Word: tito
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...attracted by Yugoslavia. Originally, the country was a carbon copy of the Soviet system. Before the 1948 split with Stalin, Yugoslavia's central plan spelled out every conceivable detail from production quotas to retail prices; in print, the plan weighed 3,000 lbs. By 1950, President Josip Broz Tito recognized the inefficiency of total central control. Tito allowed workers to participate in running the factories. Elected workers' councils acted like boards of directors, hiring managers to administer the plants. Strict central planning was abolished, and a free market was allowed to develop. Eventually, economic reform led to demands...
Serious Yugoslav resistance came to a head in 1948 over Stalin's proposed federation between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. When the Yugoslavs refused, the Soviet dictator first urged good Communists in Yugoslavia to depose Tito, then set about that task himself. A virtual civil war ensued between Soviet agents and Yugoslav security forces. The latter won out, but only after some 10,000 Soviet agents, sympathizers and suspects had been put in jail. Throughout the period, the Yugoslavs tried to avoid fighting Stalinism with Stalinism. But, as Dedijer concedes, they did not always succeed...
...Army, which played a role in liberating Belgrade from German occupation, had been quickly withdrawn. Now it began to mass troops along Tito's borders. The Yugoslavs, ill-equipped with obsolete weapons sold them earlier by the Soviets, braced for invasion. The West was slow to provide military aid, and in the beginning, insists Dedijer, its terms were harsh. Stalin wavered, partly in fear of starting World War III. Then, suddenly in 1953, the Soviet dictator died, and it was all over. Yugoslavs received the news as joyful liberation. Milovan Djilas, one of Tito's closest aides, reflected...
...took a sturdy temperament to defy Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Dedijer, now 57, well exemplifies it. A strapping, jovial Serbian, he is in the U.S. this year, tranquilly teaching a course called "Heresy and Dissent" at Brandeis University. But he lived through years of almost inhuman warfare as a Tito partisan in World War II, and still suffers searing headaches from a near fatal war wound. "When my head hurts," the otherwise generous Dedijer admits, "I hate all Germans, including Marx and Goethe...
After the war, he enjoyed high rank and Tito's confidence until he stood up for his close friend Djilas, who was imprisoned for denouncing the Communist bureaucracy in Yugoslavia. Dedijer did not go to prison, but he was drummed out of the party. Under the pressure of this persecution, his 13-year-old son committed suicide. Since then, Dedijer has spent much of his time abroad, where he has researched and written books, including The Road to Sarajevo, a penetrating study of the events leading up to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. No longer...