Word: yugoslavs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...became an organizer for the illegal Yugoslav Communist Party. Arrested and brought to trial in 1928, he defiantly admitted his Communist activities and was still shouting "Long live the Communist Party of Yugoslavia!" as he was led away to serve a five-year prison sentence. He did more organizing work for the party after his release, traveling about Europe with forged credentials. In the mid-'30s he began using the alias "Tito," a common name in his home district. (It was one of many pseudonyms: in correspondence with Moscow, he was always "Valter," and it was by that name...
...return there in 1937, when Stalin's bloodthirsty purges were at their height. This may have saved his life. He later said: "When I went to Moscow, I never knew whether I would come back alive." In 1939 the Comintern confirmed him as general secretary of the Yugoslav Communist Party...
Tito alternately loosened and tightened his hold over Yugoslav politics. When his close comrade Milovan Djilas began arguing for democratic reforms and criticizing the Communist Party elite in the mid-1950s, Tito had him jailed. After Croatian nationalism flared up during a period of liberalization in the late 1960s, he came down hard on the Croats and in 1971 forced their leaders to resign. He also launched a purge of liberals, which reminded the world that Yugoslavia was still a Communist nation run by a dictator. Yet by 1977 the trend was again away from the hard line...
...country does indeed face an immediate external threat or an internal threat of subversion, Yugoslavs have no illusions about its source. True, Belgrade's relations with Moscow have much improved since 1948. Seven years later Soviet Party Chief Nikita Khrushchev partly made up for the animosities of the Stalin era by flying to the Yugoslav capital. There, after an apparently amicable meeting with Tito, he publicly acknowledged that "different forms of socialist development are solely the concern of individual [Communist] countries." Tito's relationship with Leonid Brezhnev was edgy but cordial...
Still, the Soviets never stopped trying to infiltrate the Yugoslav party and the military, and any sign of weakness by the new leadership might tempt them to reinstate Moscow's sway over a satellite that got away. If an invasion were to come, there was every prospect that Yugoslav would live up to Tito's promise, first voiced at a press conference in 1951: "Every foot of our land is saturated in blood but if it is necessary, we will saturate it again, and it will remain ours. Yugoslavia will never again be conquered, except over the dead...