 2005, I signed onto a project to coauthor with Aida Vidan two beginner-level books on Croatian and Serbian for English speakers. Thanks to insightful commentary by linguists including Wayles Browne at Cornell University and Danko Šipka at Arizona State University, these books represent thorough and user-friendly guides to developing reliable competency in either Croatian or Serbian. Moreover, I am thankful to Patricia Chaput—language director of the Slavic Department at Harvard—for having invited me to teach Bosnian–Croatian–Serbian (BCS) for a semester at the introductory and intermediate levels. My students gave great feedback on the language books (then in draft form) and helped me to develop further my own language and teaching skills. To all of them, I am grateful. 1. Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Signet Classics, 2003), ix. vii A language as complex as BCS defies easy translation into English if, for no other reason, than the absolute density of Slavic sentence structure. What I have done throughout this dissertation was to focus on transposing as Ciardi has with Dante, rather than having created blocky and awkward English from otherwise sophisticated BCS. The only archival materials not presented in the original language appeared in certain boxes at the Open Society Archives in Budapest; there, some materials were in original form, while professionals at Radio Free Europe or the U.S. State Department directly recorded or translated other resources into English. In such cases, I have kept the spellings as presented, without an addition of diacritical marks to names of people or places. Otherwise, throughout the text, the English equivalency—from BCS, German, or Slovenian—is solely my responsibility. Lastly, I have provided the original language in the footnote if I deemed that a fuller examination might prove useful for the reader; as an extension of that, because BCS appears in both Latin and Cyrillic scripts, there are a few points where I maintained Cyrillic script as in the original. I have tried at every point in the dissertation to be as precise and deliberate as possible; to that end, I have attempted to follow stylistic conventions as much as possible, but, as sources sometimes paint only a partial picture, an occasional actor lacks a complete name or an appropriate political title. I have chosen not to use quotation marks for cynicism nor have I used emphasis expect when appropriate formatting helps point the reader more directly to my argument. For references, I have tried to follow what the respective archivists have suggested, but I have elected to describe fully the documents in the notes so that they can be readily found; as a result, despite a standardized system of viii abbreviation and citation, some references are a tad lengthy. Finally, debate exits over whether to use the terms “Non-aligned Movement,” “Non-Aligned Movement,” or simply “N[n]onalignment.” I will employ “Non-aligned Movement” when I am referring to the proper noun and its policies, and I will use “nonalignment” when I am discussing the broader concept of Cold War neutrality or when I use the term as a collective. Despite the suggestion in the most recent Chicago Manual of Style, I also capitalize the Cold War. This is deliberate, since I think that the capitalization differentiates this American–Soviet standoff from other cold wars. For names, I have tried to remain true to the original language, when possible. As a result, I have chosen Đilas instead of Djilas, Nasir over Nasser, and Josif Dzhugashvili Stalin rather than Joseph Stalin. If these and other names appeared differently in quoted material, I left the spellings as they were.