Tito’s territorial ambitions on this occasion again upset some in Moscow, just as they had the last time he was there. Even Dimitrov, who was usually on his side, scratched in his diary how Tito completely “underestimated the complexity of the situation,” was “too arrogant and conceited,” and suffered from symptoms of “dizziness with the success.” Stalin had used the latter phrase to describe those who got out of hand and did not follow the party line in the campaign against the kulaks in the early 1930s.12
Once back home, Tito pushed ahead anyway, and the Partisans went in two directions. First they headed west for Trieste, an Italian city that, were they to take and hold it, would give Yugoslavia a major port on the Adriatic. They entered there in triumph on May 1, after which Tito made repeated demands on the West to recognize the conquest, including the hinterland, as the seventh republic of Yugoslavia. On May 15 the Western Allies gave him an ultimatum to leave. Tito gradually withdrew, but his claims to the area and to parts of Austria continued long afterward. When the Yugoslav Communists remembered these events later, they recalled that Stalin had failed to back them up.13
The second major Partisan drive was even bigger. On May 8, 1945, a formidable Partisan army (estimated at 800,000) took Zagreb, heading through Slovenia toward Klagenfurt in Austria. They were in hot pursuit of 100,000 to 200,000 enemy soldiers, police, and dependents trying to escape. Most were Croatians or Slovenes, and there were also some Serbians and Muslims. Tito issued an order to “annihilate” all who could be caught, and they were chased to the northwest. The Partisans persisted until May 21, when an exasperated Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff authorized Field Marshal Alexander, with help as needed from Eisenhower, to ready Allied troops to intervene. The war in Europe, after all, was officially over.
Partisan forces were still facing around 18,500 Chetniks, Ustaša, and Slovenian home guards cornered with their backs to Austria, who decided to surrender to the British, thinking or hoping they would be sent by train to Italy.14 Instead, the British turned them over to the Partisans, who executed them, as they did opponents they themselves found.15 How many were shot in this period at war’s end remains in dispute. Croatian and other writers estimate that 60,000, and perhaps as many as 90,000, were executed within a matter of days.16 According to a member of one of the special “extermination companies,” the killers were treated like heroes and given rewards such as gold watches.17
Yugoslavia followed the pattern, established in Poland and Czechoslovakia, of using the expropriated property of ethnic Germans to win support for the new Communist regime. Already on November 21, 1944, the presidency of the Anti-Fascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia—that is, Tito’s de facto provisional government—ordered the seizure of all assets of Germans and persons of “German ethnicity.” The only exception was for those who fought for the Partisans. The others were held to be “collectively guilty” for the crimes of Nazism, and roughly one quarter-million people were interned; the lucky ones had already fled.18 The Communists used “the rich and fertile land of Vojvodina” to entice new families from Montenegro and Bosnia and to compensate “people from poor mountainous regions devastated by war.”19
The ethnic cleansing that followed had all the characteristics that it had elsewhere in Europe at that time: mistreatment, rape, murder, forced work, internment camps, and deportations. Some of these villages were in what locals called Danube-Swabia, where ethnic Germans had lived for centuries. In all of Yugoslavia, as many as 50,000 of these people may have died in the camps, and 15,000 more were killed by Partisans.20
Even before the war ended, the Yugoslav Communists volunteered to subordinate themselves to Moscow. They pleaded to be shown what was expected and asked how to shape their new state, economy, culture, and the arts. They sought out Soviet advisers to set up the police and on their own sent their teachers, lawyers, agronomists, and others to the Soviet Union to be instructed.21 As one of their leaders put it, the regime became “the most militant, the most doctrinaire, and the most pro-Soviet” of them all, so much so that at the time the Western press called it “Satellite Number One.”22
The Yugoslavs also enacted measures that sounded as though they were inspired by Stalin’s terror in the 1930s. For example, in September 1945 a new law “on crimes against the people and the state” condemned any deviation from the party line as “national treason.” Complex and explosive ethnic issues were declared “solved.” By the end of 1945, the party began to purge its own “internal opposition.”23
Elections on November 11, 1945, were preceded by police terror against the opposition, barring its candidates from standing. Trying to follow Stalin’s dictates, they put forward Popular Front candidates who were in fact usually Communists or fellow travelers. Together they took 81.5 percent of the vote. Tito might have won even had the vote been free, but he “wanted an overwhelming majority,” because—so ran the thinking inside the party—if the opposition won much support, it might “have been legalized and become a permanent factor of political life.”24 In conversations with Soviet representatives in early 1946, Tito and his close comrade Edvard Kardelj said they controlled every meaningful organization and planned to close down the last non-Communist parties.25 A short time later Kardelj proudly reported to Moscow that Yugoslavia had already nationalized 90 percent of its industry.26
He admitted frankly to the new People’s Assembly in December 1945 that “democratic rights are not something absolutely valid for all times.”27 They established Soviet-style domination, and as far back as May 1944 they created their own secret police, the Department for the Protection of the People (Odjeljenje za zaštitu naroda, or OZNa). It was led by Aleksandar Ranković with the assistance of NKVD advisers. Beginning that September, following the example of all the Eastern Europeans, Yugoslav police officials and others were sent to the Soviet Union to be “schooled.”28
The civil war left a heritage of brutality, and numerous atrocities continued. Executions became so common that Tito supposedly remarked back in mid-1945 that “nobody is afraid of death any more.” That June he told a meeting that OZNa “is an organ of security which has sprung from the people. If it strikes fear into the bones of some of those gentry abroad, that is not our fault. But certainly I think it an advantage if OZNa strikes fear into those who do not like the new Yugoslavia.”29
Ranković created a network of informers, as was the pattern in other “people’s democracies.” The “enemies” were thought to be everywhere and mass arrests routine. OZNa kept the population permanently under watch, tracking their every move and noting their reliability on detailed conduct sheets.30 The retribution carried on into 1946 with countless small and several large trials. Historians have estimated that in 1945–46 between 100,000 and 250,000 Yugoslavs were killed either through mass executions or in the new concentration camp system.31 There is no doubt about the extent of the deadly settling of accounts, as evidence exists in many forms.32
Some Yugoslav historians deny the scale of the killing and then in the same breath call Tito’s Croatian or Serbian opponents “quislings” or traitors who would have killed all the Communists if they had had the chance. One such account admits that “the annihilation of most quisling troops captured at the end of the war—which is a fact—was an act of mass terror and brutal political surgery.”33