Directory:Peter Z/Reference Page

References: Communist Yugoslavia

• Encyclopaedia Britannica on events post World War Two in Yugoslavia:

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British commanders refused to accept their surrender and handed them over to the Partisans, who took a merciless revenge. Tens of thousands, including many civilians, were subsequently slaughtered on forced marches and in death camps.

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• Encyclopaedia Britannica:

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After the armistice the British repatriated more than 10,000 Slovene collaborators who had attempted to retreat with the Germans, and Tito had most of them massacred at the infamous Pits of Kocevje."

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• Encyclopaedia Britannica:

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He knew that the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and others could not be integrated within some new supranation, nor would they willingly accept the hegemony of any of their number; yet his supranational Yugoslavism frequently smacked of unitarism. He promoted self-management but never gave up on the party’s monopoly of power. He permitted broad freedoms in science, art, and culture that were unheard of in the Soviet bloc, but he kept excoriating the West. He preached peaceful coexistence but built an army that, in 1991, delivered the coup de grace to the dying Yugoslav state. At his death, the state treasury was empty and political opportunists unchecked. He died too late for constructive change, too early to prevent chaos.

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• Vladimir Geiger-Historian from the "Croatian Institute for History" (Zagreb):

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The list of German victims includes 26,000 women and 5,800 children who died in Yugoslav Camps- Geiger said.

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• Aleksandar Rankovic, the Interior Minister and the head of the military and secret police of Yugoslavia at a Belgrade Assembly (meeting) stated:

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Through our prisons has passed between 1945 and 1951, 3 777 776 prisoners, while we killed 586 000 enemies of the people. Taken from Politika, Belgrade/1 February 1951 (p.1)

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• BBC-History by Tim Judah:

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Tito's Yugoslavia also gained enormous prestige as a founder of the non-aligned movement, which aimed to find a place in world politics for countries that did not want to stand foursquare behind either of the two superpowers. Despite all this, and although there was much substance to Tito's Yugoslavia, much was illusion too. The economy was built on the shaky foundations of massive western loans. Even liberal communism had its limits, as did the very nature of the federation. Stirrings of nationalist dissent in Croatia and Kosovo were crushed. The federation worked because in reality the voice of only one man counted - that of Tito himself.

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(Tim Judah is a front line reporter for The Economist and author. A graduate of the London School of Economics and of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University he worked for the BBC before becoming the Balkans correspondent for The Times and The Economist. Judah is also the author of the prize-winning The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, published in 1997 by Yale University Press.)

• BBC-History Partisans: War in the Balkans 1941-1945:

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Murder, rape and mass executions were all too common in Yugoslavia during World War Two - carried out by Partisan fighters as well as by Chetnik rebels and German troops. The days that followed the end of the war led to one last round of vengeful blood-letting. Tito's Partisans executed at least 30,000 Croat Ustase troops, plus many civilian refugees. In addition, Tito's secret police - the OZNa - hunted down the Chetnik bands in Serbia, and in 1946 executed Mihailovic as a war criminal. Many Chetniks went into hiding, living a shadow existence constantly on the move between safe houses to avoid arrest.

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(War in the Balkans 1941-1945. Dr Stephen A Hart is senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He is the author of The Road to Falaise: Operations "Totalize" & "Tractable" (Alan Sutton, 2004), "Montgomery " and "Colossal Cracks": The 21st Army Group in Northwest Europe, 1944-45/Praeger, 2000.)

• Titoism in Action: The Reforms in Yugoslavia After 1948 by Fred Warner Neal. Second chapter (p214):

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In a totalitarian state, personal freedom and human rights invariably most at the hands of unrestrianed police activity. That Yugoslavia was no exception was admitted by Aleksandar Rankovic, himself head of secret police or State Security Administration. This organization is known in Yugoslavia as UDBA

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• A single party, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and its leader 'Josip Broz Tito', ruled the country.

• Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences by Christopher Bennett.

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Tito was careful to keep a tight rein over home media, through which he chosen image of father to all Yugoslavs. But foreign commentators were also prone to optimistic assessments both of the man and of his state.

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(A British journalist who has the good fortune to speak both Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian, a skill that has enabled him to draw heavily on literature of the region that would be unavailable to most American or British journalists.)

• Discontents: Post-modern and Post communist by Paul Hollander.

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Virtually every communist system extinct or surviving at one point or another had a supreme leader who was both extraordinarily powerful and surrounded by a bizarre cult, indeed worship. In the past (or in a more traditional contemporary societies) such as cults were reserved for deities and associated with conventional religious behaviour and institutions. These cults although apparently an intrinsic part of communist dictatorships (at any rate at a stage in their evolution) are largely forgotten today. Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Sung, Enver Hoxha, Ceascesu, Dimitrov, Ulbricht, Gottwald, Josip Broz Tito and others all were the object of such cults. The prototypical cult was that of Stalin which was duplicated elsewhere with minor variations.

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• An Anthropology of the end in Political Authority by Di John Borneman.

"This international anthropological project is a study of the closure of political authority in the 20th century and consists of a Website, databases of research materials, an audio-visual essay, and a book. Six anthropologists, led by Cornell professor John Borneman, take up the end of an authority crisis that spanned most of this century, 1917-1991, and that crystallized around four state political forms: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the State Socialist regimes of East Germany, Yugoslavia, Romania, and the Soviet Union."

• Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union by Lavinia Stan. Chapter 9 (p202).UDBA

" This book provides the most thorough and analytically sophisticated treatment yet available of this crucial topic. Mark Kramer, Cold War Studies Program, Harvard University"

• Great leaders, Great Tyrants Contemporary Views of World Rulers by Arnold Blumberg

"Biographical profiles of 52 major world leaders throughout history, written by subject specialists, feature pro/con essays reflecting contemporary views of the creative and tyrannical aspects of their record. They provide librarians, students, and researchers with critical insights into the figure's beliefs, a better understanding of his or her actions, and a more complete reflection on his or her place in history. Coverage is global, from Indira Gandhi to Fidel Castro, and spans history from the Egyptian king Akhenaton to Mikhail Gorbachev. Among the leaders profiled are Otto von Bismarck, Oliver Cromwell, Charles de Gaulle, Elizabeth I, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, Louis XIV, Mao Zedong, Napoleon I, Kwame Nkrumah, Juan Peron, and Josip Broz Tito. " (p312)

• Keeping Tito Afloat by Lorraine M. Lees:

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Tito Afloat draws upon newly declassified documents to show the critical role that Yugoslavia played in U.S. foreign policy with the communist world in the early years of the Cold War. After World War II, the United States considered Yugoslavia to be a loyal Soviet satellite, but Tito surprised the West in 1948 by breaking with Stalin. Seizing this opportunity, the Truman administration sought to "keep Tito afloat" by giving him military and economic aid.

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(Description: Drawing upon declassified documents, this text offers a history of US relations with Yugoslavia from 1948 to 1960. It utilizes diverse sources including personal interviews with the key US and Yugoslav officials and the papers of George F. Kennan and John Foster Dulles.)

• Croatia: A History by Ivo Goldstein

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Self-management as system was only slightly more efficient than the Soviet model. It was bureaucratised and cumbersome and could not compete with Western economies. People could obtain so much free or for less than the market price (e.g. apartments) that they could be obtain without work. All this made the settling of accounts in the 1980s and in the post-socialist age more difficult. In Tito’s system no interest or ideas could be expressed in a truly democratic way. This did most harm where feelings of ethnic identity were concerned because their suppression led to growth of extreme nationalism. Furthermore, the economic failure of Tito’s system, most clearly expressed in the protracted crisis of the 1980s, left people who even if they were not poor, were disillusioned and open to manipulation by demagogues. Finally Tito’s practical solutions ensured that he would retain unlimited power during his life time, but foreshadowed the problems would come after his death.

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("Ivo Goldstein is a Professor at the University of Zagreb. The university is the oldest (1669) and biggest in South-Eastern Europe. The university has 29 faculties, three art academies and the Centre for Croatian Studies. With its comprehensive programmes and over 50,000 full-time undergraduate and postgraduate students. It offers a wide range of academic degree courses leading to Bachelor's, Master's and Doctoral degrees in the following fields: Arts, Biomedicine, Biotechnology, Engineering, Humanities, Natural and Social Sciences.")

• Retaliation and Persecution on Yugoslav Territory During and After WWII by Dr. Ph. Michael Portmann

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The following article deals with repressive measures undertaken by communist-dominated Partisan forces during and especially after WWII in order to take revenge on former enemies, to punish collaborators, and “people’s enemies“ and to decimate and eliminate the potential of opponents to a new, socialist Yugoslavia. The text represents a summary of a master thesis referring to the above-mentioned topic written and accepted at Vienna University in 2002.

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• Yugoslavia: Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (Post World War Two)

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The killing continued after the war, as Tito's victorious forces took revenge on their real and perceived enemies. British forces in Austria turned back tens of thousands of fleeing Yugoslavs. Estimates range from 30,000 to 55,000 killed between spring and autumn 1945. Native German and Hungarian communities, seen as complicit with wartime occupation, were brutally treated; tantamount in some cases to ethnic cleansing. The Volksdeutsch settlements of Vojvodina and Slavonia largely disappeared. Perhaps 100,000 people (half the ethnic German population in Yugoslavia fled in 1945), and many who remained were compelled to do forced labor, murdered, or later ransomed by West Germany. Some 20,000 Hungarians of Vojvodina were killed in reprisals. Albanian rebellions in Kosovo were suppressed, with prisoners sent on death marches towards the coast. An estimated 170,000 ethnic Italians fled to Italy in the late 1940s and 1950s. (All of these figures are highly approximate.) Tito's regime created an official celebratory myth about the "People's Liberation War," denying partisan atrocities and negotiations with Germans and exaggerating their role in defeating the Axis.

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• Where the Balkans Begin (The Slovenes in Triest-The Foiba Story) by Bernard Meares

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During the early Communist occupation in Trieste, Gorizia and the Littoral, and the 40 days of Communist rule in Trieste city, some 6000 arrests were made and the prisoners carried off to Communist-controlled areas.

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• Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical by David B. MacDonald. (p168.)

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The Partisans also carried out massacres, best known being at Bleiburg (Austria), where retreating Croatian and Slovenian forces and thier families were massacred.

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• Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy by Carl Joachim Friedrich & Zbigniew Brzezinski:

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Characteristics of a totalitarian regime; a total ideology, a single mass party, a terrorist secret police, a monopoly of mass communication, all instruments to wage combat are in the control of the same hands, and a centrally directed planned economy. Totalitarian dictatorships emerge after the seizure of power by the leaders of a movement who have developed support for an ideology. The point when the government becomes totalitarian is when the leadership uses open and legal violence to maintain its control. The dictator demands unanimous devotion from the people and often uses a real or imaginary enemy to create a threat so the people rally around him.

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• New & Old Wars by Mary Kaldor: The regime relaxed its authoritarian rule from the 1960s onwards.
• Discontents: Post-modern and Post communist by Paul Hollander. UDBA (page 397)

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• Reports and proceedings of the 8 April European public hearing on “Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes”, organised by the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union (January–June 2008) and the European Commission.
• Hrcak Portal of Scientific Journals of Croatia by Mr Dizdar's (Scientific Journal) - An Addition to the Research of the Problem of Bleiburg & Way of the Cross.
• Refugees in the Age of Total War by Anna Bramwell. (p138)
• History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe by Marcel Cornis-Pope & John Neubauer:UDBA (p126)
• Tragedy Revealed: The Story of the Italian Population of Istria & Dalmatia by Arrigo Petacco & Konrad Eisenbichler. (p89)
• Australia's Four Corners: UDBA activities in Australia from the 1960's- The Framed Croatian Six in Australia.
• Croatians in Australia: Pioneers, Settlers and Their Descendants by Ilija Sutalo. The Framed Croatian Six in Australia
• Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes in Europe by Jerzy W. Borejsza, Klaus Ziemer, Magdalena Hułas & Instytut Historii. (page 232 )
• Governing by Committee: Collegial Leadership in Advanced Societies by Thomas A. Baylis. Communist Collective Leadership (page 91)
• Government Leaders, Military Rulers and Political Activists: An Encyclopaedia of People Who Changed the World (Lives & Legacies Series)-by David W. Del Testa, Florence Lemoine & John Strickland/Legacy Chapter (page181)
• Democratic transition in Croatia: Value Transformation, Education & Media by Sabrina P. Ramet & Davorka Matic. Chapter- History Teaching in the Time of Socialist Yugoslavia (p198)
• A Personality Cult Transformed: The Evolution of Tito’s Image in the Former Yugoslavia 1974 – 2009
• Public Spheres After Socialism by Angela Harutyunyan, Kathrin Horschelmann & Malcolm Miles
• Nationalism and War in the Balkans by Aleksandar Pavkovic. (p 47)
• Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia and Herzegovina by Mitja Velikonja. Chapter: Integral and Organic Yugoslavism (p192)
• Totalitarianism: Dictionary Of Pol. Science by Yadav, Nanda & T.R
• Titoism: Webster.com

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