A COLD WAR

Tito’s form of Communism quickly became much more liberal that those in the Soviet bloc countries and China. The question is why? The collectivisation of land was put in reverse. The police were reformed and the press was given additional freedoms. Tito turned the tables on Stalin, accusing the USSR of abandoning socialist principles in favour of imperialist expansion.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tito has his own Central Committee member Žujović arrested for treason, which leads the Cominform to expel Yugoslavia. This creates a rift between the pro=Soviet Yugoslav Communists and the pro-Tito Communists, and Tito sends thousands of “Cominformists” to slave in the camp on Goli Otok. To show that he could out-Stalin Stalin, he announced there would be ‘greater boldness and a faster pace in setting up collective farms’, which caused violent resistance in certain areas of the country. Stalin then sends agents from SMERSH to assassinate Tito.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tensions between Yugoslavia and the USSR continue to increase in the late 40s, eventually erupting when the Soviets declared the Yugoslav Communist Party was undemocratic and neither Marxist-Leninist nor Bolshevik.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is Obrad. He grew up in Tito's Yugoslavia and joined the Yugoslav Armed Forces in the late 1970s. Today he lives in Canberra, Australia.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we have a couple of guests from Slovenia - Lovro and Izak. They are 20-year-old students of international relations at The University of Ljubljana. They joined Cam on Zoom a few weeks ago to talk about Slovenia today and how the era of Tito and the Republic of Yugoslavia are taught in the schools and remembered by their families.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Although all of the Ustashi leadership managed to escape Yugoslavia, one remained behind - Archbishop Stepinac. Not really a leader, more like an enthusiastic supporter. When Tito’s attempts to get him to publicly apologise for the crimes of the Catholics fails, he is put on trial - which creates massive international condemnation against Tito and the Communists.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chetniks escaping from Yugoslavia get shelter from the Vatican, but their leaders eventually settle in the UK and USA. Thousands of other fleeing Yugoslavs are sent back home by the British while almost all the leading Ustasha vanished in Austria and did not reappear until several years later in Argentina, Spain and the United States. Many anti-Communists clung to the hope that the Western Allies and in particular the United States would step in to save them from Communism.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The new Yugoslavia tries to industrialise. Tito enjoys the luxury that came with being the Premier and gets a new wife, but his biggest issue in the years immediately following the war was how to unite the country. Hundreds of thousands of anti-Communist Yugoslavs attempted to flee the country, took to the hills to continue fighting, or went into civil opposition.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tito’s relationships with both Stalin and Churchill suffer as a result of the fight over control of Trieste, the behaviour of Soviet soldiers in Yugoslavia, and Tito’s manipulation of the first free elections in Yugoslavia in 1945.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The near catastrophe of the Seventh Offensive led to recriminations between the British and Tito but it showed the Germans regarded Tito as a serious foe. Himmler said in a speech later in 1944: ‘He is our enemy, but I wish we had a dozen Titos in Germany, men who were leaders and had such great resolution and good nerves that though they were constantly encircled they would never give in.’ Meanwhile, the Western media described him variously as a lesbian, Russian officer, a Ukrainian, a Polish count or a Polish Jew, while many believed that he did not exist at all and that TITO was an acronym for Third International Terrorist Organisation. Eventually Churchill decided he had to meet this man for himself. But while his relationship with Churchill improved, things with Stalin got worse.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices