Word: yugoslavia
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...Yugoslavia was the first East European nation to defy Russia. It was a considerable event. Until Josip Broz Tito rebelled in 1948, Joseph Stalin seemed invincible in the Communist world. The Yugoslavian assertion of independence showed that there could be more than one path for Communists: it also set an example that led to the whole concept of a neutral Third World. Today all that is taken for granted. But at the time the Yugoslav struggle was a very close thing. Just how close is dramatically described by Historian Vladimir Dedijer, who lived through the ordeal as one of Marshal...
Agonized Awakening. Until the revolt occurred, Yugoslavia seemed the Iron Curtain country least likely to give Stalin ideological trouble. Its tightly knit, fiercely dogmatic Communist Party worshiped Stalin as the father of Communism and the leader of the resistance to fascism. At first, after World War II, few Yugoslav Communists could bring themselves to believe that Stalin's aim was simply to take over their nation. Much of Dedijer's book deals with the agonized awakening to the Russian threat. He describes, for example, his own change of heart at a Russian-Yugoslav soccer match...
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...
...amused by personal attacks on himself, but was appalled when a Soviet book accused his first wife, Olga, of having worked for the Gestapo. She had actually been a partisan surgeon who died in agony after a Nazi attack. Stalin cut off trade between East European countries and Yugoslavia. Railway and postal services were reduced or suspended. Stalin's paranoia was so inflamed that between 1949 and 1952 he put tens of thousands of Communists in Eastern Europe on trial...
...over. Yugoslavs received the news as joyful liberation. Milovan Djilas, one of Tito's closest aides, reflected: "I am glad we struck out at Stalin while he was still in good form. I think his last thought before the stroke must have been: 'Ugh, Yugoslavia is not giving...